#teamguac

Over the past month, I have been enrolled in Strategic Internet Public Relations. This course has been fantastic and came at a perfect time in my career path.

I work as a Marketing Manager and in March, my department absorbed Client Relations under our umbrella. Since adding this team, we have faced whole new challenges, and this class has addressed some of them.

One area I have been working on is creating internal PR, and I greatly appreciated the discussion on creating employ focused PR. One area we struggle with as a company is releasing new products, and get employees behind this products. I have often found that well the teams in the stores can see the positives of our new offerings, the focus becomes all the negatives. As a result, my team has begun to look for ways to create stronger employee buy-in. One option we are considering is bringing employees into the product development prosses.

We are looking to revitalise our food menu offered in our cafes this summer, and I'm looking for ways to engage the baristas in this prosses. Last time we changed the menu the baristas were our strongest critic and had little good to say about the changes which were then passed on to out customers. Well looking for a potential fit we ae considering including store teams in the menu design process, this could foster both employe engagement and brand ownership. I'm still leery of this idea solely because if we vary from there ideas, the backlash could be greater than before and in the corporate environment, some of their ideas may not be practical.

I will have to write a quick update in a few week to let everyone know how we address this issue.

All this to say I have enjoyed this course and the group project has been very fun #teamguac.