Tom Martin Senior Counselor
Tom is one of the public relations industry’s most widely respected communications strategists. As a senior counselor at PulsePoint Group, Tom focuses on corporate communications, governance and crisis management working with such clients as Dow and the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association, among others.
As a former chief communications officer of both ITT and FedEx, Tom has been engaged in a broad range of challenging business issues including building global brand equity, managing crises, and enhancing corporate social responsibility. His experience has included developing strategy to communicate Justice Department settlements, plant closures, labor issues, an attempted aircraft hijacking and numerous bi-lateral trade disputes. Today, in addition to being a senior counselor with PulsePoint Group, Tom is Executive-in-Residence in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina and he has also taught at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
At ITT Corporation, Tom was Senior Vice President and Director of Corporate Relations for the $8 billion diversified global engineering and manufacturing company. In that role, Tom was a member of the Executive Council and served as a management liaison to the Board of Directors. He was responsible for global branding, corporate advertising, government relations, public relations, employee communications and corporate philanthropy.
At FedEx, Tom was Vice President, Corporate Communications where he was responsible for worldwide public relations, investor relations and employee communications for the Fortune 150 Company. He joined Federal Express in 1978 and assumed posts of increasing responsibility in the communication field prior to becoming the chief communications officer in July 1995. In 1988, his department launched FXTV, one of the largest and most successful internal satellite television networks. He was also responsible for the public relations and internal communications efforts for the launch of the FedEx brand in 1994.
Tom earned his BA at Vanderbilt University. He has written on ethics and communication issues for PR Week magazine and serves on the board of governors of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. He has served as a trustee of the Arthur W. Page Society, a membership organization for senior corporate communication executives, since 2002, and was President of the Society in ?2004-2005. In 2005, he was elected to the Board of Governors of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. In November of 2006 he was inducted into the PR News Hall of Fame.