All Posts By

Marijean

Marijean Oldham (Jaggers), a social media specialist and public relations professional, is president and CEO of Jaggers Communications LLC, a strategic communications firm based in Charlottesville, Va.

Jul 29
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Why is LinkedIn Important?

By Communications, Social Media

I’m asked often if it’s important to have a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn can be useful for a number of reasons: it can help you connect to others in your field; it can help you find new business opportunities or a new job; it can help you learn good business practices and social networking technique.

LinkedinimportantWhat you do with your LinkedIn profile says a lot about you as a professional. Other business people will go to LinkedIn to connect with you after meeting. Before that, though, some will Google you. What do people find when they search your name in Google? For me, an admitted high-producing publisher of online content AND the only Marijean Jaggers in existence, it’s surprising, even to me that the third result in a Google search of my name is my LinkedIn profile. It’s important because LinkedIn profiles show up for anyone who has one, in the Google search of their name. If it’s a clearly neglected profile, a nearly blank profile, or otherwise suffering (you have 14 connections? Really?) then THAT leaves a distinct impression on the person searching for you. If you can’t be found online, THAT leaves yet another impression.

What does your online profile look like? Are you happy with it?

Jul 22
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How will you Learn of the Royal Baby’s Birth?

By Communications, Jaggers Communications News

By the time I hit publish on this post, the Royal Baby (RB) could very well have arrived. An event anticipated LONG before the necessary players were in place, it’s an international relief to have the news break.

I’m wondering how we’ll learn the news first. I would have said Twitter years or even months ago, but my own Twitter use has waned somewhat and I think I’m more likely to learn of RB’s birth on Facebook. It’s possible I’ll be out of the loop (shocking, I know) and a human in-real-life will share the news. They, of course, would have gotten it from the internet on a computer or tablet or from their smartphone.

How will you hear the news? If that little rascal has arrived, how DID you hear the news?

I’m eager to learn the name, also relieved that we’re not anticipating a little North, a Django or a Katniss. I’m pulling for a girl, personally. I’ll come back and comment on how the news was broken to me, if you’ll do the same.

Jun 28
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Celebrating Success, Mourning Loss

By Communications, Social Media

When I learned the other day about a client facing the sudden loss of a long-term team member, immediately my own experience with this came to mind. My young colleague Amber Morris passed away, shockingly, in 2011.

We spend so much time with the people in our offices and our work lives, that they become like family. When we lose them, it’s jarring, particularly when there’s no foreshadowing of illness or old age.

Marie postSo my heart lurched a little bit when The C’ville Market told me that one of their most visible team members, a cashier whose face was familiar to customers and community members, was gone, knowing that for years to come customers would look for and miss Marie, and store staff would continue to feel her absence.

When a company suffers a loss like this, it’s important to stop and let the public know. We all feel loss, and sharing it with the public is not only OK, it’s a good idea. It helps the team process the loss and the community to understand why someone they’ve grown accustomed to seeing is suddenly no longer there. We have empathy for loss and sharing it on the professional side of our lives allows our businesses to be human — we’re all looking for authentic, human relationships in our business lives. I’m a stalwart champion of allowing loss to be part of the professional conversation.

If you’d like to leave a note of condolence for The C’ville Market team, there’s a post about the loss of Marie Phillips on the store’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cvillemarket

 

Jun 25
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The 5 Actions Paula Deen Should Take Right Now

By Communications, Crisis Communications

I haven’t been a fan of Paula Deen for a long time. When she came out of the closet about her Type 2 diabetes and began touting a pharmaceutical product that would allow the user to deeneat whatever they wanted, I grew incensed. Deen has grown a food empire; restaurants, cookbooks, television programs, endorsed brands, product lines — she has been, by all counts, a financial success.

I hope she banked a lot of it, because I believe her payroll just ran out.

Food Network dismissed her after, in a deposition, she admitted using a racial slur. Smithfield Foods dropped her as a spokesperson. It’s not looking good for Deen, even though some fans still support and defend the on-air personality.

I’m neither working for Paula Deen or any of her employers, nor am I defending her in any way. But were she to ask, “What do I do now, y’all?” I would say this:

  1. It’s time to put your succession plan into place. Your sons are untainted (thus far) and as adults, it’s time they took over the family business. Get the heck out of the spotlight and start transferring ownership to them. 
  2. Stop making terrible apology videos.
  3. Disappear from the spotlight and begin to think about the next stage of your career. Writing is a good place to start, and your fans will still buy your cookbooks.
  4. Enroll in sensitivity training and let people know you’d like to learn from your mistakes, and pass along to your children and grandchildren a greater understanding of how important it is to be thoughtful about language. Share what you learn from that experience. But please, not on YouTube. Write it, and run it through an editor first.
  5. Take trusted counsel from your attorneys and PR firm. Not from friends. Not from Al Sharpton. Not even from fans.

Many have empathy for Deen, either because they, too were raised in a generation or geography where racial slurs were commonplace and even accepted, or because being human means we all make mistakes. Others will throw the book at her, tired of the practice of letting people (especially entitled white people) off the hook for being inappropriate. If you’re a die-hard fan, buy up the cookbooks and DVDs; I think it’s going to be awhile before we see any kind of meaningful comeback from the southern butter pusher.

Jun 18
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What to Do When You Goof on Facebook

By Communications, Media, Social Media

Here’s the deal: we all “like” stuff we don’t necessarily want people to know about. Like, is naturally in quotes here because it refers to the practice of blithely clicking a button that says “like” on an image, a video, a blog post, an article, an essay, etc. What we forget, sometimes, is that we’ve previously given a website permission to interact with Facebook and to let the Facebook universe know about our “likes.”

It DOES come to our collective attention when a “friend” (and yes, now I’m just being silly with the superfluous quotation marks) “likes” something that uh, I have to cover with black boxes to both hide that “friend’s” identity and the nearly naked body of a “public figure”/sexy model.

Jenna

It may have happened to you. It may be happening right now, without your knowledge. I’ve done it (well, not quite THIS badly), and close friends (minus quotes) have done it, too. So Privacygiven the inevitability of the situation, what do you do, when you “like” something private out loud?

  1. Manage the situation. If it’s brought to your attention, or you suddenly notice, get into Facebook and UNLIKE that page. 
  2. Review your “likes” to make sure they’re appropriate for public sharing. If you don’t like what you see, fix it.
  3. Take note of the privacy shortcuts and settings — the little “lock” icon in the top right hand corner of your Facebook profile. Pay attention to who can see what you post.
  4. Go into App Settings (under settings) and make sure you’re comfortable with what apps have access to your Facebook account, and who can see what’s cross posted from those apps. You may be surprised at permissions you’ve unknowingly given in the past.