Coffee and Communications

I have always disliked negative campaign ads. I personally believe that a campaign should be centered on promoting oneself, not running a smear campaign against the opponent. Before I came into my current position, I was the campaign manager for a candidate in east Alabama. The candidate and I had the same views on running negative ads, and we ran a clean campaign. Unfortunately, negative political advertisements work. Thankfully, I got out of the political world because today it is not easy to have a clean campaign and win an election. According to Science Daily , negative ads are successful, but they work better if they are paid for by the candidate, not a Political Action Committee, or PAC. In fact, negative messages from the candidate are twice as effective as PACs. On the other hand, according to the study, positive ads have no effect on an election. During the 2016 Presidential election, there were so many negative ads, you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio without ...

One of my first events when I started my job was a training session for the Troy University Trojan Ambassadors. We brought in a representative to teach our new ambassadors about how to grab attention and give a memorable tour. To start off his presentation, we watched a TED Talk by Simon Sinek named “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” A big portion of the talk is about how successful leaders and organizations start with why. Sinek said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Most organizations or people do not follow this line of thinking. Most start with a product and are forced to work backwards and figure out why people should follow them or buy the product. From what I can tell, starting with the why shows passion. It shows that this product wasn’t just created to make money, but because the person who created it really believes that it was needed. It is their passion project . In class this week, we read about the importance of leaders having vision. Leader...

I am going to preface this post by saying that I am not writing about my opinion on President Trump and the current administration’s politics, I am discussing their communication problems. This is in no way a political post. Do you trust our current administration? According to the Pew Research Center , public trust in the government is at an all-time low. Only 17% of Americans say that they trust our Federal Government to do what is right, compare that to 55% in 2001. After that peak in the fall of 2001, the public trust in government has been a fairly steady decline. One of my readings for class this week mentioned that, historically, seniors and activists distrust the government the most. This paper, which was written in 2010, is still probably accurate on this, but according to the Pew study, most generations do not trust the current administration: 19% of millennials, 17% of Gen-X, and 16% of boomers trust the government. Here’s a thought provoking question: could better...

I get woken up every morning by an alarm on my Echo Dot going off. I scroll through social media and read some emails before I read my morning news, which is delivered directly to my inbox by a few different news conglomerates. I watch TV while I’m getting ready and listen to a podcast on my drive to work. My entire morning routine revolves around technology. It is almost crazy how much I use it every morning just while I am getting ready for work, and I am not the only one that is like this. We live in a world that is very dependent upon technology, and that can be a great thing! I love being able to keep up with my family and friends who don’t live near me! Without technology and social media, I would never be able to talk to my best friend during her deployment, but this reliance on technology, and our constant need to be updated on events as they are happening, can be a hindrance to us all. I studied public relations for my undergraduate degree. One class I took was Public Rel...