Category Archives: Best Practice

Crisis Communication In The Age Of Social Media – Sixteen Top Tips

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

It was a great morning yesterday at the NASDAQ OMX Glide event in San Francisco. Chairing such a lively and knowledgeable panel was thought-provoking, fun and educational. A big thanks to all the panelists: Richard Brewer-Hay of Ebay, Rachelle Spero of Brunswick, Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo and Larry Kamer of Kamer Consulting. Thanks too to everyone who came along. It was fantastic to see a packed room and there were some excellent questions and comments from the audience.

Here are my Sixteen Top Tips that came out of the discussion:

  1. Define a crisis by how much impact it will have on your business
  2. Manage your social media on a 24/7 basis, not just when there’s a problem
  3. Many of the basic principles of crisis management have not changed. The one big change is the speed at which issues break and develop
  4. Informal stories work. Richard authors company blogs and also talks about personal issues at the same time. Drives better coverage in the media.
  5. In a crisis, don’t make the mistake of putting your most important audience at the bottom of the list. It’s not always the press.
  6. When managing a crisis there are two things you need to do:
    1. Manage the information
    2. Manage the message
  7. The industry needs regulators to embrace social media and define best practice e.g. SEC
  8. Communications practitioners must work hand-in-hand with IR, Legal and the other corporate functions
  9. It is essential to create common ground with the legal team
  10. Companies need “social media lawyers” i.e. lawyers must be trained and versed in social media best practice
  11. One of the real benefits of social media in crisis comms is the opportunity for learning that it affords. There are so many case studies out there that we can all learn from.
  12. Encourage and promote use of social media in your employees. Don’t be afraid of it. E.g. Morgan Stanley is putting 8,000 brokers on Twitter
  13. Rule of thumb for blog posts – I should be able to read it to my 12 year old daughter (language, appropriateness)
  14. Never start a conversation you are not willing to have
  15. Social media is a great way to spot talent in the organization. E.g. if one of your employees is demonstrating a talent for handling customer enquiries effectively, you can spot it and maximize their skills
  16. When preparing for a crisis:
    1. Listen first
    2. Define your objectives
    3. Dedicate resources. E.g. don’t dive into Facebook unless you have a Facebook community manager
    4. Build a cross-functional team
    5. Consider what is in the mindset of your adversaries. You will always have competitors who will be seeking to exploit your misfortune
    6. Create a step-wise planning model starting at the beginning

What can we learn from the Shippam’s paste Twitter affair?

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s start at the beginning… A few weeks back a Twitter feed appeared, purporting to belong to Shippam’s Pastes, and manned by ‘Ben’, an ‘executive social media intern’. Being new to the world of social media, he was quite honest about his intentions and shortcomings:

The feed read like a social media engagement for beginners’ rulebook, sometimes perhaps a little too literally:

The Tweets led many to question who was behind the account. Was it a hoax? A genuine attempt at ‘engagement’ from a naive intern? Or a stroke of marketing genius from a largely forgotten brand (à la Old Spice…)? As the Guardian revealed over the weekend, it was indeed a hoax. The man behind the account explained, “faking a spectacularly inept attempt to ‘do Twitter’ just seemed funny – as did picking a real, but nearly forgotten, brand to do it. A large part of it was also simply wanting to see what happened.”

Funny is certainly how the feed was perceived, picking up over 9,000 followers before it was closed down. We learnt of Ben’s nights out in Wetherspoons, and his failures in seducing the local chip shop girl, as well as admirable attempts to help us consumers engage with fish paste, of course:

Having seen so many corporate failures on Twitter, as the author remarked, “A company attempting to get involved with an internet ‘thing’ like Twitter and cocking it up entirely is also completely believable.”

The feed played on the idea of ‘engagement’ being seen as the holy grail of ‘doing’ social media and ensuring the whole thing is ‘fun’. In reality though, the feed had very little engagement, being largely a broadcast of disparate thoughts and product references. It broke all the best practice social media ‘rules’, and yet was a great success.

So what can we learn from this? Largely a reminder of the old mantra that content and creativity are key, and even more so in social media, where everyone’s fighting for our attention. Ironically, given the account was fake, original ideas such as this is what brands should be doing. Content which is genuinely engaging and disruptive will attract our attention and make us click ‘follow’ (as the success of the Waterstones Piccadilly feed testifies, as well as our old friend, the insurance quote comparing meerkat).

We must not of course forget that this account was not authorised by the brand, Shippam’s. I would, however, be very interested to see their web analytics for the past few weeks, and also to see if there’s been any rise in sales. If I ever feel like a ‘batenberg sandwich of the sea’, I certainly know where I’ll be heading.

The Social Media Newsroom Part 3: Comments

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

This is the third instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so.  Today I’m having a look at comments, Part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

When looking at how to bring in some two-way dialogue to a company’s newsroom one obvious place to start with is allowing members of the public, or the specific community you are targeting, to post their thoughts, comments and questions on your site in response to your news pieces, blog posts and even press releases.

However, one thing I really don’t like to see on a corporate newsroom or blog is spammy comments!  If you see a blog that has comments that are clearly spam lingering around on their site for days, weeks or even longer what does it say to you?  What it says to me is that there is clearly no-one moderating the site and probably no-one actually bothering to read what people are saying in the comments.

Comments spam and ignored questions – HP blogs

HP has a pretty-looking blog site that is actually a hub pulling together a number of blogs on various topics.

But are they really taking the comments seriously or is this just another gimmick?  Take a look at this post title “Answering your questions”.  Ironically, given the title of the post, no-one has bothered to reply to the people who posted questions in the comments in response to this post.  The last post here from “leo” is clearly spam trying to get some link juice from the HP site (and if you look around other posts you’ll find plenty of spam).  What do you conclude by looking at these comments?  HP isn’t really paying any attention to the community on their site…

Allowing comments and responding to them – Microsoft Hardware Blog

Microsoft have a vast array of blogs on a variety of topics nicely laid out with a summary of the latest posts.  Not all blogs allow comments and you do find the occasional spam but what I like about many of these blogs is that Microsoft does actually respond to the comments people post.

Microsoft Hardware Blog Imagehttp://www.microsofthardwareblog.com/we-want-your-feedback/

This shows a much more genuine attempt to use comments as a way of engaging with people through the site.

How much freedom should people be given to say what they want? Should negative comments be allowed?

This is a tricky question to answer and a lot depends on both the wider culture of a company and also on regulatory requirements.  Aside from preventing abusive posts, spam, blatant self-promotion or links to indecent or illegal content, how far a company goes in allowing people to air their views is really a matter of discretion.

One really interesting example of a company that takes a very tolerant approach to comments on their own site is General Electric.

Take a look at this post about the nuclear meltdown in Japan after the Tsunami and the role that GE played in tackling the crisis.  There are over 111 comments in response to this article, many go beyond negative and are quite damning, it doesn’t really get much worse than being blamed for a nuclear disaster, does it?

The people posting are a broad mix with some people claiming to be engineers and even nuclear experts themselves.  GE have not responded to individual comments but it is interesting to see how commentators with differing views interact with each other.

Do these posts damage GE’s reputation?  GE obviously don’t think so.  Everyone coming to the site first reads GE’s official statement and there are links to other information and posts from GE about the issue on this site.  The community that has developed on this site has also developed a degree of self-correction with individual posters correcting the most blatantly erroneous statements from other posters and there is quite a lively debate about how to tackle the nuclear problems in Japan and the pros and cons of nuclear energy more generally.

There isn’t the usual level of spam, off-topic posts or self-promotion on this site which suggests to me that someone from GE is moderating comments.  Meaning that these negative posts are not there simply because no-one has noticed.

Now the question is, would you let someone say this about your company on your blog?

Comment from a member of the public on GE Reports blog

But look also how the community on the site supply each other with information.  There are a lot of well informed commentators taking part in the discussion.

Comment in GE Reports Blog

I will be interested to hear people’s thoughts on whether such an approach is good for GE but what you can’t deny is that this is ‘social’ in a real sense and also quite ‘brave’ of GE to permit such criticism in a space they control.

In the next part of the series I will be looking at how to use your newsroom to facilitate conversations in other channels.  Thanks for reading!

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 2: The Golden Rules of a Social Newsroom

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

This is the second instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so.  In Part 3 I’ll look at comments, part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

But first, here are my 3 “golden rules” about what constitutes being social in a corporate communications context:

The 3 Golden Rules of being Social in Corporate Communications

Rule 1 – Conversations must be two-way

You can use as many social media channels as you like but if the mode of communication on each channel is still only one-way broadcast are you really gaining anything?  Just posting on twitter doesn’t mean you are being social any more than being in a gym means you are exercising.

Rule 2 – Communication must be personal

Your business is made up of your people.  Your PR team is a team of people.  Do you always have to communicate behind the mask of your corporate logo?  Bring out the individuals in your business – they will often have their own networks that you can connect with through your site.  Put a name and a face to your communications as often as possible.  In order to be social you have to first of all be human.

Rule 3 – The focus is on the audience

One thing that makes ‘social’ communication distinct from traditional PR is the willingness to share content that isn’t directly aimed at promoting the brand or selling goods or services.   This can involve inviting people from outside the business to create content on your site or sharing links to content not created or related to your business.  The goal here is to create or direct people to content because you think it will be interesting to them not because it’s directly beneficial to you.

I could talk about communicating with an audience where they are but I’m focusing here on things that can make the newsroom social, not more widely on how businesses can be more social in general.

If you want more on the specifics then come back next week when I will be publishing the remaining 3 parts of the series.  Thanks for reading!

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 1: How to Fake it

Featured

Posted on by
2

This is the first instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Many companies want to be seen as “social” – there are now numerous case studies showing how social engagement online can be beneficial for business of many types. Certainly, many marketers and PR people want to be seen to be engaging in social media as it’s the latest thing to be seen doing as a marketing/comms professional.

But sometimes the priority can be on “appearing social” rather than actually being social and this can be seen in the way many companies approach communications through their website.  This is most apparent when you look at the company’s newsroom section – i.e. the place where they publish company news and/or press releases.

In terms of what qualifies a newsroom for the additional badge-of-honour prefix “social media” I think the recipe, in the minds of some companies, works as follows:

Step 1
Take one tired looking online press office.

Step 2
Stick in a few Facebook Like/Recommend or Tweet This buttons so people think they can share the story on their social media channel of choice. These buttons don’t actually have to work, just make sure the buttons are clearly visible. Throw in a few other channels for good measure (LinkedIn is popular, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon too and if you are really current try Google’s +1).

Step 3
Instead of hosting your videos on your site host them on YouTube. Everyone knows YouTube is “social” – don’t worry, you can disable comments if you don’t want people saying your videos are boring and your company sucks on a channel you can’t moderate.

Step 4
Make sure you put a few pictures on Flickr. Some people still use Flickr and people will instantly recognise the logo so it will create a warm fuzzy social media feeling inside.

Step 5
Tag clouds! Every web 2.0 site HAS to have one of these. They also make your site look like a blog and blogs are social, right?

Step 6
Show your latest tweets. This may be just a feed showing tweets telling people what’s on the page that they are already on or it may be a stream of tweets to various people apologising that their experience of your company has been bad and telling them to speak to customer services. Either way, twitter is super-social, so just shove it in. It doesn’t matter if the tweets you are displaying offer no information whatsoever to the person on your newsroom that they a) want and b) didn’t have access to already on that page.

Step 7 (optional)
Add some pictures. Podcasts are also funky; if you have them throw them in too. If you have some presentations, why not stick these on Slideshare too?  The more logos of recognised social media channels you can squeeze in to your site the better.

JOB DONE! You now have a “social media newsroom” which you can tell the world about.

“Social” – really?

Don’t get me wrong. Sarcastic comments aside, I’m not saying that any of the things I’ve listed above are bad – in fact many are actually good things that I would recommend. Tag clouds, for example, are a useful way for people to navigate through your content. And there’s certainly no harm in putting videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr. Many of the self-styled “social media newsrooms” that I’ve seen are actually quite good as far as a corporate newsroom goes and often give a better user experience than newsrooms from other companies in their sector.

What I’m objecting to here is the notion that there is actually anything genuinely “social” about these sites. In my view, the self-applied moniker “social media” is often nothing more than a gimmick – reinforcing some of the more negative stereotypes about PR as a profession in general, i.e. doing something for a headline when the substance doesn’t match up.

But why do it? If a site is genuinely social do you really need to call it ‘social’?  Shouldn’t it be up to the people visiting a newsroom to decide for themselves if the site is social or not?  If they think it is they will ‘vote with their fingers’ by sharing/recommending your content and by taking part in a conversation with you.

Subscribe to our blog or follow me on twitter to get updates on my next posts in this series.

Next in the series: The 3 Golden Rules of Social Engagement in a Newsroom

The Social Media Newsroom – a 5-part Guide

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Last week I came across news of yet another corporate newsroom site launched under the headline of “company X launches social media newsroom” and I found myself again wondering, as I browsed through the site, ‘why have they called this a “social media newsroom” as opposed to just a “newsroom”’.

I’ve seen a number of examples where companies have called their corporate news site a “social media newsroom”. Some of these sites do look rather good and have some nice functionality in them, both for journalists visiting the site and for the public. But when you look through the site it is hard to find anything particularly social about it.

All of this has gotten me thinking about what exactly it is that makes a newsroom social? Are we sometimes confusing what represents best practice, in terms of web design, functionality and usability, with actual social engagement? I think we often do, as I’ve seen a number of these “social media newsrooms” receive praise from some for being groundbreaking when in fact they aren’t really doing anything social at all and it can come across as a bit of a gimmick.

So this an introduction for my guide to building a more social newsroom for your business. I’ve resisted the urge to name and shame the worst offenders when it comes to undeserved “social” badges but I will be mentioning a few examples of companies that I think do a good job of it.

Small Business vs Large Corporations

Some of the best examples of using social media in corporate communications actually come from small businesses, but my experience in working in this area mainly comes from working with large corporations. Bigger businesses have both opportunities and restrictions when it comes to engaging in social media that smaller businesses don’t have – so my focus in this series (as with all my posts) is on the larger organisations. If you have good examples from smaller businesses do please share these though!

Part 1: The Social Media Newsroom – How to Fake it

Do you see what we see?

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

When Glide set out to transform the current market for monitoring and sentiment analysis, we recognised that to succeed our solution must be both timely and deliver new value for customers.

Not much has changed. The two pertinent questions as we go to market remain:

  • Why now?
  • Why a technology-enabled solution?

Here are three reasons that shout “now”:

  1. The sheer volume of comment
  2. The emergence of multiple channels
  3. The fast-moving nature of news

And, of course, the answer to the second question lies in the confluence of those three reasons. Simply put: there is now an obvious mismatch between the established methods of monitoring and evaluating the news and today’s media environment.

The ‘old’ methods reflect a set of circumstances that no longer prevail. Now, stories unfold and gain momentum within hours rather than days. Comment flows and intersects across multiple channels. The ‘window of opportunity’ within which to respond in an informed and effective way continues to shrink.

Not surprisingly the needs of organisations have evolved. New circumstances create new challenges and opportunities. They require new tools that are fit for purpose.

And so to the last question. If the very nature of media environment is increasingly driving organisations to source solutions that can meet their needs then what are the pertinent questions they might legitimately ask:

  • Do I need separate solutions for print and online media?
  • Can I synthesise social media and traditional analysis?
  • Can I source analysis in a timeframe that enables me to respond effectively?
  • Will it enable me to measure results against planned outputs?
  • Will I be able to track the correlation between sentiment and business performance in real-time?
  • Is the old, content-based pricing model still relevant?
  • How far can technology help me and where is human input best applied?
  • Can new technologies deliver more value for less cost?

If your organisation is unaffected by the changes in the media environment and your need remains a summary evaluation report on a quarterly basis, then new solutions will have little relevance.

On the other hand, for many organisations, perhaps the majority, they see what we see: new opportunities in the new media landscape to grow their brand but also new threats to brand value that must be guarded against.

Apollo

Logging Journalist Enquiries

Posted on by
Reply

Logging journalist enquiries is simple with Glide and recent enhancements (thanks to your feedback) have made these even easier.

Quick Find Journalists
So you’re on the phone, or you’ve just got an email and you need to record this interaction. Simply start typing the journalist’s first name or their last name into the log and we’ll find all the contacts that you have in your Glide system and present back all their details for you.

Or if there are no matches (because you don’t have this person on your system) then keep typing in their details and when you save the log, they’ll be added to your database.

Or if you have their details, but on the call you get BETTER details, then just overwrite the stuff that’s presented to you and when you save the log, their details will be updated.

Logging the details of the call
We’ve updated the formatting controls so that they only appear when you’re typing and if you don’t use them, they won’t get in the way.

‘Incidents’ and ‘Lines to take’
If you use the incident manager (and if you don’t you should really find out more about it because it’s hellishly useful for managing crises and campaigns) then you can quickly find lines to take and incidents from this next section. Just click ‘add’ and you’ll be able to see all the latest lines to take / incidents which you can grab. This log will then automatically be attached to the ‘incident page’. To find out more, please contact support@glidetechnologies.com

Attachments! Direct from your desktop and in bulk!
We’ve implemented the same funky bulk upload feature to call logs that we have in the media library so you can grab a bundle of attachments from your desktop and upload. As soon as you hit the ‘save’ button on your log then it will upload the items and associate them to this log. It will also place the attachments into a folder called ‘log attachments’ in your internal resource library. Don’t worry – no one but your administrators can see this folder.

Save or Save and Close
If you’ve spent some time on this log and want to save your changes, then you now have the option to ‘save’ (which will save your changes and allow you to keep editing) or ‘save and close’ which will save all your changes and close the log.

What do you think?
Have our changes helped or hindered? Made you happy or left you cold? Please let us know if we are doing a good job by emailing support@glidetechnologies.com or follow me @mamaglide

Samantha

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Sites: A key component of digital crisis management

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Our 24/7 connected world feeds our thirst for “real-time” information and with so much available at our fingertips (Google how we love you so) the speed at which crises now gain momentum adds to the impending threat. Unfortunately it seems that bad news travels faster than good news and remains visible (searchable) for longer. Here’s the rub: reputational damage can be incurred faster than ever and take longer to address and recover.

On the plus side, these same technological advances also offer a raft of opportunities for reputation managers so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Here’s why one organisation built a dark site. The organisation has a global brand in a highly competitive market place. The company’s brand is critical in driving customer preference and sustaining and building the organisation’s equity value.

The comms director’s worst nightmare goes something like this: Confidential customer data gets lost. Within 2 hours ten blogs have picked up the story. Mainstream media gets wind of the stories. Broadcast and print articles will quickly follow. The Twitter sphere explodes with comments. Most of it highly opinionated and inaccurate. Within 8 hours Facebook has kicked off. The others follow. Flickr, YouTube, Digg and co get in on the action. The story spreads like wildfire. Within 15 hours there is editorial comment and the early adopters are now the top search results. The comms director knows how difficult it is to dislodge results once they are top of the news.

A key part of a comms director’s job is to avoid this nightmare scenario and to protect the organisation’s brand and reputation. Increasingly, dark sites sit at the heart of effective digital crisis management. They provide a central hub for all incident related information. In a nutshell, they support three key pillars of crisis management by:

  • Ensuring accurate information is available immediately
  • Presenting information to guarantee absolute transparency
  • Providing a forum for dialogue with stakeholders

A well designed and appropriately deployed dark site can be the difference between an organisation managing a crisis effectively and sustaining significant long-lasting reputational damage. To return to my previous metaphor, it is perhaps the difference between a few sleepless nights and an organisational nightmare.

Apollo

Glide Emails Explained

Posted on by
Reply

If you are reading this, you are either an IT professional wanting to know about Glide’s move to Jango or you are lost. If you are lost, then why not cheer yourself up by watching this video written by a coder turned musician http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE

How Glide Works

Glide sends emails on behalf of its customers (your PR teams). It works like this:

• Your PR team creates content via Glide’s content management system
• This content can then be published to an online newsroom and / or distributed via email
• The email sender is shown as the PR contact (jo.smith@yourcompany.com)
• The email was relayed via MessageLabs but as of May 2011 is now run through Jango SMTP

We have chosen Jango SMTP because they provide great visibility of email delivery and have some lovely APIs which we are busily integrating into our Glide platform. They also help us get through to organisations which consider what we are doing as ‘phishing’ by stamping a sender address in the header of the email of the nature: yourcompany@jangomail.com.

What you need to do

We’re telling you this because it is possible that your internal email systems may prevent emails from the Glide system being delivered internally. If this is the case, we have a number of options:

• You can whitelist a unique range of IP addresses
• You can whitelist the email address your company@jangomail.com
• You can whitelist a unique number found in the header of the email

If you would like to discuss these options (or your own alternative suggestion), please contact support@glidetechnologies.com and we will be happy to help.

Many thanks for your time.

MamaGlide