This week, communicators descended on the Southwest Airlines headquarters in Dallas for a conference hosted by PR Daily publisher Ragan Communications. Here’s what one attendee learned.

Content is the new marketing.

Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, told us we need to start thinking of ourselves as “brand journalists” and our companies need to realize they are “media outlets.” If we aren’t shaping the story, someone else is. Our messaging needs to be communications mixed with entertainment, and grab people’s limited attention. The new formula: great content + engagement = success.

Employees and customers want passion and purpose.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, mentioned that a big part of people’s happiness is linked to doing something that has meaning for them, and is contributing to the greater good. Companies must be more than profit-driven, but aspire to contribute to a better world.

As the brand/communications team from Interface explained, they made radical changes to their modular carpet business, embracing sustainability and creating a sense of pride within their workforce that has translated into a more successful company.

Trust your people.

Hire the best and the brightest, and get out of their way as a manager. Southwest looks for people who have “a warrior spirit, service heart, and fun-loving attitude.” As Tony Hsieh from Zappos declared, “We don’t motivate our employees, we inspire them.”

The best ROI for companies today: Invest in your culture.

As the Southwest Airlines team explained, “Happy Employees = Happy Customers = Happy Stakeholders.” You could feel the difference at Southwest headquarters. There were a lot of happy people walking around, and it was amazing how many people had worked there for more than 10 years.

Oh, and Southwest happens to be one of the biggest domestic carriers in the country, something seems to be working on their focus to build the brand inside out.

Social is here to stay, so deal with it.

Social is more than Facebook. SAS fostered internal collaboration and conversations with its internal communications platform. It sparked better employee relationships and connections with teams spread around the world. And if you don’t get it, then learn it, as younger generations enter the workforce, the use of the Internet and collaborative tools are more important than ever to them.

Change is hard, but you can no longer afford to resist it.

Complexity is only increasing and the world is rapidly changing. There has never been such a convergence of disruption for our society, business, and government. As Cisco’s Carlos Dominguez pointed out, “More than 40 percent of the companies today will be out of business in 10 years.” Companies need to be looking forward and constantly adapting to the rapid changes that are occurring in business and technology to thrive.

Focusing on customer service is a critical part of any business strategy going forward.

It doesn’t matter if you sell shoes or deals. Southwest Airlines, Groupon, and Zappos demonstrated the merits of exceptional customer service and how ingrained it was in every aspect of their culture.

You can’t communicate enough to your stakeholders.

As Mark Ragan explained, corporate communicators play a critical role in the success of your company. Content drives everything, and at the center of good business is good communication.

Consumers own your brand.

We are all living this paradigm shift. Dominguez said give your customers social tools and arm them with the resources to represent your brand. He calls it a “contribution revolution.”

Kirstin Falk is a brand engagement strategist with over 15 years of marketing experience. She is co-founder of Lifecycle Strategy Group, a consulting firm that helps its clients engineer meaningful relationships with their employees and customers.

I found this interview to be very provocative and made me consider some things that I had never realized. Such as how few aid appeals show pictures/imagery of men needing help in developing countries.

Highlights:

“Yes – the worst kind of paternalism is the notion that you have superior morals, and you impose them on someone else. Especially when that’s based on a religion that’s different from the people you’re helping, it’s just incredibly arrogant. If we’re going to be serious about respecting the rights of women in poor countries, we have to let them play by their rules. That’s why these conditions on aid are incredibly patronizing and coercive. Everyone should have the right to make their own choices, not have someone else make choices for them, like we don’t allow you to use condoms because we’re hung up about birth control, or we don’t allow you to access abortion because we’re hung up on our own religious views.”

WELL SAID.

Years ago, capturing someone’s attention was enough to market your product. In 2002, I read a presentation that stated the new currency is human attention, and I remember thinking it was such an innovative concept.

Yet today we are so interrupted with requests for our attention, it is becoming even more difficult to focus and navigate the digital world. How can a company differentiate itself in this overwhelming environment of 24/7 advertising and marketing?

ENGAGEMENT is the newest currency. Companies need to build brands and products by collaborating with their employees and customers and creating an experience that inspires passion and a desire to take action. One way communications and products just add to the noise. Building relationships with your team and customers enables companies to cut through the clutter and deliver on their brand promise.

Check out the idea behind the slow company movement.

-Kirstin

I am excited to announce my selection to participate in the highly competitive Progressive Women’s Media Training. “The Women’s Media center makes women’s voices visible and powerful in the media.”

You can check out the video here, and learn more about the program here.

Over the next year, I will receive over 60 hours of training on owning my expertise, critical elements of messaging, and video-journalism and much more.

I couldn’t be more excited, and I will keep you updated on my experience.

Successful brands will become social movements, fully committed to a cause. They will connect with people by either sharing a passion or fighting a common enemy. Brands have to come down from their Ivory Tower of branding and stand shoulder to shoulder with people sharing their passion, and helping each other to co-create and collaborate. A brand that shares my passion and is committed to a cause (We’re talking real dollars here…) will be seen as credible, committed and a real change agent.

This tweet captures it all:

“Your employees probably treat your customers about the same way you treat your employees.” -@ducttape

And for a long time this didn’t matter to many companies. But the game has changed.

If you aren’t using the same engagement tactics and strategies with your employees as your customers, then you haven’t fully realized the potential and power of social media in transforming your business strategy.

I just read a great blog post about a company that understands social media isn’t just a marketing campaign but an entirely new approach to doing business.

Check out Cisco’s Social Strategy. As Jeremy Morris notes,

Outbound activity that focuses on engaging more effectively with customers in social is important. But embracing social insights in order to change the internal culture and processes of a business is even more so. Much more so. And much harder.

I couldn’t agree more. Cisco understands that fostering collaboration internally and utilizing social media tools unlocks tremendous value within the company.

Cisco uses digital and social media tools to improve internal collaboration, but more importantly they made (the need for) collaboration the rallying cry to completely revolutionize their internal culture. Cisco’s bet is that improved collaboration, and the tools that enable it, are the future of business.

Social media efforts can no longer just be driven by a marketing department. Companies need to embrace collaboration and realize the true power of building transparent and authentic relationships with employees and customers.

The better companies collaborate internally the more efficient, flexible and innovative they’ll likely be. It certainly seems to be working out that way for Cisco.

His talk really resonated with me.  He makes the case that business operates on a broken set of assumptions on how to motivate people.  Most management is organized in a way that no longer applies to the reality of doing business in the 21st Century. As a result, our existing mechanism of reward and punishment kills creativity and performance.

Social science already knows this. Yet most of corporate America clings to running their companies by managing people in a way that doesn’t allow them to thrive or encourage them to perform. He shows studies from around the world that debunk that concept higher financial incentives create better performance. It is truly a brilliant perspective, and something I have experienced many times in my career.

The traditional, top-down approach to management is a dinosaur that is becoming extinct. I certainly know I can’t work for people who view the world that way.

Hiring and retaining smart, passionate people is the most important business strategy of any company, any size. As the world becomes more complex, the need for innovative thinkers becomes even greater. People who are comfortable with little structure, very few answers, and constant change.

I believe that the path forward is the concept of “distributed leadership.” Everyone on my team is a leader, and my role is to remove any barriers to their success, and get out of the way. This makes having a compelling brand that aligns the team even more critical, and provides a platform for innovation.

As Dan mentions, the key to success is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. People want to be self-directed, get better at something, and be a part of something larger with meaning. It seems so evident, yet the system in which business operates is clinging to myths, and the old ways of doing things even though it isn’t working.

I loved it.

What I am writing about is the ability of each of us, without authority or permission, to do work that matters, to have an impact and to create a place for ourselves in a society that’s brainwashed us into doing something that’s an easily replaced commodity.

I hear that…and it is amazing to realize how difficult it is to pursue that path. The biggest barrier to success is yourself, and all of the doubt and insecurity that choosing your own path reveals.

It is risky, but isn’t it riskier to spend your whole life doing something that makes your miserable? I will admit, I was scared to embark on my own path, and it really is the best thing that I could have done for my life.

A big part of that is acting like an artist. Being personal, making change, communicating a vision.

I agree, and can’t even describe the happiness that I derive from making change. What is my path to change? Fostering and growing the next generation of rock star women that are on their way to dominating the world. I judge my personal success by giving them the confidence and support necessary to battle. Because it is a battle…being a smart, independent trailblazer is not easy in our society.

As Seth points out:

“The system is a mess.” Which system? How does our art change that?

The system of factories churning out stuff we can no longer afford to buy, or to store in our houses overstuffed with junk. The system that turns out college grads who are eager to follow instructions, not blaze a path. The system that depends on spam or churn to grow a product or a brand. And the system that treats employees like disposable cogs in a giant machine.

This is a system that kills innovation and leadership. A system that rewards the same people, doing the same thing, offering the same thinking. Its getting old, and becoming less relevant.

As the status quo fades, a tremendous opportunity to rethink the manner in which business is done exists. To re-imagine the role that we want to play in all of this, and stop accepting that it is ok simply because it has been done before.

For me, it starts with my team. I am still in awe of the amount of companies that use the term human resources. Are you joking? That is a red flag for all job seekers and customers.

I love the term talent capital…[my business partner laughs about my romance with buzz words]. But the more empowered and inspired your team is, the more passionate they are going to be with your customer. And the more your customer experiences the authentic and positive culture, the innovative product, the effective customer service, the more likely they will want to engage with you and your brand.

Quite frankly, it is simple, treat your team and customers the way you want to be treated. And have the confidence to stand up for them.