Brothers in Business

As an undergraduate, I majored in business and joined America’s foremost business fraternity, Delta Sigma Pi. Our chapter was strong and engaged on the University of North Texas campus. We all took professionalism seriously which was evident by the commitments we made to perfect strangers by becoming brothers. This experience connected me to some of my greatest friends from my college days that I still speak to today.

We bonded over community service projects, tradition and above all, our passion for business and professional development. Online, we formed a community of accountants, finance experts, marketing junkies, entrepreneurs and management gurus that often share articles, stories and contacts with each other. 


The lines of our professional development blur because we combine our career paths with our personal lives by our commitment to the brotherhood and industry. We contact each other when we have great news to share about our careers or we welcome new people to our family. We hold each other’s hands in prayer when we lose one of our brothers. We’re family. 

Like many, we use Facebook to communicate with our family. When I checked my Facebook on Wednesday, over 10 of my brothers had posted quotes, which is a typical occurrence. But Wednesday’s posts had a theme…

“If you can dream it, you can achieve it.”

"Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude."

"The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now."

Zig Ziglar had passed away.

As business students, we had been encouraged to “read, read, read” and Ziglar’s name was always at the top of our authors list. The marketing majors in Deltasig had something in common with Zig since most of us started our careers in sales. Our professional sales courses took a thing or two from his anecdotes and attitude towards business and friendships. We had come together in an organization to not only advance our own development, but that of our members.

“You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.”

His philosophy taught us about positivity and living a balanced life. He motivated people to set goals and have tangible ways of reaching them, something any public relations practioner can appreciate. Above all his successful career was built on the same principles that PR follows: realizing true character, taking personal responsibility, and laying groundwork with a calm, good-humored personality.

Seth Godin’s blog celebrates him as good as anyone. Both individuals have written influential books in my library and undoubtedly that of my fraternity cohorts. Who are the influential people in your career? 


Edit 12/6 This video explains what "brotherhood" is all about (from the UC Irvine chapter):

Why “Black Friday” Is a “Thing” and Other History Lessons From the Internet

I am about to debunk the greatest positioning strategy of all time. It’s making me pretty nervous just thinking about it.  I don’t know who the master minds are behind this, but I have a feeling they’ll be kind of angry that I am about to spill the beans.

I’m just going to say it. Chances are you probably already know it.

Black Friday is just some hyped up American holiday invented by the corporations!  A Hallmark Holiday, like Boss’s Day or National Hotdog Day.

When I think about it, it was probably someone at Macy’s or the National Retail Federation that came up with this great American tradition. In the early 1900s, stores offered discounts for holiday shoppers, which led to the start of the retail profit season. The hugely hyped up American standard activity with the moniker “Black Friday” alludes to the day retail earns enough money to bring their businesses out of the red and into the black, the color of profit. At least, that’s the story I got in my sophomore accounting course. It made sense, red denotes debit lines, black denotes credits, and at the end of the day you want your balance sheet to be black. According to this story, a police department coined the term because of stampeding and traffic jams.

I tried to track down the real story after I typed out this line “Not quite sure how A refers to B with that one, so I’ll stick to the story I know since it’s much more colorful.” “Maybe there is more,” I thought as I jumped to the Google machine. But my initial hunch that Black Friday is nothing more than successful PR positioning was correct. If you take the time to read the comments on the AdWeek article, which I do, since I’m such a fan of the blogosphere and crowd knowledge, you will see an informative post from Bonnie Taylor-Blake correctly articulating the origin of Black Friday.

“None other than Denny Griswold is responsible for the first sighting we have of "Black Friday" used with reference to the day after Thanksgiving.  In the 18 December 1961 issue of Public Relations News she mentions Philadelphia police officers,” – Bonnie Taylor-Blake.

As a journalism student, I don’t feel comfortable citing a comment thread, or Wikipedia, but I’m also a strong believer in oral history and storytelling, so just trust me on this one. I tried to track down a “credible” source on this Internet fact, and ended up with some pretty cool crowd sourced knowledge banks. Keep them around if you’re a nerd like me that likes to spread some Internet knowledge at Thanksgiving dinner! (Last year, I explained to my younger cousins how Stan Lee’s characters were Jewish based on a wiki I read then come April this comes out. Trust the Internet, folks.)

Origins of Black Friday

Cite Lighter

Visual Thesaurus

American Public Media

An Education Communicator’s Library

Public relations for education can be a challenging line of work. If you’re good at it, you might find yourself with bylines in the local news, an abundant endowment fund, or as Richie Escovedo of Mansfield ISD found out, a swarm of student protestors.

Approximately 100 students from Timberview High School held a demonstration at the Mansfield ISD administration to show their concern over the decision to transfer a popular coach. Escobedo’s media monitoring story, which is chronicled on his blog, tells of how he successfully managed the media issue.

Public relations for education are not much different than corporate communications. The biggest difference would be the fact that you communicate about a different, less tangible product: trust.  Part of the success plan was to share key messages about positive community engagement to keep the media and key constituents aware of policy changes. In education, as well as business, transparency and honesty are two points that are on the checklist for communications planners.

If you’re looking to read more about this niche in public relations practice, I recommend the following books as a good starting point:

Carnoy, M. (2004). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education by David Kirp. (N. A.-L. Sutton, Ed.) Comparative Education Review , 48 (4), 466-469.

David Kirp, explores the international trend of commercializing the university. Kirp explores the methods colleges and universities are using to operate more like a for-profit business, and how these methods may propel the missions of the institutions, or in some cases, how institutions are hindered.

Gibbs, F. M. (2009). Marketing higher education theory and practice. New York: McGraw Hill.

The authors include tips on reputation management and marketing of education. The book has a great idea called The FACTS Method that can be applied towards any product.

• Focus on the quality and the customer.
• Ask the customers what they need and want.
• Clarify: your image, identity and product benefits. Clarity builds customer loyalty.
• Tell: tell your customers about your differences clearly, consistently and frequently. This is the essence of the project achieved by utilizing a variety of communication channels.
• Show: added value. Design appealing symbols and slogans to give verbal cues of the identity.

Salis, B. (2009). Putting the public back in public relations. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education.

This one is not specifically about education, but it important in my library because it’s a reminder about the essence of PR: people. Basically the intention of this book is the transform the public relations industry back into one about the people in the digital age. The book tries to emphasize a new set of priorities in PR brought upon by social media.

Twithchell, J. B. (2004). Branded nation: the marketing of megachurch, college inc., and museumworld. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This book brings together three cultural institutions that have turned to branding to increase their appeal, and then criticizes to no end. I would not really recommend this book to anyone that takes branding seriously, it is always nice to read something that disagrees with the norm, in order to understand different viewpoints and learn from them.

Other sources of vital education and PR trends include: the Chronicle of Higher Education and even some blog entries like The Most Social Colleges  or twitter streams like Educational Marketing Group’s https://twitter.com/EMGonline.