At the Publicity Club of Chicago’s 64th Annual Golden Trumpet Awards this year we were honored to receive a Silver Trumpet for the unique media relations program we’ve developed in partnership with our client The Academy of Management (AOM). The Golden Trumpets honor distinguished achievements within public relations and communications, and this year returned for the first time in-person since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reputation Partners has worked with AOM, the preeminent professional association for management and organization scholars, for the last five years building a comprehensive program to increase awareness and top-tier media coverage of their published, peer-reviewed academic research to better inform major news cycles – recently focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the workplace.
These audiences, the media and through them, practitioners, sought advice, guidance and solutions for the pandemic’s great “workplace reset.” Worker burnout, labor shortages, vaccine mandates, hybrid and remote work revolutions, and other topics were impacting the workplace in unprecedented ways. AOM had valuable research-based, scientific answers to these challenges.
To help inform this workplace pandemic reset, the Reputation Partners objectives were:
- To use AOM’s peer-reviewed research to inform global workplaces during the pandemic.
- To grow AOM media coverage of their peer-reviewed published research so it would inform workplace audiences who sought trusted information to make sense of the pandemic and how it was upending their traditional work structures and norms.
- To position AOM scholar members, many of whom come from the most respected universities in the world, as trusted sources for media and for these workplace audiences during a period of time when misinformation and nefarious narratives diluted trust in COVID-19 reporting and spokespeople.
- To leverage AOM’s published research and the individual AOM Subject Matter Experts to become go-to top-tier media sources to inform news cycles around COVID-19, remote work, equity during the pandemic, family and work dynamics, leadership activism, pay equality, worker burnout, salary negotiation, corporate corruption and the return to work coinciding with vaccine mandates.
The Plan
Armed with this vision, Reputation Partners and AOM implemented a strategic approach to provide media with actionable research-based insights and access to Subject Matter Expert scholars by providing research-based solutions for organizations, managers and the C-Suite to address the pandemic’s workplace reset.
Why it Matters
Reputation Partners positioned scholarly research as objective and peer-reviewed truth and insights that could inform the world when facts and science were needed most.
With misinformation and distrust a leading problem during the pandemic, along with constantly shifting pandemic guidance, these resources were pivotal to informing media and organizations across the globe.
How We Achieved Our Goals
- To efficiently share this scholarly research, Reputation Partners and AOM created a strategic distribution mechanism titled the “AOM 500,” which reaches more than 500 top-tier business and workplace media internationally.
- Each distribution was sent at the beginning of a viral news cycle, like sharing remote work optimization research right when global companies like Apple or Microsoft announced remote work shifts due to COVID-19 outbreaks, and included 10-15 pieces of peer-reviewed, published AOM scholar research that informed that news cycle.
- Every “AOM 500” included direct links to the research and offered media complementary access to utilize that research in reporting.
- Reputation Partners also launched a Subject Matter Expert program to make leading scholar members from the most reputable universities like Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Business School, INSEAD and London Business School available for comment on breaking news.
- Reputation Partners has evolved AOM’s Subject Matter Expert program to increase strategic incentives for scholars that boost engagement and exposure to media such as implementing a scholar-led panel series around top trending workplace issues. These panel discussions have covered trending topics including “The Workplace’s Pandemic Reset,” “Team Dynamics in the New Pandemic Workplace,” and “The Remote Disconnect: Challenges and Opportunities within the Future of Work.”
2022 Results
- Nearly 500 U.S. media mentions (including The Washington Post, Forbes, Insider, The Wall Street Journal, Government Executive and The Financial Times)
- 300+ international media mentions (The Daily Mail, Business Insider, The Globe and Mail and Elle)
- 45 media opportunities where a subject matter expert was interviewed or AOM research was reviewed
- The AOM Subject Matter Expert program has expanded to nearly 100 participating scholars
- Eight feature articles in 2022
Thank you to the Academy of Management for their continued partnership and trust, and to the scholar members whose rigorous research and timely insights drive the success of this program.