new president

SIIA Announces Chris Mohr will be Interim President

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Executive Committee of the Board of Directors announced today it has named SIIA Senior Vice President for Intellectual Property and General Counsel Chris Mohr Interim President of SIIA. The appointment follows the recent announcement of the departure of current SIIA President Jeff Joseph at the end of July to join a global communications firm.

“Chris’ experience with SIIA and knowledge of team members make him a superior choice for this role,” said SIIA Board Chair Steve Emmert, Senior Director, Government & Industry Affairs, RELX Group, Inc. “Chris has provided SIIA and our member organizations with eight years of outstanding service since first joining the association, developing and advocating for policy positions on key issues, ensuring good corporate governance, and advising on legal strategy. The Executive Committee extends our sincere congratulations to Chris on this new appointment. We are confident SIIA will continue its solid growth and strong history of providing outstanding value to our members under his leadership.”

Mohr joined SIIA in 2015 as Vice President for IP and General Counsel. Across his tenure with SIIA, he has developed policy positions and represented SIIA and its member organizations before Congress, state legislatures and federal agencies on issues of critical interest to the association and its members. Mohr created and leads SIIA’s Strategic Filing Program, designed to take a long-term approach to the organization’s policy goals in patent, copyright, privacy, tax, patent, and other areas, with particular focus on the federal appellate and Supreme Court docket. He also has coordinated closely across SIIA Divisions to provide counsel on legal, contractual and key policy issues.

In addition to these duties, Mohr has served as General Counsel to protect SIIA’s legal interests, ensure good corporate governance, and manage the organization’s legal matters and litigation strategy as needed. Mohr came to SIIA following eighteen years in private legal practice with the firm Meyer, Klipper & Mohr, PLLC where he represented his clients on a variety of issues including intellectual property, privacy, and constitutional rights.

“Under Jeff’s leadership, SIIA has developed an identity as the place for companies serious about the business of information.  We have a great team here and I look forward to continuing the work that he started,” stated Mohr.

Mohr will assume the Interim President role beginning Monday, August 1st and will continue until further notice.

july 20

Democracy Affirming Technology: Restoring Trust Online

On July 20, SIIA, in partnership with the Center for Democracy & Technology, conducted an in-person event, Democracy Affirming Technology: Restoring Trust Online at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C. Speakers included representatives from Adobe, Center for Data Innovation, WITNESS, the White House Gender Policy Council, National Science Foundation and the National Security Council along with remarks from Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), Rep. John Katko (R-NY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

The event identified some of the problems surrounding disinformation online including the threat of deepfake information campaigns to national security and democratic values and discussed solutions such as how the government, private sector, academia, and civil society can collaboratively educate the public to counter disinformation, and restore online trust. 

A recording of the event can be watched here.
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Introducing the SIIA IMPACT Awards!

SIIA is proud to announce our new awards program, the SIIA IMPACT Awards. These awards are a part of SIIA’s continuing commitment to help our members achieve better outcomes in diversity, equity and inclusion and spotlight and develop outstanding young professionals across the publishing industry.

This recording is from the AM&P July 21st webinar.

Please login to view this video and link to event page.

StephanieStuckeybigger

Get Back to Basics (Direct Mail) and Come Together on Brands and Titles, Event Marketers Say

Paul McCartney just turned 80 on June 18. Ringo Starr just rang up 82 on July 7. Both still tour which is quite heart-stirring. While they don’t need too much marketing to boost their events, the rest of us certainly do. So with a little help from my friends, let’s see if we can work it out to offer a few event marketing tips.

Do you want to know a secret? With that, Jeff Lenard, vice president of industry advocacy for NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores), looked at the big audience before him at our recent AMPLIFY conference. “We all urge our speakers to send information about our event or podcast or webinar that they will be appearing on or at to their followers,” he said. “But that’s probably more of how a parent might encourage a child—and not always with the best results.” So when a podcast episode with Stephanie Stuckey, CEO of Stuckeys Corp., recently passed Mike Rowe to go into their top 10 for downloads, Lenard emailed to congratulate Stuckey. She wrote back: “You made my day—I’m going to post this on LinkedIn and Facebook.” “Find a way to celebrate something with your speakers,” Lenard advised, instead of just asking them to do something.

We can work it out. Lenard also discovered that changing the titles to their podcasts increased downloads significantly. Plain titles were turned into ones in question form or the proven mode of starting with “how.”: Is an Electric Vehicle Future Possible? How Retailers Support Local Heroes Around the Clock; How Stuckey’s Is Bringing Back the Road Trip; Is the Great Resignation Over? What’s the Tipping Point for Gas Prices? The more dedicated efforts at snappier, more descriptive titles have tripled downloads. “It wasn’t a huge content shift,” Lenard said. But moderator Blake Althen, co-owner and producer of Human Factor, who works with NACS on the podcast, said “It was everything around it [that changed].” The takeaway: little things matter.

I’ve just seen a face. “It’s time to stop thinking about your event or service as inanimate and start thinking about it as a persona, a character that would be a part of your desired community,” writes MCI in their Event Marketing Guide. “…Your brand’s voice is this character and should be strategically incorporated into every written aspect of your event’s brand across website, social media, graphics, ads, and even onsite signage. Personality and branding are everything for today’s consumers and will help create a vivid image and understanding of what your event is and who it’s for. This also adds humanization, which many brands strive for to better connect to an audience and draw them in, inspiring a community centered around your event.”

Got to get you into my life. Speaking of humanization, a recent subject line—“Catch up next month?”—from Ragan Communications CEO Diane Schwartz for their upcoming event caught my eye: “Hi – I noticed you are not yet registered for Ragan’s Workplace Wellness Conference on Aug. 16-17 in Chicago, and I’m writing to see if you’ll be attending. I’d love to catch up with you there.” The code for a discount is even Diane-centric. She’s sincere—“Send me an email if you’d like to set up a time to chat while in Chicago.”

Please Mr. Postman. “What were the last five things someone sent you in the mail?” Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh, VP of marketing at offline marketing automation platform Postal, asked in a recent Marketing Brew post. “I could name the last five brands that have sent me something in the mail. I can’t do it with people who email me.” While email inboxes are overflowing, a USPS study found that 62% of millennials tend to read through the advertising mail they receive, rather than discarding it without reading. “The younger marketing generation is now saying, ‘Oh, shoot, this is something kind of new,’ even though it’s not new,” Alt-Kishpaugh said. Like Schwartz’s warm and fuzzy email greeting, getting a handwritten note has become inviting and has helped to drive the success of recent campaigns, she said. Many of Postal’s clients choose to use an AI handwriting tool to approximate the look of an actual letter. Yesterday returns.

In an era dominated by overflowing email inboxes, the tactile and personal touch of direct mail has reemerged as a powerful tool in the marketing arsenal. For businesses seeking to leverage the impact of direct mail, exploring Cactus Mailing Company services can be a strategic move. With a reputation for providing comprehensive and effective direct mailing services, Cactus Mailing Company brings a tangible and personalized approach to marketing, aligning seamlessly with the evolving preferences of a generation that finds warmth and appeal in the tactile experience of receiving a handwritten note.

Twist and shout. In the middle of a long, hot summer and in the midst of two-plus years of Covid, plus rising inflation and climate craziness, some added enthusiasm in our marketing certainly can’t hurt.

I have more ideas but we’ll let it be for today.

 

Professional business teleworkers connecting online and working from home for their corporate company, remote working and networks concept

‘Take an Intentional Approach’; Creating Collaboration in a Remote Workforce

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that, while “the office as we know it is over,” he still believes very strongly in getting staff together for “immersive, intentional gatherings.” He said they’re trying to be “super intentional, so we expect every employee to be together for one week a quarter.”

Chesky added that the one week of staff togetherness “is not going to be random meetings. It’s going to be meaningful experiences that we’re going to design to build trust, connection and do important collaborative work.

“Ultimately, I don’t believe that CEOs can dictate how people work. The market will. The employees will. Flexibility will be the most important benefit after compensation,” Chesky said in the interview. Another benefit can be increased diversity. “If you limit yourself to hiring people only in San Francisco [for example] then you’re limited to the diversity of people that can afford to live [there]… true diversity [comes] from a diverse set of communities.”

Taskrabbit closed its corporate offices, turning instead to monthly get-togethers, and is providing corporate employees with two “wellness weeks” a year, during which workers will get paid time off. “We held our first team week [a four-day, voluntary in-person week for planning and meetings], and generally speaking, it was a big success,” said CEO Ania Smith in another Post interview.

As remote work has become more the norm than the outlier, here are more ways to support your staff and facilitate more collaboration:

Be intentional. “Organizations need to take an intentional approach to address this issue,” wrote Post tech at work writer Danielle Abril, echoing Chesky. “That means creating onboarding processes that offer several points of connection and give new employees the chance to meet both their co-workers and other people across the organization. And when employees join, managers should make sure new hires feel like they have some ownership in the company’s culture.”

Convey a greater sense of worth. “An inspired employee comes to work lit up about what they’re doing because they feel they matter, their work matters, and the impact they’re having matters. What burns people out is when they don’t have a sense of the impact or contribution and that it matters,” says Stephen M.R. Covey, author of Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others, in a recent Fast Company article. Can you crisply provide your company’s reason for being in 30 seconds or less, the article’s author, Anne Marie Squeo, asks. “Times of major change make it easier to evolve and progress, because people are already feeling uncomfortable.”

Consider structuring unstructured time, said Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor and author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. Perhaps “starting every meeting with some personal connection time, versus jumping right into the subject matter at hand.” He suggested that 10-15% of meeting time could be allowed for the group to chat freely. This is where the random subdividing into smaller groups could pay dividends. “Starting in a personal way increases group cohesion and group performance. You have to build in the informal to get to know one another.”

Think out of the box. “In essence, we need to stop designing work around location and start designing work around human behavior,” Alexia Cambon, a research director of the human resources practice at research firm Gartner, wrote in The Guardian last year. “Employees will work better, stay at their organization longer and keep healthier if they are placed at the center of work design—trust me, we have the data that proves it. This is what we should be asking ourselves: if 9-5 had never been invented; if ‘office’ were a foreign term; if the concept of a meeting sounded like gibberish—in short, if today were day one of the history of work—how would you design how you work?”

Create virtual “connection points” for employees. “Is there a platform in which employees are encouraged to chat with each other?” Abril asked. “Are there regular calls? Are there opportunities to team up with employees from different teams for something that might resemble a virtual water cooler?”

Encourage two-way conversations. U.S. CEO of Edelman public relations, Lisa Osborne Ross, spoke of the importance of “two-way conversation” during the pandemic. “I think managers had to change. Managers had to realize they were not managing for work, but you’re managing for people, which again, is something we should have been doing all along. And I think this two-way conversation is asking people, what you think. We do a thing called ‘P-Can’ [phonetic]. We’re doing it every three months during the pandemic, and then we started doing it generally. It was six months. But it was asking people, what are your needs? What are your tech needs? What are your emotional needs?” A recent study by Deloitte found that one in three employees and executives are constantly struggling with fatigue and poor mental health, with an enormous dichotomy between perception and reality.