The MMI Blog | Marion, Montgomery, Inc.

Happy Birthday, Cindy Marion!

April 29th, 2010, Posted by Lauren

Today our fearless leader hits a big milestone. (Is it thirty? I think it was thirty.)

After her surprise serenade earlier this week (check out our Facebook album for a few more photos) we asked MMIers to give us their thoughts and share their birthday wishes for the woman whose vision, values and good humor continue to

Delivery man with birthday flowers suddenly breaks into song.

inspire us to our own acts of greatness. A sample of MMI birthday wishes:

“I’m pretty sure Cindy is bionic. She is a terrific mother, wife, church leader and CEO. She may not sleep, now that I think about it, but she’s incredible at all she does. She’s a great example for those of us who aspire to her balance.” –Elisa

“Around Cindy, you’re guaranteed to always learn something new, or just to get in a laugh. She’s the best! Have a great day, Cindy!” -Nicole

“Inspiring, professionally and personally. If there were a book that listed people who set good examples in life she would surely need her own chapter ….. or more realistic, her own book.” -Kelly

Courtesy of Amanda Hansen, Happy Birthday Boss! You're the best.

“Woo Hoo!!! Boss get your B-Day on. Have a wonderful day! Love ya.” -Betty

“Cindy ROCKS! Happy b’day, Cindy!” -Susan

“Cindy trusts and empowers her employees not only to do their best, but to push the envelope from best to fabulous. Consequently, MMI is a place where creativity and innovation flourish. Part of the reason our work is so good, and our clients so happy, is that the team has been set free to do their best.” -Robin

“Cindy you have such a great insight on marketing and always come up with ideas that are clever and impactful for all our clients. I am most touched by your never-ending generosity on a year-round basis to all of us employees. Thank you for being you….and Happy Birthday!” -Marina

“I hope that I can be as accomplished and respected when I’m her age. Happy Birthday, Cindy!” – Emily

“Finally. Finally. You can get into rated R movies! Let’s go. Happy Bday ” – Rick

Posted in Behind The Scenes, MMI News | 5 Comments »

Fanatic.

April 14th, 2010, Posted by Sarah

Taking part in the full SHO experience was incredible. Leading up to the SHO we focused on highlighting all of the charities the SHO benefits and at the event we take our backstage pass to the media center with golf and sports writers. Reporting live at the event–taking photos of the players, producing videos, updating Twitter and Facebook pages, meeting people like PGA player Adam emitt smith Scott, Shell president Marvin Odum, Mike and Mike from ESPN and Emmitt Smith was thrilling, but it was the work behind the glamor – the difference made and lives changed, that really got our hearts pumping that weekend.

Leading up to the SHO, we were given the opportunity to select an individual or family from each of the core charities and interview them. I got to meet and talk to some incredible people – people so grateful to be given the chance to excel, people allowed to take their hardships and turn them into something great. It was moving. And it’s these people, these success stories, which fuel the Shell Houston Open.

One of my favorite things about PR is that it makes you a more passionate person and your clients’ number one fan. I feel privileged to work with the men and women of Shell Oil and the Houston Golf Association because of the work they’ve done to help millions of children through charity contributions. Since 1992, the Shell Houston Open has raised over $50 million for local charities like The Chinquapin School, the Boys & Girls Harbor, Interfaith of The Woodlands, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Acres Home Youth Association and Cenikor.

The number of kids who have benefited from the support of the SHO could fill 15 Super Bowl stadiums. That’s a lot of lives changed.

To get the word out, an exhibit display known as Shellville showcased the tournament’s six core charities, acting as a constant reminder to those walking by what this event is all about—the kids. Radio interviews with charity Shellville3 spokespeople were scheduled so that their voices and their mission could travel to listeners far and wide, letting them know that the Shell Houston Open means a chance for children. It’s pretty much impossible not to become a SHO fan after discovering the positive impact it has had on so many deserving youths.

So thanks to the incredible company I work for and the kindness of the Shell Houston Open. I was an amazing week, and I look forward to taking part in all the magic next year.

Posted in Awesome Clients, Houston Events | No Comments »

What an amazing Shell Houston Open weekend!

April 6th, 2010, Posted by Maggie

At Marion Montgomery, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have such awesome clients. This past weekend we got to work with the folks from Shell Oil, the Houston Golf Association and Redstone Companies on the Shell Houston Open — and were reminded yet again to thank our lucky stars!

The Shell Houston Open festivities kicked off last month with our first ever Shell Houston Open tweetup at Houston’s beloved Coffee Groundz. JR Cohen was our unofficial host with the most and the awesome PR folks from Shell gave away passes to the tournament. We grilled burgers for everyone and used the event to start spreading the word about all of the things the tournament does for Houston charities and the Houston economy as a whole.

On Tuesday night of tournament week, we got to attend the Legacy Dinner where Shell honors someone for their humanitarian and volunteer service. Last year, First Lady Barbara Bush was honored for her work fighting illiteracy, and this year it was none other than the legendary Emmitt Smith! Pat and Emmitt Smith Charities strives to create educational experiences and enrichment opportunities for underprivileged children. It was a super fun evening and one of our SHO Social Media Ambassadors, Monica Danna, even got in a high five with Emmitt! To top it off, ESPN’s Mike and Mike were there, because Shell had earlier auctioned off a chance to play with them in the Shell Houston Open Pro Am. The money raised by the auction — $48,500! — went to Mike and Mike’s favorite charity, the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

So what was the actual tournament like for the MMI crew?

Leading up to and during the tournament, one of our main jobs was to be the liaison between the Shell Houston Open core charities and the media. MMIer Sarah actually wrote a post on the SHOandTell blog a few months ago about how fulfilling and moving it is to get to work with the charities. Did you know that since 1992, the tournament has raised almost 50 million for charities? Amazing.

During the tournament we worked directly with the producer Shell hired to cover the event, creating end-of-day recap videos that would be posted to ShellTube, the company’s internal YouTube-like site. I had a lot of fun working with Evan (the producer) on the videos. We focused on the charity aspect of the tournament as well as what the tournament brings to Shell as a company.

When we weren’t managing charity interviews or filming with Evan, we were walking from hole to hole and tweeting up a storm and running with all things social media.

A special thank you to Paul from The Loop Scoop, the CultureMap team, Monica, Chris Pitre and Fiery James for coming out to play with the MMI team. We had a blast with y’all!!

And to Shell Oil, Houston Golf Association and Redstone — thanks for hosting this amazing event that does so much good for so many! See you next year!

Posted in Awesome Clients, Houston Events, Social Media | No Comments »

Spring has sprung…and so have new clients

March 31st, 2010, Posted by Gus

Teams here are busy promoting the Shell Houston Open, planning for the 2010 Vintage Car Show at Vintage Park, gearing up for the opening of Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille’s premier Dallas location, and buzzing around implementing a plethora of other projects.

Spring has sprung at MMI, and in our usual flurry of activity we find new reasons to celebrate, as we happily welcome some new clients to the MMI family:

American General Life Companies

Cardinal Health

Corinthian Colleges

Phillips & Reiter, PLLC

Want to know more about the MMI family? Some veteran members of the list could tell you a thing or two about unquestionable value. Click here for a look at our clients.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mom 2.0 Summit – A Happiness Project

March 25th, 2010, Posted by Melissa

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole month since we wrapped up the Mom 2.0 Summit. Working behind the scenes was such an amazing experience for MMI. Highlights include:

Coordinating with the wonderful staff at the Four Seasons Hotel Houston.
Finding the perfect outfits at Cheeky Vintage for the Mad Men kickoff party (and watching Maggie change a tire with The Bloggess).
Meeting Mom 2 Summit’s keynote speaker Gretchen Rubin, author of New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project.
Working with the fabulous people at FotoFest to organize a first-of-its- kind art exhibit celebrating the accomplishments of women online, and subsequent online auction benefiting Haiti.
And last, but not least, collaborating with the lovely ladies behind it all — Laura Mayes of Kirtsy and Carrie Pacini and Marla Trevino with The Tasteful Life – who made it all come together beautifully.

We were privileged to be a part of it, and can’t wait to see what the next Mom 2.0 has in store for us – April 2011 in my hometown, New Orleans!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

SXSW: Customer Service in a 140 Character World

March 15th, 2010, Posted by Maggie

Gone are the days of traditional customer support. In a world of Twitter, Facebook, and customer complaint sites like GetSatisfaction, customers are now jumping online to vent and publicize their customer support issues. But does it work for everyone and can complex customer service issues really be resolved within a 140…

Gone

Time for some more MMI live from SXSW Coverage! And it’s time to talk Twitter (and a few other things).

Let’s face it. Traditional customer support is out the window with the advent of sites like Twitter, Facebook and GetSatisfaction. Customers can hop online from anywhere and vent about products or services in real time. Since we encourage our clients to engage with their customers via these platforms, I jumped at the chance to attend Customer Service in a 140 Character World!

The panel was made up of Twitter customer service experts Frank Eliason with Comcast (@comcastcares), Lois Townsend (@ltownsend) with HP, Toby Richards (@TobyRichards) with General Motors and Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) with the Altimeter. The panel was moderated by Caroline McCarthy.

What I liked most about the panel was that there were differing opinions about Twitter. There was a lot to take in! For example, Lois said that HP considers Twitter a way to connect but not converse. If someone complains about your product on Twitter, reach out to them and tell them where to go and be their virtual concierge. As soon as she was done with her explanation, Frank jumped in to totally disagree. If you follow @comcastcares, you know they definitely treat Twitter as a dialogue.

There was also great debate about who handles online customer service… Is it your customer service team or your PR team? There was a consensus among the panelists that BOTH teams need to be involved. Your customer service team needs to be reaching out to those customers that need help while your PR team can monitor the conversation going on about your product and offer relevant information to followers.

The question was asked; what happens when you get someone with a huge Twitter following and a vast number of fans tweeting super negative things about your brand?

The response from the panel was pretty clear. Eventually this is going to happen to your brand and it actually doesn’t take someone with a million followers to effect your brand. In social media, anything can go viral. Always treat people with complaints well. When something bad happens, leverage that by showing people you are responsive and open about the problem and willing to help get their issues resolved. This approach goes a long way to helping turn that unhappy customer into a super fan.

Frank did make one really great point during this part of the conversation. He said “transparency doesn’t always mean say yes to the customer.” He goes on and says that “transparency means that you are listening, responding and being open with your customers. You can’t give everyone free cable just because they complain about it online.”

Here are the biggest takeaways I got from the panel:

It’s important to establish listening systems
Empower your staff to act quickly by creating a best practices guideline
Be genuine
You still need traditional customer service measures
It’s okay to stop responding when someone becomes a troll (some people are just mean)
Integrate. Integrate. Integrate.
Link to solutions
Keep your eyes on where your customers are going
BE THERE!

Tomorrow is the last day of SXSW so expect another post then. I’m going to be sad to say goodbye to Austin but I’m ready to be home in Houston soon.

Posted in Behind The Scenes, Conferences, SXSW, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »

MMI Live from SXSW Interactive

March 12th, 2010, Posted by Maggie

I’m in Austin for the SXSW Interactive Festival and I’ll be blogging here live when I finish an interesting panel. Don’t know what SXSW is? Don’t worry. I’m pretty new to the festival too. Last year was actually my first conference.

SXSW Interactive is a technology conference in Austin that features some of the brightest minds in the industry. The keynote speakers include Jack Dorsey, the founder of twitter, and Valerie Casey, the Executive Director of the Designers Accord.

I just finished a session called “Beyond Barbecue: The Future of Corporate Culture” with Mallory Messina, one of the culture reps from Southwest Airlines and it was awesome. The fact she opened by singing a song about the power of love definitely helped.

So what is corporate culture, according to Southwest Air? Your corporate culture is what you sell to the people inside of your organization while your product is what you sell to your public. Your company culture is about how you and your employees live everyday and how you run your business.

At Southwest, the culture was designed with the number one customer in mind–the employee.

Yes. You read that right. At Southwest they consider their employees number one. The customer is always right and that customer is their team. All 35,000 employees are responsible for the company culture. Southwest believes if their employees are happy, they will treat customers well and by extension, their customers will be happy.

Southwest has some really great tenants for maintaining their corporate culture.

Hire on attitude, not on skill. The three most important attributes Southwest looks for are a servants heart, a warrior spirit and a fun-loving attitude.

They communicate openly and transparently. Every single employee knows what is going on with the company.

Everyone wants to be recognized. Southwest has several recognition programs in place and they think saying THANK YOU to their team is number one.

At MMI we think company culture is really important too, so we love what Southwest is doing!

Posted in Behind The Scenes, Conferences, SXSW, Social Media | No Comments »

Building Community

March 11th, 2010, Posted by Emily

Working with various organizations in Sugar Land, I have come to think of Sugar Land as my home away from home. As such, it’s a pleasure when the synergies between my clients are so evident that two of them can come together to do great things.

Most recently, the WATCH Health Fair took place in Sugar Land Town Square and the M. D. Anderson Clinical Care Center in Sugar Land was right in the thick of it. The fair provided free, useful information regarding children’s health for parents – and a whole lot of fun for kiddos.

M. D. Anderson representatives Sharon Jamison, left, and Niki Olanrewaju hold down the fort at the fair.

A lot of what I do in Sugar Land is bring clients into the fold – into the community to do good, to meet the people, to meet the newsmakers and stir up some news of their own. Although Sugar Land is certainly no small town, I’ve enjoyed fostering these relationships that make my clients and the community feel like old friends and good neighbors.

For an ongoing list of all the great things Sugar Land Town Square and M. D. Anderson are doing in the Sugar Land community, you can stay connected here and here.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »