There’s a wonderful organization based in Waterville, Maine called Hardy Girls, Healthy Women.  It’s a non-profit that works with girls and the adults in their lives to inspire social change to ensure that all girls and women experience equality, independence and safety in their everyday lives.   They have a complex mission and vision, and they do really important work.  Over the past couple of years, I have gotten to know Karen Heck, one of the founders of the organization, through our alma mater Colby College, so I offered to help the board with a message map.

A message map is a tool that we use as part of the Marshall Plan process at Nancy Marshall Communications.  A message map is the foundation of all our our public relations and marketing programs for clients. It includes a ‘key message’ at its center, which is 21 words in length. It takes seven seconds to say 21 words out loud. If you are familiar with  broadcast news, you know that reporters and editors love seven second sound bites. But we use the key message for more than just media interviews: we use it in brochure copy, speaking engagements, web copy, newsletter copy and everywhere we are talking about the client organization. Continue Reading »

This weekend I received a gift. It was the gift of time. What a simple but wonderful pleasure!

I had time to do some things on my two laptops that I normally just skip doing because the tasks are too time consuming……like setting up a  backup program to be sure I save all my data on my two hard drives (not too sexy but so important); synchronizing my iPod to iTunes  and downloading some new music I heard on the “Oprah” Show by Lady Antebellum; and finally, updating Norton Antivirus software.  Some of these tasks are insurance against having to spend future weekends trying to rescue my computers from disaster, and some were for pure pleasure; the simple pleasure of listening to good music on my iPod (which I am doing right now as I write this blog post!) Continue Reading »

I am proud to know Seth Wescott. He lives in Carrabassett Valley, Maine, which is where I have lived since 1984.  When he won his Gold Medal in Snowboard Cross on Monday in the Winter Olympics, he displayed the American flag that had been his grandfather’s flag in World War II. Yesterday on the “Today” show, he told Matt Lauer that he had brought this flag with him in order to hold it up in the finish corral when he won a medal in honor of his family and his country. He had done the same thing four years ago in Torino when he won his first Gold Medal.

Seth is the best role model I can imagine for my two sons and for all the kids in the State of Maine. He is so humble, and he shows no pretense. He treats others with respect no matter who they are, or where they come from. He is so mentally focused  that he planned for success even though his trial runs weren’t going well. Many people would have mentally ‘checked out’ when they had to wear the black vest relegated to the lowest ranking competitor  in the final competition. But not Seth. He used it as a way to inspire himself to come from behind and literally pass the forerunner while flying through the air on the fifth in a series of five jumps. Continue Reading »

Many of you know that my agency is handling the PR and Web site for Saddleback Maine where they are currently building the largest glade in the East. It’ll be called Casablanca, not after the famous movie but after a ’streamer fly’ which is famous for catching trophy trout in the Rangeley Lakes Region. All the trail names at Saddleback are fly fishing-related.

So last week Icalled Scott Thistle, who is regional editor at the Lewiston Sun Journal, and in a previous life a ski patroller at Sugarloaf. I invited him and his buddy/photographer Russ Dillingham to head up to Saddleback and do a story about “A Day In a Life of a Glade Cutter.”  Not only did they go and create a two-page feature that appeared in the newspaper on Sunday November 15, but they also did a video that appeared on their Web site, called “The Sawyers of Casablanca Movie.” Continue Reading »

Each time my team launches a new Web site, it feels like giving birth to a  beautiful baby child. Launching a new site brings the culmination of  all the pain of deadlines and hard work, combined with the sheer joy of bringing something new and exciting into the world.

Today we launched the new site for our ski area client, Saddleback Maine. Please check it out at www.saddlebackmaine.com and let me know what you think. As with any site, it’s a work in progress and we will be adding to it and changing it as we learn from the site’s visitors (especially from you!) what they like and don’t like.

Congratulations to the team at Marshall Interactive for their hard work on bringing this new site into the world.

When I first learned about Search Engine Optimization(SEO), I was working with a Maine whitewater rafting company that had their accountant optimizing their site for them in his spare time. He was able to easily baffle me by talking about the logarithms for each of the search engines. This was at least 10 years ago, back around the time that we were spending a lot of time worrying about how all our computers were going to crash with the onset of Y2K.  Back then, we didn’t think about Google as much as we did Yahoo, Alta Vista, and even AskJeeves. Today, Google rules the roost when it comes to SEO.

Being a typical PR person, I have always thought more about words and images than about numbers. So when I even heard the word “logarithm,” I was immediately convinced that I would never be able to “do” SEO. The accountant easily convinced me that I needed to pay him to do it for my own site and my clients’ sites. Continue Reading »

So it’s a  quiet Sunday afternoon, and I’m surfing around the internet. I stopped by the new site that we just launched for Saddleback Maine.   Then I clicked on the YouTube link at the bottom of the home page and watched a few videos about Maine.  I particularly liked the one about the AMC Lodges. You’ve gotta love the loon calls and the Maine guitar music. Continue Reading »