Sidney Burngasser

It’s not leaderships job to hand you every tool on a silver platter. ICYMI: Tuesday night I addressed a room of several hundred folks who’ve worked with me over the last few years at the IMPACT Live Chicago event. Over this time I’ve garnered a reputation for being funny, easy going, a brimming with southern hospitality. The one thing I’m not nice about though is doing the work. My finest southern apologies if that ruffled your feathers. But it is no one’s job but your own to figure 👏🏼 it 👏🏼 out 👏🏼. Ai, particularly chatgpt, has one of the easiest ux designs of a complex software we’ve ever seen. You have the power to develop millions of unique and powerful tools all from tappy tapping on your keyboard for a few minutes. You don’t need me, or your marketing director, or your ceo, or your best friend to help you. You really just don’t. It is NOT hard! I too often hear that ai is “scary” or “confusing” or “not working right”. That “leadership is working on it for our team”. Those are all excuses to not do the work.It’s lazy. It’s entitled. It’s stale. If you’re a content writer, videographer, crm administrator, developer, strategist… only YOU know the real problems you face day to day. Your leadership is hosing down problems in every direction (hello recession, fancy seeing you again)- they don’t have time or bandwidth to hand hold through the creation of a simple custom gpt that you can generate in a couple hours tomorrow. We’ve said for a full year now that ai won’t take your job, someone using ai will. “Proficiency in generative AI” is the new “adept at Office 360”. Update your resume bullets now.

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This explains a lot. Many return-to-office mandates are deliberately designed to make hybrid and remote workers miserable so that they quit. Many execs are using RTO as a backchannel layoff. And if too few people quit, then leadership resorts to explicit layoffs. So, if you saw a company announce layoffs 6 months after an RTO campaign, that should tell you something about that company's leadership.

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Jane Sarasohn-Kahn shares great insight into the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer special report on trust and health. If you're looking to improve trust in healthcare, the upcoming #AHIP2024 panel Jane mentions will be right up your alley. #healthequity #healthandtrust

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Jamie King, co-founder of Camp + King, introduces proactive disagreement, revolutionizing #collaboration in agencies. This #innovative approach fosters creativity by skillfully pitting differing viewpoints, ensuring all perspectives are valued. Inspired by Steve Jobs' rock tumbler analogy, King highlights how constructive debate refines #ideas and individuals, propelling teams towards excellence. Embracing proactive disagreement can inspire bold creativity and elevate organizations to new heights of success. #Innovation #Collaboration #Creativity #Leadership https://lnkd.in/ecj-FBVZ https://lnkd.in/eNxJAe2b

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Great HBR article on The Art of Asking Smarter Questions. “Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is the ability to craft smart prompts.” Enter “question-storming” as a creativity technique with the following 5 domains of strategic questions: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. What’s your question mix? https://lnkd.in/ehUyUVUT #AI #prompts #strategy #creativity #criticalthinking #questionstorming

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Hiring for a Director of Engagement Marketing to build Hazel’s engagement and product marketing function from zero (well, 0.25!) to one. Know anyone who fits the bill? Send 'em my way! 🙏 #1: The problem this role is focused on solving:  Over 4 million K-12 students are eligible for Hazel Health’s services, at no cost to their families — and an estimated 600,000 of them have mental healthcare needs that are *not* getting treated today. We’re looking for a curious and critical thinker to lead Hazel’s efforts to connect these children to the care they need, and stem the tide of the growing youth mental health crisis. #2: Who we're looking for: A “general athlete” with a specialized background — bringing expertise in customer engagement and omni-channel lifecycle marketing to Hazel, ideally in a healthcare context (bonus points for a B2B2C model). • You're unquenchably curious. Complex industries, topics, and personas fascinate you, and you have a knack for explaining them to others in simple terms.  • You’re self-directed, with an innate propensity to create order and drive to decisions in unstructured environments.  • You feel excited (rather than overwhelmed) by ambiguity — and feel comfortable building entirely new playbooks, frameworks, and systems (not just running existing ones).  • You are a crisp, compelling storyteller — with a keen instinct for audience-specific value prop identification and positioning, as well as an eye for copywriting and design. • You love making sense of data, and separating the signal from the noise. While you may not be a math whiz (but, great if you are!), you're not intimidated by data or spreadsheets, and can appreciate a good pivot table. You’re able to partner with analytics teams by (a) asking the right questions, and (b) making sense of multiple (sometimes disparate) datasets — recognizing patterns and extracting salient insights to get to the “so what.” https://lnkd.in/epdtFcEZ

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Want better meetings? Try PANTS. 👖 The PANTS framework ensures my meetings are clear, thoughtful, and efficient. Plus, you can share the framework with that cute lil' emoji. 👖 Purpose: Decide the goal of the meeting? (could it be an email?) Agenda: Clarify and document the meeting topic(s)  Notes: Designate a note taker Tasks: Delegate tasks and next steps  Share: Send meeting notes and next steps If you're finding your meetings are a bit of a hot mess express, try PANTS. Let me know how it goes! #meeting #meetinghygiene #meetings

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This is a great launch. A smart tool that helps consumers know what they're buying, if making a second-hand purchase of a Peloton Bike or Bike+. The summary is a detailed look at the history of a Peloton Bike, including the approximate number of historical workouts, date of first activation, protection plan eligibility, service visit history, number of previous owners, and more.

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Some years ago, I interviewed for a job and it was down to the finalist stage. I was asked to put together a package—a marketing plan for my prospective employer's offering, and some sample content. I went in for interviews, which included individual conversations and a conference room meeting with several folks at once. We walked through what I prepared, and I got compliments on the work. One of the sales people in the room looked at the social media content I developed and said, "We should totally use this." It was decidedly not phrased in the form of a request. Fast forward several days and another candidate was selected. I requested feedback on the process and none was given. I wish I could say this kind of thing has only happened once. Why are companies still asking candidates for free work? And why are candidates accepting the assignment? It's a pernicious habit that ought to be retired. I learned many years ago not to ask agencies for spec work on creative projects. The reason is simple—without a proper understanding of the company and its offerings, any such work is going to be generic, have placeholders, go in the wrong direction, and be plain old unimpressive. It's garbage in, garbage out. Similarly, job candidates lack a deep understanding of the business. So, they're likely to submit a marketing plan that's too cookie cutter or designs that don’t resonate or something your market research already tells you not to do. But those candidates don't have the benefit of your hindsight or your top-secret research. (Don’t believe me? If you’ve assigned free work to candidates in the past, compare their submissions with work product from folks who have gotten through their first 90 days and note the differences.) What if we banded together to say a collective ‘No’ to doing free work in a future interview process? Sadly, there will always be folks who think it's the cost of doing business … or who are down on their luck and believe it's the only way to land the job. Rather than working on the supply side, we've probably got a better shot at behavior change by goading the demand side. Please don't ask candidates for free work. Ask to see a portfolio. Ask for references who can speak to their role in a large project. Ask them to talk through how they would solve a specific problem within your parameters. Ask them why a deliverable in a previous role was successful. Just don't ask them for free work. It’s not fair to the candidate and doesn’t help the hiring manager as much as they think it does. (Oh, and do give feedback when candidates ask; that’s just a decency thing.)

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Painful PR truth: Tons of interesting, newsworthy, relevant, timely, deeply researched, and tightly pitched stories still don’t get published. It stinks, and it happens every dang day. Sometimes multiple times per day.😭 Why?: Because for every reporter, there’s 25+ PR folks pitching at any one time (and now probably way more with AI). Newsrooms across print, broadcast and yes online too have been decimated over the past 25 years and so have reporter and editor jobs along with it. Sure, tons of pitches are yawn inducing commodity 💩 that barely gets a skim, but that still leaves oodles of high quality stories getting the 👻 because, well, competitive math, overloaded inboxes, breaking news, beat changes, layoffs, vacations, family and life stuff. How do you respond?: ⬇ —Never rely on traditional media relations (especially Tier 1) as your primary distribution and brand building avenue, even if you have a sweet scoop. - Meaningfully and consistently invest in your own content and distribution channels including social, newsletters, podcasts, blogs, email list, events, employee ambassadors, etc.) These should often get more attention than traditional media relations. —Don’t get defensive when busy/stressed reporters miss your email or pass. Polite persistence and feedback are fine, badgering is not. Be a good sport and they’ll be more likely to engage with your pitch next time. -Bylined article submissions, especially to trades. -Speech or panel at industry event, or your own. -External podcast appearance. -Influencer deployment (paid or organic). -Distro’d press release or advotorial (notice where I prioritized in this list). 😏 Conclusion: Media relations is NOT dying and still uber important, but the competition is only getting tougher and we all need to be evangelists for this unsexy reality.

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Intranets are still valuable as hubs through which employees access content needed to support their work, along with important benefits and career resources. Intranets also become "kitchen sinks" of outdated material and unhelpful sites that don't truly matter to most employees. Simplicity IS possible if you stay true to your vision. Join me May 30 during ALI Conferences’ Modern Intranets conference in Chicago. I'll be sharing key lessons learned during my own team's recent experience moving away from the kitchen sink to a streamlined, modern intranet. I'll share advice on using data and analytics to support your initiative, clarifying your intranet team's true scope, conducting user experience testing, planning change management communication and most of all - keeping it SIMPLE. Visit aliconferences.com for more details. Use the code below to save on registration. #intranets #strategiccommunications #ALI #conference #communicationprofession #simplicity #employeecommunications #iabc

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2024: A Tale of Two Economic Realities in America Consumer A: Rents a home, no savings, has a grocery budget, buys their kid’s clothes at Kohls. Consumer B: Owns a home, has a 401k, not concerned with the price of milk at the grocery store, buys their kid’s clothing at Abercrombie. Consumer A is at a tipping point in Q2. Consumer B is hiding the reality of the underlying economic situation.

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Great way to support Maternal Mental Health. If you're a new or expecting parent, the Hotline is a call/text away. #MaternalMentalHealth #TLCMAMA #MaternalHealth #MentalHealth #Support #Hop3 # Someonetotalk

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A new cookie-less era has begun, and marketers need to be ready. Lippincott Senior Partner Chris Ciompi lays out five tangible steps to ensure your company succeeds in this post-cookie world.

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Hi, LinkedIn network! I need your help because (drumroll please): I'm #hiring! The role (linked below) is for a DEI Business Partner who will work most closely with two important brands under the Nike, Inc. banner: Jordan and Converse. You'll use data to help tailor the enterprise DEI strategy for each brand, advise on enterprise-level needs to effect systemic change, and use your influence skills to manage a number of cross-functional relationships with people and teams who have maaaany different priorities. Perhaps the best part of all? You'll get to work with me! Some logistics: This role is based on Beaverton at Nike WHQ (World Headquarters), and requires committing to complying with our Monday-Thursday on-site requirements. Because Converse is based in Boston, the role will also require regular travel to the East Coast. A note on the qualifications: I know from past experience that JDs generate lots of critique. Rightfully so. It's good to hold people accountable for individual and systemic bias that may emerge in these kinds of processes. Here's what I know: I have high standards for my team, and for this role. DEI work requires rigor, operational excellence, and passion. For this role, which is mid-career level, demonstrated experience will be important. What I *also* know is that demonstrated experience can look different from person to person. This is why I encourage you to apply if you think you only *might* be qualified. (I once almost didn't apply for a job where I "only" met 14 of the 16 qualifications. Dear reader, I got the job.) I would love to see the unique skillsets you can bring to this role! Sound like you? YOU SHOULD APPLY. Don't hesitate. Don't DM me to ask for a pre-chat (I don't do those). Just. Do. It. (See what I did there??) https://lnkd.in/gh_SqB7n

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Interesting piece on the unique impacts of remote work on women at various career stages. While junior female workers lose out on mentoring, more senior women may benefit from a reduction in "invisible work" when they are not seated next to colleagues.  https://lnkd.in/gxPE43Kh #womenatwork #diversitymatters #representationmatters #hybridwork #womeninleadership

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Calling self-proclaimed introverts to take this survey about your experience working from home and/or working hybrid. This will help •Jennifer Kahnweiler Ph.D. CSP, author and introvert ally, with research for her upcoming book!

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