SDA’s member spotlight After 5 Fridays showcases the varied creative, fun, adventurous, or interesting achievements our members accomplish after business hours.

The February 5, 2021 feature highlights SDA National Secretary Anne McNeely.  Many know Anne as an associate and project administration manager at Fentress Architects in Denver, Colorado.

But there’s another side to Anne. She is also a published romance novelist. Anne has always been a voracious ready and storyteller. In 1998, she discovered an online writers' forum and began the habit of regularly writing.  It wasn't easy at the start, but over time her confidence and writing skills improved and she found she loved the process.  "At the end of the day, I like to write as a way to decompress.  I like escaping into my own head to forget the day-to-day brouhaha."

Her book, Meaningful Omissions, was published in 2017, holds a 5-star rating on Amazon and dozens of positive reviews. Full disclosure: it's has a high "steamy" factor and may be considered #NSFW or not sharable with your mother-in-law.  You can find it online as an e-book and POD paperback at BookBaby, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and more.

We asked Anne a series of questions about how she got started, her process and what keeps her writing. Being a writer, her answers are a great read. So, with no further ado, Anne’s answers in her own words:

Who doesn’t love a good romance? 

For as long as I can remember, I have always thought of myself as a storyteller.  I never imagined myself as a writer, let alone a published author.  Being able to come up with a good story and being able to tell it in published form are two very different things.  Writing was a craft I did not possess naturally, and I had to learn how to write before I could ever dream of getting something published. 

Like many, I have always been a ferocious reader.  I was bit by the writing bug in ‘98 after I found a writing forum online.  Members were encouraged to post their own stories, poems, etc. for the community to read, critique and comment.  So, I gave it a shot and the critiques I received cemented my belief that I was in fact, a fantastic storyteller—just a not-so-fantastic writer.  It was a true learning experience and in the time that followed, I learned how to write, admittedly through a lot of starts and stops, waiting for the right inspiration. 

Meaningful Omissions came to life after a 1-minute news story about Deborah Jeane Palfrey.  It was the moment my character Emily Clairbourne was born.  I knew from the very beginning that when the book was finished, it would be something special.   It was marvelous fun to write! 

At the end of the day, I like to write as a way to decompress.  I like escaping into my own head to forget the day-to-day brouhaha.  I love human nature and I love plot development based on a ‘what if’ scenario.  I love multi-faceted characters and understanding their motivations. 

Getting the story out of my head is the goal and in order to achieve that, it has to follow its own path.  Romance is a byproduct of how the characters develop as the story is told.  I am not afraid to go there or take readers along for the ride.  It is fun to embrace a little bit of naughty.  Who doesn’t love a good romance?  I certainly do! 

Meaningful Omissions is a fun, coming of age story, that is full of surprises with a plot that is unexpectedly unique.  You can find it online as an e-book and POD paperback at BookBaby, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and more.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently."

-- warren buffett

Before the age of social media, you and your firm’s reputation was crafted largely through word of mouth communication and print media. Those who wanted to get the word out about their work attended events, networked and pitched themselves to writers who were the gatekeepers to media. Building a reputation took time.

Fast forward to today. Google, social media platforms, online forums and other digital channels provide a vast array of digital real estate to contain things to be said about your firm and its work. Clients and other parties can sculpt an organization or firm’s reputation by providing comments, feedback and testimonials online. Building a reputation can happen faster than ever before. Unfortunately, damage to a reputation can also happen with record speed.

What is “reputation management”? 

Reputation management is the process of monitoring, influencing or managing your online search results to shape and influence how a person, organization or business is perceived online. You will often see it referred to as “online reputation management” or ORM. Offline reputation management is what is usually known as public relations. 

Reputation monitoring is one piece of the larger field of online reputation management. Reputation monitoring is knowing or listening to what’s being “said” about your firm online. 

Why monitor your firm’s reputation?

According to a Nielsen report, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family. After suggestions from friends and family, 88% of consumers trust online reviews (what is said about a company online) as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. Managing and maintaining that positive reputation is just good business.

Especially for firms whose market share is private sector or reputation driven, monitoring the conversation around the firm and its brand can be a strategy to improve the bottom line, increase the number of project inquiries and ultimately improve the number of commissions secured. 

Monitoring online mentions allows a firm to listen for negative feedback and respond quickly. It can also find positive mentions or a mention of a firm project or quote from a firm member. You can maximize the good coverage by sharing across your own media channels and even thanking the author blogger creating a connection for perhaps future mentions that the firm can acknowledge, 

What else to monitor?

In addition to tracking a company’s brand, there are other strategic items that are worth considering. Here are some other items to consider tracking:

1. Think beyond the brand name. Moving beyond firm name, consider any acronym, nickname or shortened form. You may want to track mentions related to key members of the firm or staff. Insider tip, if a partner’s name is pretty common, put the name in quotes and then add the term architect. That way it will pull items that have the name and architect mentioned somewhere. 
2. Track names important to the firm. This could include VIP clients or business development of future VIP clients. Consider adding their names or businesses. This can be a good way to stay informed of what is going on in your client’s world. Again this can work both ways allowing you to congratulate them, get market research about them or get an early inkling of market changes.
3. Follow inspiration. Monitor firms that inspire you. Notice what blogs and news outlets are covering them and reverse engineer the process if you want them to say the same about you. You can use alerts for your competitors or even your firm’s role models to stay abreast of what’s working, what’s not and what’s hot. Tony Robbins says “success leaves clues” and this is one tool to discover those tools so your firm can model the successes.
4. Watch keywords. Using your firm’s keywords is another way to get value. As said in number 1 above, make the effort niche this term or you will flood your daily inbox. For example “school design” may be too broad, but “net zero energy” “school design” could hit a sweet spot. Additionally, by setting up alerts around your firm’s keywords, you can monitor key conversations across the web where your firm might want to position itself as a thought leader in such conversations. 
5. Detect trends. By tracking key terms within our industry, you can watch for trends and changes. 
6. Discover new outlets for PR. By following your inspiration and watching keywords, you can discover which outlets, writers, and bloggers are covering your market.
7. Learn about new potential clients or projects. When keywords include a project type, you may discover announcements of future plans for new projects.  

How to Monitor Using Google Alerts 

It’s been around for ages, but many firms still don’t know about the power of using Google Alerts or forgot to harness it. 

Google Alerts is a free change detection and notification service. When you set up an alert, anytime Google’s magic bots detect one of your terms, it alerts you by email or RSS feed. While a Google Alert is not perfect, it is a valuable and free starting point.

How to set up a Google Alert:

• Log into a Google account. 

If you have access to more than one, strategically choose the one you use. For example, an alert to marketing@yourfirm won’t bother you when you get that big raise to ceo@yourfirm. But one sent to your personal business or personal non-business account will leave a void for the firm, or follow you.

• Go to Google.com/alerts.
• Enter the words, names, or brand you want to follow In the blue box at the top of the page. Below the box, Google will show you an “Alert preview” of the type of items that might be tracked with that word or phrase when you get the word or phrase you want.

TIP: Use operators to tweak search results to those most relevant to you. You can use a hyphen (-) before a word to exclude it from the search, a tilde (~) before a word to return synonyms or similar terms, or quotation marks (“) for an exact match. 

• Go to “Show options”. There you can edit
  • how often you want the alert sent,
  • what sources you want searched,
  • languages,
  • region, and
  • number of results
• Click “Create Alert”

Going beyond the basics.

Above, I shared Google Alerts as a free, basic way to monitor that will “push” the information to you. I said basic because Google Alerts is limited. It primarily tracks sources that Google indexes like web news and blogs. 

If you want to track social platforms as well, you will need to look at an additional service. Depending on your firm’s marketing budget you may want to look into a more robust platform. For an easy to follow spreadsheet that compares 19 monitoring services, see this chart by Alfred Lua from Buffer. Besides costs, pay special attention to the platforms supported. If you are going to pay for the monitoring make sure it’s covering the platforms that apply to your firm. 

Next steps.

If you don’t have any Google Alerts set up, go now and set up your first. Track mentions of your firm or even yourself.

Are you already using Google Alerts? Share with us how you use them in the comment box below!

Liz Harris, FSDA, is the Firm Administrator for Kevin Harris Architect in Baton Rouge, LA.

She is the Co-Chair of the SDA National Public Relations Committee for the 2020-2021 Term.

Do you know Cherie Tucker? She’s a grammarian whose claim to fame (one of them, at least) is getting Seattle’s Nordstrom stores to correct all of their signs from “Childrens shoes” to “Childrens’ shoes.”

The Seattle Chapter has hosted Cherie as a speaker a few times, and she’s also presented for SDA National (we love the grammar/writing knowledge she shares!).

One of the things that Cherie helped me remember was the use of commas in independent clauses. An independent clause is one that can stand on its own. Like this: This sentence is an independent clause, and you should insert a comma after clause. That’s a two-part sentence that contains the conjunction “and.” The second part of the sentence (you should insert a comma after clause) is a full sentence on its own. If both parts of the clause — joined by a conjunction — can stand on its own . . . it’s an independent clause.

What a lot of people do though, is not insert a comma before the conjunction in their independent clauses. Did you know that you should add a comma before each conjunction in that case?* (Note: It depends on the context; you might consider a semicolon instead.)

Here’s where Cherie came in and helped me remember all of the conjunctions, and thus the use of commas in my independent clauses. She calls the conjunctions “FANBOYS.”

For

And

Nor

But

Or

Yes

So

If I have a FANBOY in a sentence, I know to stop and test whether I have any independent clauses. If I do, I know to insert a comma (or a semicolon) before the FANBOY. Will you?

*Tons of sites that back this up. For example:

https://depts.washington.edu/engl/askbetty/sentence_structure.php

 https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comma-before-and/

http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/commas.htm

https://getitwriteonline.com/articles/when-to-use-comma-before-and/

Judy Beebe, FSDA is our resident Word Nerd.

She currently serves as the SDA Seattle Chapter President