DIY - Communication Resources

Welcome To the FEEL Academy

Communication is at the heart of your company. Your ability to communicate effectively is what captures attention, keeps the interest, creates trust, promotes advocacy, and builds strong lasting relationships with your stakeholders.

When you approach communications with a FEEL First commitment you are agreeing to face Fears (be open and inclusive), have Empathy (your deep understanding and compassion), use Ethics (be truthful) and unleash Love (show energy and passion).

FEEL is the bridge or stepping-stone to extending beyond a point of connection and simple transaction. When you use FEEL as your communications North Star, it’s the first step toward a genuine relationship.

Where does FEEL begin? It’s the point on your communications roadmap where your strategic communications takes you; the place that enables you to connect with an opportunity to grow or strengthen your bond.

When you add a FEEL First lens to your interactions, the people you reach will feel closer to you and share more with you. When you FEEL First, you’re saying and showing you care about the people you want to engage.

Tuning in and using FEEL in your communications also means learning about yourself and the ways you come across as a communicator.

Being influential, making a difference and creating impact with your communication (as The Influential Communicator) requires a present mindset and self-awareness. You are able to achieve communications alignment, from your vocal and verbal cues to your body language. Then, as you master alignment and reach a state of Communications Flow, you can also recognize the signal others are sending to you. Now, you are “reading the room.”

Reading the signals around you, and learning to adjust your communication results in the kinds of relationships that have the opportunity to go deeper, create impact and make a difference.

Online courses to help you FEEL First and to become an Influential Communicator are currently available. You can check out The Influential Communicator course here. For Media Training with a FEEL Lens you can find more information here.

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Marketing Strategy: Competitive Intelligence

By compiling a competitive analysis, you gain insight into your competitors to identify your own advantage and edge in the marketplace. In this course, join marketing expert Deirdre Breakenridge as she explains how to conduct a competitive analysis for your business. In addition to explaining the value of a competitive analysis, Deirdre shares best practices for conducting research on your competition and discerning your own strengths and weaknesses. She also discusses how to analyze your competitor’s strategies to inform your future goals. Finally, Deirdre shows you how to evaluate the outcome of your analysis to drive growth and competitive intelligence.

Marketing Strategy: Competitive Intelligence

Are you looking for a fresh approach to building and implementing a video strategy? Have you ever wondered how to create and share video content to boost your brand identity across channels? As major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok prioritize video over still images, video is no longer just “nice-to-have”—it’s a key tool in the marketer’s toolkit.

Marketing Strategy: Relatable Video Content covers these topics and more!

Modern PR demands an integrated, multichannel approach. Learn how to research your audience, build a PR plan, develop the right messaging, use a targeted media mix and measure the impact of your communication programs. At the same time, you’ll understand how to manage relationships with everyone from reporters to influencers and amplify awareness with the aid of internal champions and external brand ambassadors.

Public Relations Foundations covers these topics and more!

Marketing Ethics starts with defining your company’s ethics and values. It starts with your executives as the role models and the communication stems from your marketing and PR departments. However, it doesn’t stop there. Marketing ethics should penetrate every level and professional in your company. Learn how to define your marketing ethics, identify the problem areas to avoid unethical behavior, communicate ethics effectively, recognize and reward your employee champions.

The Marketing Ethics course covers these topics and more!

When you launch a new product or enter a new market, it’s crucial to have a reliable roadmap that sets you up for success and the means to track the growth of your program. In this course, you’ll learn how to build and develop a go-to-market (GTM) plan for your next product or service. Your GTM plan helps you create a product strategy that’s tailored to the market and your customer base. You’ll understand how to prepare for better customer service and channel performance, discover the best ways to price and promote your product and measure your impact at launch and beyond.

The Go-To-Market Plan course covers these topics and more!

Today, consumers decide how and when they want to receive information and companies need to be listening. It’s crucial for marketers to have a robust understanding of how to design and execute a marketing communications plan that resonates with audiences—as well as how to measure the results. Diving int Marketing Communications means you’ll discover how to chart your own marketing roadmap. You’ll learn how to research your marketing communication needs and craft a marketing plan that helps you connect with your audience. You’ll leverage PR, social media, and email marketing strategies as you track your program through a measurement dashboard.

The Marketing Communications course covers these topics and more!

Learn how to create a better rapport with your audience and handle negative interactions with unruly audience members. Handling your audience means recognizing the personality “signals” of hecklers in advance and what to do when you are interrupted. In this course, you’ll also learn to identify those potential champions who can help you and how you can enlist their support before you ever step foot on stage. Whether you are speaking to a large or small audience, discover the tips for keeping your composure and maintaining focus, from the moment you start speaking to answering difficult questions during Q&A.

The Handling an Unruly Audience course discusses these topics and more!

CMOs have the opportunity to create a vibrant culture of marketing at their organizations. You’ll learn how and why it’s important to audit the existing culture and then create goals, a vision, and a mission to align all groups around your brand. You’ll build a roadmap for employees well beyond the communications function invest in your brand and share with more passion. Creating a marketing culture also means you quickly identify the leaders who can champion the new marketing culture while you measure the impact of marketing culture for your company.

Creating a Marketing Culture Course covers these topics and more!

With online media outlets, 24-hour news sites, Twitter, and Facebook all competing for attention, getting your message broadcast—and received—the way you want and intend it to be is tricky. When you dive into media training you’re learning how to identify the qualities of a good media spokesperson, what to expect from interactions with journalists, how to enhance your message with stats and sound bites, and how to cater your delivery and message to specific media channels and audiences.

The Media Training Course covers these topics and more!

By compiling a competitive analysis, you gain insight into your competitors to identify your own advantage and edge in the marketplace. Learn how to conduct a competitive analysis for your business and the best practices for conducting research on your competition. You’ll also be able to discern your own strengths and weaknesses and how to analyze your competitor’s strategies to inform your future goals.

The Marketing Foundations: Competitive Market Analysis course covers these topics and more!

Deirdre's Books

Answers For Ethical Marketers

Answers for Ethical Marketers, A Guide to Good Practice In Business Communications,

With advancing technology and evolving media, the journey to ethics has become more complicated for businesses and the professionals who communicate on their behalf. This book, Answers for Ethical Marketers, answers ethical questions, from taking your ethics and values into every media interview to applying ethics and sound judgment throughout your company and communication channels. The book shares how personal and professional ethics align, and how business leaders, managers, and students can maneuver their way around a new media landscape to demonstrate their values and role model ethical conduct.

This book is divided into eight important areas based on where and why a breakdown in ethical behavior is likely to occur, and delivers advice from experts on the frontlines of business communications; professionals who know what it means to face the inherent changes and challenges in their fields. With more than 80 questions and answers, readers will uncover situations where ethics are challenged, and their values will be tested.

This straightforward Q&A reference book is for professionals who realize ethics are a crucial part of decision-making and who want to maintain trust with the public and keep their positive brand reputations in business intact.

Readers will learn the answers to pressing ethical questions that help them apply good judgment in their own situations, based on the stories, theories, and practical instruction from the author’s 30 plus years of experience as well as the thought leaders featured in this book.

Here’s the link to Amazon where people can pre-order a copy. Buy the Book

Answers for Modern Communicators, A Guide to Effective Business Communication, provides students and professionals with practical answers to important career and communication questions, helping them to communicate successfully in a business setting. Communication expert, Deirdre Breakenridge examines the ways in which professionals can make the most of their careers in a fast-changing media landscape, offering advice on how new and seasoned organizations can utilize and adapt to the latest modes of communication.

The author breaks down the eight most critical areas for professionals seeking to develop their communication skills, opening with essentials that will prove useful in any setting, then detailing the ways in which organizations can adapt to changes in technology and consumer behavior to improve relationships, social media presence, and brand recognition. The easy to follow question-answer format walks readers through the most pressing, confusing and frequently asked questions about successful communication with plenty of advice and examples for a better learning experience. Covering traditional business communication topics like partnerships and storytelling, the book also includes material on digital and social media channels as well as a chapter on giving back as a mentor. “Experts Weigh In” boxes feature advice from other top professionals, exposing the reader to multiple perspectives from the field.

Conversational and grounded in decades of experience, Answers for Modern Communicators will benefit all students getting ready to enter the workforce, as well as professionals looking to enhance their communication skills.

Buy the Book

In Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, social marketing pioneer Deirdre Breakenridge teaches and demonstrates the eight new skills and mindsets PR/marketing pros need to build brands and engage customers in a social world. This concise, action-oriented book shows practitioners how to systematically expand their roles, improve their processes, and sharpen their strategies to engage with today’s more sophisticated and socialized customers.

Drawing on her extensive client experience, Breakenridge helps you respond to consumers who demand control over their own brand relationships… unite communications with technology more effectively, and become your organization’s go-to resource on social technology decisions… reflect social media realities throughout your policies and governance… generate greater internal collaboration, eliminating silos once and for all… listen to consumers’ conversations, and apply what you’re learning… build communications crisis plans you can implement at a moment’s notice… develop profound new insights into how consumers construct and perceive their brand relationships.,. practice ‘reputation management on steroids’… take the lead on identifying and applying metrics… and much more. For all PR, marketing, and communications executives and professionals; and for students intending to enter these fields.

Buy the Book

Forget the “pitch”: Yesterday’s PR techniques just don’t work anymore. That’s the bad news. Here’s the great news: Social Media and Web 2.0 offer you an unprecedented opportunity to make PR succeed more powerfully than ever before. This book shows how to reinvent PR around two-way conversations with traditional and new influencers, bring the “public” back into public relations—and earn a new level of results that just wasn’t possible before now.

Drawing on their unparalleled experience making Social Media work for business, PR 2.0 blogger Brian Solis and industry leader Deirdre Breakenridge show how to transform the way you think, plan, prioritize, and deliver PR services. You’ll learn new ways to build the relationships that matter and reach a new generation of influencers…leverage platforms ranging from Twitter to Facebook…truly embed yourself in the communities that are shaping the future.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to stop being a “publicist” or mere “communicator” and become what your clients or company really need: a genuine enthusiast for the product you represent.

Buy the Book

PR 2.0 is the convergence of Public Relations and the Internet with the potential to change how communications professionals reach customers and online communities with social media strategies. This is a tentative time for communication professionals as they face a rapidly changing environment for their brands. Although traditional channels and methods are still present, audience behavior and interaction online necessitates a new way for brands (both B2B and B2C) to communicate.

Traditionally, PR pros communicate through the “Influencers” who provide those valuable third-party endorsements. Communication has always been closely controlled and monitored. The nature of the game has changed whether communications professionals like it or not. No longer will the PR professional have to speak through an influencer (i.e., the media). Although we still rely on our influencers, now we can also move forward with a direct to consumer approach through social media tools.

PR 2.0 breaks the traditional mold and allows communications professionals to think, react and promote in a whole new way. Today’s audiences are citizen journalists in social communities that are connected across the Internet. PR professionals through PR 2.0 will learn how to use the power of technology, the increased bandwidth and a whole new array of social media resources to join in the marketing conservations that span the Web.

Buy the Book

PR professionals are well aware that a host of new tools have been created to transform their profession, presenting new opportunities and challenges for anyone using PR to strengthen brands and stakeholder relationships. The New PR Toolkit takes PR to the next level, offering a complete blueprint for PR strategy and execution that draws on up-to-the-minute case studies and today’s most creative public relations work. From opt-in newsletters to Internet-based brand monitoring tools, Webcasts to self-service press Websites, this is a book that shows professional communicators how to make the most of all the new tools available to them.

Buy the Book

If you’re a marketing professional, you understand perfectly well that the Internet has changed all the rules you live by — and especially the rules that impact how you brand your products, services, and organization. Cyberbranding doesn’t merely show you how the rules have changed: it presents a complete framework for branding that works now — and for years to come. In Cyberbranding, crucial questions that marketers have about branding in the 21st century are answered: How do you move your brand online — without compromising the values it already stands for in the “real” world? How can you re-engineer your brand in the wake of the Internet revolution — and how can you create a new brand that leverages the full power of the Web? The book draws a series of insightful interviews with leading Internet branding executives.

Buy the Book

PR Expanded Blog

PR has changed from the behind the scenes development of talking points and third-party endorsements to champion building with the public and using media and influencers to amplify communication. Now, you’re listening more closely, monitoring data and gathering insights, and joining the conversation the right way through social media. As the media landscape and consumer behaviors continue to change, the lines between PR, marketing, branding and customer service are more blurred. The silos are down and we’re learning to use the force of a PR & marketing toolkit with a mix of media to engage and to create action. Professionals realize it’s time to embrace a hybrid approach with a variety of ways to communicate, creating the loyalty and advocacy for companies and their brands.

PR Expanded is a research journey and a passion project offering articles wand resources with practical tips, communication advice and guidance on the best way to approach maintaining public opinion, your reputation and using better communication and decision-making for your business.

PR Expanded Blog

DIY - Communication Resources

Welcome To the FEEL Academy

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Deirdre's Books

PR Expanded Blog

Book a Complimenary Session