Thanks Derek

In 1995, I went to Yankee FanFest with my cousin Dave Yaniro and we stood on line for two hours to get the autograph of some 21 year old baseball player named Derek Jeter. 

We did it because Warner Wolf said at the time that Jeter would be the next Yankee great. 

"Bogus," I thought, but I still did it because I wanted a chance to maybe experience meeting the next Yankee great. 

When I got to the front of the line and saw Derek in person for the first time, all I could think was that we were wearing the same EXACT long sleeve Aeropostle shirt. Befuddled, all I could blurt out was: "Hey Derek. Nice shirt."

He said: "What?" (looking at his shirt and then at me). Then he realized it and said: "Oh, yeah. We have the same shirt. Thanks."

The next 19 years Derek left me with many more memories, but  that one was my favorite...

Thanks Derek.

Jets Make a Good Biz Decision and a Bad Football One (Updated)

Companies Should Tebow to their Bottom Line

By Tony Bianchini

On March 20^th, the Denver Broncos announced the signing of future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning. With that huge signing, the Broncos and team executive and Hall of Famer John Elway sent the message to their fans that they are certainly serious about winning.

The next day, the Broncos traded Tim Tebow to the New York Jets in a stunning turn of events.

With that one trade, the Broncos dismissed not only Tebow’s late game heroics, but also some key things that drove the company’s bottom line during the 2011 season: 1) Tebow’s jersey was one of the top sellers for much of the season; and 2) The Broncos saw a tremendous increase in national TV ratings and prominence that was brought to the team when Tebow was under center.

Those business facts certainly did not prevent the Broncos from trading Tebow to the Jets, which while probably a good football decision for the Broncos, may not have been such a good business one.

As we saw with Jeremy Lin’s surprise emergence for the New York Knicks in February and as we’re seeing with the 3 million iPad’s sold by Apple in the first three days of its release, companies that are able to tap into the emotional side of their customer’s psyche can see their share price and business revenues skyrocket.

When Lin started at point guard for the Knicks on February 6, MSG stock was at $29.50. Two weeks later, when Linsanity was in full force, the stock closed up 13% at $33.43 on February 21^st. Some speculated that the increased interest in the Knicks as a result of Linsanity brought Time Warner back to the table in its cable deal with MSG. Similarly, due to speculation of the release of the new iPad, Apple saw its stock skyrocket 28% from February 1 to the March 16^th release of the new tablet.

These are just some examples of how an iconic person or product can mobilize a huge audience of people and positively drive the respective companies’ bottom lines. All it takes is for a company to tap into their customer’s emotional psyche and appeal to their wants, needs and desires.

While you might not have those icons on your roster, here’s a few key ways you can get there:

· Identify who your target audience is by looking at the primary market segments that are buying your products or involved in your issues.

· Complete an assessment or market analysis to identify what are your customer’s needs, desires and concerns.

· Develop a strategic communications plan that accurately targets your key customer groups in the places they receive their news, get advice on products to buy or congregate with others like them to support or oppose certain issues.

· And finally speak directly to your customers and influence them to take action by appealing to their emotional desires by pointing them to people like them who have successfully utilized your product.

Instant icons like Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin and Apple’s iPad don’t come along too often. That’s why it’s important for companies to identify who their basic stakeholders are, what are their desires and wants and finally what tugs at their emotional heartstrings and encourages them to take action.

It’ll be interesting to see if their trade of Tim Tebow turns out to be a good business decision for the Jets. It probably will. It may, however, not have been the best football decision.

Tony Bianchini is the Director of Public Affairs at Open Door Media, a public affairs and communications firm based in Trenton, NJ. He can be reached at: (609) 396-6620 or by email at: tony@opendoormedianj.com. Visit Open Door Media at: www.opendoormedianj.com to learn more.

Companies Should Tebow to their Bottom Line

On March 20th, the Denver Broncos announced the signing of future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning. With that huge signing, the Broncos and team executive and Hall of Famer John Elway sent the message to their fans that they are certainly serious about winning.

With that one fell swoop though, it’s safe to say that Tim Tebow’s days in the Mile High City certainly are numbered. While Tebow’s late game heroics during the last NFL season saw Tebowmania take the nation, the Broncos believed that Tebow’s 46.5% passing completion percentage wouldn’t be enough to get them to future Super Bowls.

Missed by the Broncos is the fact that Tebow’s jersey was one of the top sellers for much of the season; not to mention that increased TV ratings and national prominence when Tebow was under center positively drove the company’s bottom line. The reason was simply because of the fact that such a large national audience -- including people who usually wouldn’t care about football –mobilized around Tebowmania.

Those facts certainly did not prevent the Broncos from signing Peyton Manning though, which while probably a good football decision, may not have been such a good business one.

It certainly would make good business sense for the Jacksonville Jaguars to trade for Tebow, the former Florida Gator, which would no doubt fill up the consistently empty EverBank Field.

As we saw with Jeremy Lin’s surprise emergence for the New York Knicks in February and as we’re seeing with the 3 million iPad’s sold by Apple in the first three days of its release, companies that are able to tap into the emotional side of their customer’s psyche can see their share price and business revenues skyrocket.

When Lin started at point guard for the Knicks on February 6, MSG stock was at $29.50. Two weeks later, when Linsanity was in full force, the stock closed up 13% at $33.43 on February 21st. Some speculated that the increased interest in the Knicks as a result of Linsanity brought Time Warner back to the table in its cable deal with MSG. Similarly, due to speculation of the release of the new iPad, Apple saw its stock skyrocket 28% from February 1 to the March 16th release of the new tablet.

These are just some examples of how an iconic person or product can mobilize a huge audience of people and positively drive the respective companies' bottom lines. All it takes is for a company to tap into their customer’s emotional psyche and appeal to their wants, needs and desires.

While you might not have those icons on your roster, here’s a few key ways you can get there:

• Identify who your target audience is by looking at the primary market segments that are buying your products or involved in your issues.
  





• Complete an assessment or market analysis to identify what are your customer’s needs, desires and concerns.
  





• Develop a strategic communications plan that accurately targets your key customer groups in the places they receive their news, get advice on products to buy or congregate with others like them to support or oppose certain issues.
  





• And finally speak directly to your customers and influence them to take action by appealing to their emotional desires by pointing them to people like them who have successfully utilized your product.

Instant icons like Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin and Apple’s iPad don’t come along too often. That’s why it’s important for companies throughout New Jersey to identify who their basic stakeholders are, what are their desires and wants and finally what tugs at their emotional heartstrings and encourages them to take action.

Tony Bianchini is the Director of Public Affairs at Open Door Media, a public affairs and communications firm based in Trenton, NJ. He can be reached at: (609) 396-6620 or by email at: tony@opendoormedianj.com. Visit Open Door Media at: http://www.opendoormedianj.com/ to learn more.

How Do You Value a Good Reputation? And the Steps to Get There

There’s nothing more valuable to a company than a good reputation.

That’s a difficult statement to get your company’s financial people to swallow though, as measuring the true value of a company’s reputation is very hard, if not impossible, to cite on a balance sheet.

In 2007, the Chartered Institute of Managed Accountants published a paper called: Corporation Reputation: Perspectives of Measuring and Managing Principle Risk” where they concluded the following: “Reputation has a value even if it cannot be expressed financially … although reputation cannot be classed as an asset for balance sheet purposes; a good reputation can be seen as a asset to corporations.” The full report can be read at: http://www.cimaglobal.com/Thought-leadership/Research-topics/Enterprise-governance-restoring-boardroom-leadership/Corporate-reputation/

Simply put, while a company’s reputation is nearly impossible to value by an exact number, it’s a major reason why some companies prosper in both the short and long term.

Companies that build good reputations and brands by delivering great products, telling positive stories on how their product/program helped others and by communicating honestly and accurately with their stakeholders and customers, frequently find long-term success because they are able to develop a strong base of loyal, long-term customers who tell everyone they know about the positive experience they had with a company.

How exactly can you develop public relations/marketing initiatives that provide both tangible bottom line results and more importantly the intangible ones that will help your company to enhance its reputation amongst its customer base?

The Intangible

Public relations activities that can help your company to create or enhance its reputation are virtually endless, from getting a customer to write a favorable post on Facebook or positive review on Amazon.com or write a letter to their local newspaper about their experience.

And there’s a lot that your public relations firm or internal marketing staff can do to promote these positive customer stories to potential customers. You can promote these positive stories through:

• Press releases to the news media.
• Posting the stories and positive customer testimonials on your website.
• Posting a video on YouTube or various other Internet video websites.
• Get your third party stakeholders to recommend your company to their friends through word of mouth, sharing of your Fan Page on Facebook or Retweeting your company’s daily updates/news to their Twitter followers.

As I mentioned previously, some of these tactics can be highly successful in creating a good reputation for your company and spreading word on the street about your brand. These activities through are very difficult to measure success for; unless you’re planning talk to the millions of people who may have heard about your company on the local news, or read about it on Facebook, or saw a newspaper story on a positive experience that one of your customers had.

The Tangible

There are a great range of public relations and marketing activities that a company can undertake to take advantage of the latest technologies as well as some tried and true public relations and marketing/advertising techniques.

The emergence of social media, the Internet, Google Analytics and other Internet measurement tools has made it much easier in recent years to gauge the success and tangible results of public relations and marketing campaigns. As a result, a company is able to see in definite numbers how many unique users are clicking on their web pages, how many search for their company name and keywords that can lead to your company’s website, and how many people click on an advertising banner on a business website and it leads to them signing up for your product or program..

For the tried and true public relations and marketing/advertising techniques, you could create unique phone numbers for your company and its programs and cite them on advertisements that promote your program or alert your administrative staff to the latest public relations program to ask incoming callers where they heard about your company’s program.

These are just a few of the many public relations/marketing techniques that can help your company to increase and enhance your reputation and positively impact your company’s bottom line.

The latter will certainly keep the bean counters happy.

Extra, Extra … Read All About It…On Facebook and Twitter

When I was studying to become a journalist at the University of Maryland, I had to take more than 20 classes to learn what it took to become a professional reporter. Little did I know, but all I had to do was wait 15 years and I could become “a reporter” just by creating a new Facebook page. Don’t tell that to my father; he’s still paying for the University of Maryland. Web 2.0 and the explosion of social media outlets has not only changed the way that people communicate with their friends and family, but it’s also opened up the way they disseminate news to business colleagues, potential customers or communicate with Facebook Friends or Twitter followers (akin to a newspaper’s circulation) about what they had for dinner at Five Guys (and more importantly, if it was good or not). I know. There’s nothing more annoying than reading what a person you knew in high school ate for dinner that night, but when you think about it: 1) you read their status update; 2) formed an opinion on it; and 3) may in fact eat at that restaurant simply because your brain stored that information and remembered that someone you knew had a good experience there. While there are still many reputable and professional journalists in our State and the world at large, the simple fact is that today, everyone, including YOU, has the ability to become a “reporter” because the Internet has allowed websites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and a variety of other social media outlets to become the newsstands of the 21st Century. Think about it: People are no longer hearing about world events like the earthquake and tsunami on the ABC Nightly News. They are reading about it from their friends’ first person accounts in Japan on Twitter or Facebook. Now people aren’t just learning about the hot new restaurant because they read a food review in a newspaper. They’re reading posts from their friends on Foursquare. Now people aren’t opening up the Sports Section first thing in the morning; they’re opening up Ubersocial on their smart phones and reading the Tweets of their favorite sports reporters. Whether, it’s Twitter or Facebook or the ABC Evening News or NJ.com or the Star Ledger print edition, people learn about the world around them from a variety of “news” sources. And believe it or not, sometimes it’s not a professional journalist who’s sharing that information with thousands of people. It’s YOU. Tony Bianchini is the Director of Public Affairs at Open Door Media, a public affairs and community relations firm based in Trenton, NJ. He can be reached at: (609) 396-6620 or by email at: tony@opendoormedianj.com. Visit Open Door Media at: www.opendoormedianj.com to learn more.

It's Been Two Years...

It's been two years today since my mother died at the age of 59.

She had turned 59 just a month earlier. ...

And her granddaughter Grace had been born just a month earlier....

My mother was taken away much too soon from us, but I've come to accept it over the last two years, after crying a lot, reflecting a lot on her life and thinking about how much she suffered since 1996 when she got pancreatitis. No one deserved to suffer the way she did.

Still, even when she was in the most gut wretching pain that even I can't possibly imagine, she always had a smile on her face and always cared about us first and foremost.

In the month that she was alive at the same time as her granddaughter Grace, my mother called everyday to ask about her, spoiled her as much as she could and died way too soon before she was ever able to see her granddaughter speak her first word or recite her first color or count to 20 for the first time.

I will always regret that she wasn't there to experience those moments in person and I will always regret that she wasn't there for Grace's Baptism or 1st birthday or 2nd birthday.

But still, I always know that she's always in the room.

I can literally feel it.

I talk to Grace every day about her grandmother and I could swear that she recognizes her grandmother's face when I show her pictures.

And I can swear that when we're playing, she sometimes looks over at the couch and can see her grandmother sitting there like she was the last time I saw her alive - truly alive - on March 16, 2009. ...

808 Wedgewood Circle, Flemington, NJ For Sale

808 Wedgewood Circle in Flemington NJ is for sale starting on March 15th. It's a 2 BR, 1.5 Bath and is listed at $235,900. We've taken great care of the condo in the last five years that we've lived there and have had the entire house professionally painted, redesigned the master bath with new tile, vanity, medicine cabinet and mirror, installed four new windows in the master bedroom and second bedroom.

You can visit the listing on the Garden State MLS (http://new.gsmls.com/). The MLS # is 2840617

It's been a great house for us and would be a wonderful home for anyone looking for a 2 BR and 1.5 Bath condo. Here are some photos: