Your organization has a product or service to sell, or perhaps you need to influence certain people to take a specific action to support your cause. The challenge is many other businesses just like yours do as well. In the digital age, where you can share your offerings far and wide online, your competitors are increasingly doing the same. What your business has, that no one else does, is your story, which is truly unique to you.

Your story can include how you serve your customers and why you genuinely give back to your community. Or perhaps you share significant obstacles and challenges that your business has overcome with perseverance and humility. The list goes on...

For many of the people that matter most to your business (customers, employees, suppliers, and others), they want to experience and understand your Raison d'être. A growing body of research indicates that before they purchase your products, support your causes, or choose to work with you, they want to know more about your business and what it stands for.

Every business has a story to tell, including yours. As you’ll discover in Selecting Your Stories, telling the story of your business is no longer a “nice to have” but a “need to have” as part of your company’s growth and long-term operation, especially in the digital age.

In Selecting Your Stories, you will:

• Learn how to identify and tell stories about your business with proven and easy-to-implement processes designed by Rob.


• Explore what essentials your business needs to tell its stories using Rob's content assessment designed for your business.


• Examine the growing need for storytelling in your organization.


• Learn what business storytelling means in the digital age and why that matters now more than ever.


• Understand how to build your own “media network” Hint: It’s not as much work as you think and doesn’t cost a lot to get started.


• Learn why people use social media and how to choose the right platforms for your business storytelling.


• Understand how to effectively measure the success of your business storytelling.

The most impactful resource to tell your story is the people that matter the most to the success of your business. In Empowering Your People, you’ll learn how to identify and empower the right storytellers to authentically showcase how your products and services will solve problems and make lives better and easier for your customers. Empowering Your People will also cover the important stakeholders that have a direct and indirect impact on your business and how you influence them in favour of an issue or initiative that’s important to your business.

In Empowering Your People, you will:

• Learn how to identify, empower, and prepare the right people to tell the stories of your business. Hint: The obvious spokesperson isn't always the optimal choice to tell your story.


• Understand how to assess internal and external audiences, and how to engage and connect with them through storytelling.


• Learn how to recover when storytelling doesn’t always go as planned.


• Learn how to prepare your people to share stories on the right platforms at the right times.


• Learn that sometimes it’s essential to tell hard stories that will be difficult to deliver and challenging for your audiences to accept.


• Learn why and how expressing humility as a storyteller can be one of your best storytelling strategies.

It’s in the middle of a busy workday at your business, and one of your staff comes to you to explain that a reporter is waiting on the line to talk to the owner or organizational leader. Or, perhaps that reporter, with a cameraperson, is standing in your lobby.  What do you do?

In Reactive Media Relations, you will:

• Learn what to do when the media approaches your business.


• Learn why you don’t always need to respond to media inquiries.


• Understand how to amplify the story of your business with unexpected media inquiries (if you choose).


• Gain a greater understanding of the mainstream media’s role in influencing social media and how that affects your business and industry.


• Understand why “mainstream” media no longer represents just traditional news platforms.


• Understand what a crisis means for your business, how to survive it, and mitigate the risk of other crisis scenarios.

Your business has meaningful and interesting stories to share with the people that matter most to your success. Though like many businesses, your reach to get the word out may be limited. Through proactive media relations and strategies, many organizations find it rewarding to partner with the media, enticing them to tell your stories. Ideally, you want to positively leverage the media’s traditional and online channels of communication, but you want to avoid any negative missteps that could have the opposite effect. How do you start, where do you finish, and how do you know you have succeeded?

In Proactive Media Relations, you will:

• Understand how to amplify the story of your business by proactively engaging with the media.


• Learn how to determine when are the right (and wrong) times to proactively enter the media’s agenda.


• Learn how to build better relationships with mainstream and non-mainstream media influencers by knowing what stories they want to tell, how they want to tell them, and when they want to tell them.

• Learn what optimal key performance indicators (KPIs) are right for your business to measure the success of working with the media Hint: It’s not earned media.


• Discover what platforms your business can access. Hint: they’re not as intimidating as you may think!

Whether the media contacts you (Reactive) or you engage the media (Proactive) to tell the story of your business, you’re most likely going to do an interview. How do you prepare for media interviews and what do you say and not say?

In Interactive Media Relations, you will:

• Explore the best environment for you to perform in a media interview to tell your story. Hint: it doesn’t always need to be directly with the reporter.


• Participate in an on-camera mock media interview.


• Learn about the latest tools and technology employed by the media, especially over the past couple of years.


• Find out how to craft compelling key messages, and deliver them so they don’t sound rehearsed

• Learn why the obvious spokesperson for your organization isn’t always the best spokesperson.


• Learn how to safely engage with the media on social media.