What separates an elite military group such as the Navy Seals from others? They train non-stop. They train for every situation imaginable. They train for what happens when the plans fail. When they execute a mission they’re relying not just on their skills, they’re relying on their training. In business we need to think more like Navy Seals and train for situations that could endanger our community, our customers, our partners and our vendors.

Our ability to prepare and train for such situations is what will help us when everything hits the fan, the boss is calling, emails are flying in and you’re sitting there trying to figure out what to do. Darren Rowse tweeted out a quote from Bear Bryant that said: “It’s not the will to win, but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference.” It’s in the preparation that separates the good from the great.

With the 24/7 news cycle and the fire hose of information that is always coming at us, it is surprising the number of people that I speak with who don’t have a digital crisis communications plan. Over the past couple years as social media has continued it’s explosive growth, we have seen so many examples of companies who have experienced a crisis due to an accidental tweet, a campaign gone wrong, a misstatement by a spokesperson or the collapse of an industry. But for every major crisis that we hear about there are thousands of crises which will never bubble up to the surface that are the little situations that we deal with on a daily basis. If we’re able to mitigate or solve the issue then it doesn’t grow into a case-study level crisis.

These plans don’t have to be overly complex or difficult to understand. In fact, they need to be written in easy-to-understand language so that when it comes time to take the plan of the shelf and execute against it, everyone isn’t left scratching their heads at a weird acronym or section of legalese. Ever since last year when I read the Radian6 “Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Playbook” and since joining Citrix Online, I have been thinking about digital crisis communications and the basic steps to developing a plan.

Using bits from the Radian6 playbook and my own experiences, I have boiled it down into 11 steps to developing a digital crisis communications plan. Some of these steps may not apply for your company depending on the size of company, whether you have an international customer base and several other factors.

11 Steps to Developing a Digital Crisis Communications Plan

1. Choose and set up your monitoring platform(s)

Choose the platform that is right for your company. There are plenty of them out there and even if you’re not ready to move to a premium solution yet, you can still grow bigger ears for free.

2. Determine your monitoring schedule

After you have selected and set up your monitoring platform you need decide what your monitoring schedule will be. Who will be involved? What times will they be monitoring? Will it be active or passive monitoring? Do you need international support? All of these questions will need to be answered to determine what your monitoring schedule needs to be.

3. Ensure local language support teams

If you have an international customer, partner or vendor base then you need to ensure you have the capabilities to respond in local language to any crisis that may occur. In the U.S. we tend to be an ethnocentric society who believes that our way is the right way. That how and when we communicate is the same everywhere. However, that is far from the case. You need folks on your team that understand, can monitor and respond in local language.

4. Determine what constitutes a crisis

What constitutes a crisis for your company? Not everything will be a “run around the office with your hair on fire” type of crisis (well, hopefully not!) but you need to have an ability to rate or grade the situation to determine whether something is escalating to crisis-level. You may choose a numerical score or a letter grade. You can use a severity grid such as “xx number of comments in 24 hours” or make it situation-specific. Whatever it is, make sure you understand what a crisis is for YOUR company.

5. Determine what you WILL respond to

It is important to have listed what your company is willing to respond to. These may be general inquiries such as customer service/support issues, product inquiries or publicly available information.

6. Determine what you WILL NOT respond to

Equally, if not more important is having listed what your company WILL NOT respond to. These may be legal or financial inquiries that are not publicly available, potentially inflammatory comments or something that the company does not possess the ability to properly respond to.

7. Form your digital crisis communications team

You need to form a digital crisis communications team that is comprised of stakeholders from across the business. Depending on the severity of a crisis and who it involves, it will mean that different stakeholders will need to be activated. Therefore they need to be aware of and bought in to the plan because not only will you turn to them during the crisis for support, they’re the experts of their respective areas. For example, Legal may want to be involved in anything that involves an employee issue. HR may not want to be involved in customer support issues, even if escalated to a crisis-level. Another team may prefer to be notified after it has been resolved, just as a FYI. It is important to understand these dynamics and the level of involvement needed and wanted. Some members of your core digital crisis communications team should include:

• Internal Communications
• Marketing
• PR
• HR
• International Teams
• Customer Service
• Agency Support

You may also have an extended team that could include: Creative, Web Development, Customer Insights, SEO, Sales and any other relevant teams, depending on the size of your company.

Be sure to include contact information for every member and proxy/backups for each person.

8. Escalation ladder and flow

Who needs to be notified and when. It’s as simple as that. Have a simple grid that lists who is notified, when, how fast and the method of communication. For example, an email will be sent to the VP of Corporate Communications. If no response is received within 30 minutes, it will be escalated to the SVP of Marketing.

9. Who will respond on the company’s behalf

It’s important to determine who will respond on the company’s behalf. Who will be the online spokesperson for your company. Remember that it may not be the same person every time. You probably don’t want your CEO responding to every inquiry during a crisis. But, you may want to call them in for a high profile response, an influential website or an interview. List who is authorized to respond and under what circumstances.

10. What to report on and how frequently

During and following a crisis the executives and managers will want to understand what happened, how it was handled and what affect it had on the company. Determine what that frequency is that they want and what they’re interested in having reported. During the crisis you may report every hour then move to once per day, once per week and then a final report. Agree to this so there is no confusion on when and what will be reported.

11. Build support beams

You can’t do this alone and you shouldn’t attempt to. Make partnerships, build a team and develop internal support for your plan. It will be important during a crisis and you will be thankful for developing these partnerships ahead of time.

Below is a slide deck that I put together that’s part of a speech I give on digital crisis communications. If you can view it below, you can find it over on Slideshare.

 
 
Does your company have a digital crisis communications plan? Has your company had to execute against this plan yet? What were your experiences?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: Will Scullin

In general, restaurants have a few main ways that they typically market their business: You can run ads in the local newspapers, buy radio spots, have television commercials produced, and grab prime billboard locations.  All of these marketing tools will help gain a restaurant visibility and exposure.  They’re part of most restaurants’ marketing toolboxes.  But, these marketing tools don’t help when an increasing number of eyeballs are turning to Google as their primary source of information.

When my best friend and now-partner, Joseph Gionfriddo, purchased Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, the extent of the restaurant’s web presence consisted of, essentially, just a copy of the menu.  Joe was spending most of the marketing budget on local newspapers and radio spots.  The restaurant was struggling to survive even though the food that Joe prepared was some of the best I, and everyone else that came through Caminito’s doors, had ever tried.

Recognizing an opportunity to lower our marketing budget and use the web as the primary tool to drive more bodies through the front door, I approached Joe with the offer of a partnership.  My primary responsibility: create the strongest presence, both offline and online, for Caminito, in as short of time as possible.

We immediately sketched out a 12-month strategic marketing plan that included:

• A complete revamp of the website.
• Developing an online presence through social networks, a blog, and a video blog.
• Creating a listening station that allowed us to monitor for conversations across the web about us, our restaurant, our competition and our industry.

Since many of these tactics provide for solid SEO, as part of our goals, it helped us to gain several thousand links in Google and other major search engines.  As our online presence became stronger and we developed a more engaged community, we began to rank for prime keywords that we targeted as being important for our restaurant to drive business through search results.

Our take: if prospective customers ran searches for restaurants in the area while making a decision of where to dine and our restaurant dominated the front page of Google, they would be more likely to visit Caminito.  Though we had made the decision to decrease our traditional marketing spend by approximately 80% we still continued to run local newspaper and some radio spots.  Since not all of our customers use the Internet to do their research, it was important to us to continue to use these avenues to reach our customers.  We also contacted each of the newspapers, other print publications, radio and associations to negotiate for digital advertising options, linkbacks on their websites, logo, bio and/or menu publishing.

The first month of this strategy being in play we saw a sales increase of 20% as compared to the same month the previous year.  Over the past almost two years we have maintained an increase in sales every single month as compared to the same month the previous year.  Additionally, we have finished each year approximately 20-25% up in sales as compared to previous years.

As time has continued, we have tweaked our strategic marketing plan but still maintain the above tactics.  This has helped to continue to create conversations, both online and offline.  To measure the continued increase in online conversations we use a combination of Google Alerts and Twitter Search.  While this does create some duplication, it ensures that we never miss any conversations happening around us, our brand, our competition, or our industry.  We monitor offline conversations through anecdotal interactions we have with our community and inferred through the continued increase in new customers and increased sales.

To further guide decision-making we also measure everything from the number of comments we receive on a blog post, to the number of hits on a video, the total number of subscribers, where those subscribers come from, how and where our blog and video posts are shared, who shares them, the level of engagement we have, the number of conversations that are started and tons more.  The challenge is keeping up with all of this data flowing in and bringing it all together to analyze our overall online impact.

As a result of the measurement systems we have in place the impact of online and offline conversations is clear to us.  Online conversations help to further our online brand, increase conversations, improve search rank for evolving prime keywords, demonstrate and expertise in the food industry, create new opportunities, and increase sales.  The offline conversations translate to word of mouth marketing that helps to drive increase and repeat sales.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

Want some more explanation?  David Plouffe was the campaign manager and chief architect of the Obama presidential campaign.  Over the course of 2 years the campaign raised more than $750 million, had a staff of almost 6,000 people and an army of volunteers that totaled into the millions.  The Audacity to Win (Amazon affiliate link) takes you closer than any other account of the Obama campaign has.  There are many business, marketing, community development and time management takeaways in addition to the granular level detail of what it takes to run a presidential campaign.

As usual, I shot a quick video with my thoughts on the book.  If you can’t view the video, check it out over on my YouTube channel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

I highly encourage you to take the 20 minutes to watch/listen to the entire presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m curious to know your thoughts.  What did you think of this presentation?  Did it get you thinking of how you could do your business a little differently?  How are you using these tools that we call social media?

Note: This a post as part of the series of presentations  from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  You can check out all videos on the Inbound Marketing Summit Blip.tv channel.  Content from all over the interwebs are being aggregated over on Delicious.  All posts on this blog will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Outside of this conversation I had been bugging Chris to analyze my restaurant, Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, for some time now.  Other case studies have focused on what we’ve done but not tearing apart the metrics.  Chris is a genuis at analysis and analytics.  So, I really wanted him to expand my knowledge and ability Google Analytics and other tools to properly analyze our efforts at the steakhouse and determine our ROI.  For those that don’t know, approximately 1.5 years ago we cut out 80% of our traditional marketing budget and turned our focus to our website, SEO, social media and other digital initiatives as a way to drive sales.  Surprise, surprise, it worked.  Since then we have seen a minimum of 20% increase in sales when comparing the same month the previous year.  But, one thing we never did was break out and track those individual efforts between the website, social media, and other areas we were spending our time online.

As part of his presentation Chris asked if he could use the restaurant as an example and do an analysis of our ROI.  What Chris found, in terms of hard dollars, surprised me and I think it will surprise you too.

You can check out Chris’ presentation, both slides and videos below:

Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Slides

As I said, I was surprised at the actual dollar values but I wasn’t surprised at the result that Chris found.  For us, our entire focus has been on SEO.  We have used social media as a tool to augment that but not as a primary vehicle to drive revenue for the restaurant.  For instance, we have made a conscious decision to not set up a Twitter account where offer discounts.  It is something we’re considering doing in the future, but right now we aren’t utilizing social media in that way.

While this presentation gives you some information about my brick and mortar and the decisions that we face and have to make, have you taken these steps to determine the ROI of your efforts on your website, blog, or social media profiles?  If you have done this exercise, did you change anything about the way you spend your time post-analysis?

Note: This is the first post of many highlighting videos from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  All posts will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

If you don’t know the story of Kogi BBQ, instead of me retelling you the story, check out this excellent video on how they started and what Twitter has done to enable them to grow so fast.  Starting out not having any sales on some days to now adding a 2nd truck and looking into options of opening brick & mortar locations is awesome to see!

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a restauranter who has used to social media as a primary means of marketing my steakhouse, I love the story of Kogi.  As someone who works in this social media space, it’s always exciting to see companies that take these social tools and use them in a different way then we’re used to seeing.

Have you had a chance to partake in a Kogi BBQ taco yet?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

This “ideal customer profile”, as I refer to it, is actually called a “buyer persona”.  A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents your audience – an archetype of the ideal customer.  The word “buyer” actually represents whoever your target customer is.  As Adele Revella explains:

The goal for buyer personas is to make them so real and persuasive that the company will be willing to take direction from them…Their [the buyer persona] purpose is to tell a story to internal audiences about how a particular type of buyer views the decision to buy the company’s product, service or idea.  The story must be real, even though the persona is not.  Persona developers need to continously interact with buyers to keep the story real, reiterating the buyers’ perspective whenever an internal decision loses its focus.

Want to see what a buyer persona looks like?

David Meerman Scott highlights Kadient, a SaaS application provider, who have successfully implemented buyer personas.  To check out a couple of the buyer personas they have developed, check out David’s post.

How can you develop your own buyer persona(s)?

While there are a bunch of ways to develop your buyer personas, here are just 3 that I think will keep you pretty busy for a little while and will help you to start to gain a better detailed picture of your ideal customer.

1. Analyze you current customer data – If you collect any demographic or user data, analyze to see what your average customer looks like.  Of course, the more information you collect during the customer acquisition phase of your sales cycle, the easier this will be to develop a complete picture.

2. Listen to your team – Listen to what your internal sales and marketing team tell you about interactions they have with people about your company’s products or services.  Are consistently noticing that they’re talking to a middle-aged woman with kids yelling in the background and who always seems to be in a rush?  That’s important to note.  You have a lot less time to get your message across with that person then you might with others.  Maybe your marketing team runs into the same type of people at every conference you set up a booth at.  Again, important to note, analyze and target your messaging towards.

3. Ask for feedback – Ask your customers for feedback on what they would like to see.  Did they really like that last website refresh because it made their life easier to find some information because of how busy they are in meetings all day?  That’s important to know.  Then you need to make your messaging snackable.  Marketing delivered to that persona in any other manner will crash and burn because they’re too busy to read it and just delete it or never get around to it.

Have you developed buyer personas at your company?  If so, have they been successful?  If you’re not using buyer personas at your company, what are you waiting for?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo by: emery.josh

One of the big ways is through the below email I get randomly from Netflix.

It usually comes about once every couple weeks.  It simply asks what day I dropped the movie I was returning in the mail.  But, it is so much more than just remembering that you dropped it 2 days ago.  Netflix is using that data to track the delivery time from mailbox to shipping facility.  Sure, that allows them to know it takes 1-2 days from the greater Boston area because they have a shipping facility in Worcester, MA (about 1.25hr drive from Boston).  It also allows them to strategically determine where to open new shipping facilities.  If they see that the average delivery time moves from 1.3 days from Boston to Worcester up to 2.2 days, that will show them that maybe the Worcester shipping facility is overburdened because of the number of customers in the area.  Netflix could then build a new shipping facility closer to Boston using their customer address data and the average return time of a movie based on what customers tell them on these email surveys.

Those are just a few examples of the many possibilities for using the data that Netflix receives just by you telling them what day you sent back a movie.  Also, that’s only one way of many that Netflix is working to improve their customer experience and they’re doing it, at least in the above example, without ever speaking via phone to their customers.  Furthermore, they’re making the customer feel as though they’re valued by the company.  Remember, every customer matters!

So, how are you working to improve your customer’s experience?  Do you analyze every touch point that your customers have with your brand?  Do you strive to continually improve those touch points?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

A few years ago I first read Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service. Back then I was in college studying sociology.  While the book made sense, it didn’t really sink in what a “raving fan” was or why they were so important.  I recently decided to re-read the book again since I’m fascinated in developing positive employee cultures and the concept of developing raving or super fans.  If you haven’t ever read this book, this is a must-read and you should order it immediately.  Even if you have read it before, it’s one of those classic business books that should be read once a year or so just to remind yourself how important it is.

What are some ways that you can develop raving (or super) fans?  These are just some of the ways I try to develop raving fans at my steakhouse.

Developing Raving Fans

1. Take the time to learn their name and something interesting about them.  Write it down and next time you meet them, ask them about whatever it was.
2. Set up a listening post.  If you find someone talking negatively about your brand, address it directly with that person.  Chances are, they will appreciate it and may actually become a super fan of your brand.
3. Learn what your customers actually want and then find a way to deliver it.
4. Be humble
5. If you find someone talking positively about your brand, reach out to them and thank them.
6. Don’t always make it about your top or bottom line.  Zappos.com runs their warehouses 24/7 to provide fast service to their customers.  Inefficient from a labor prospective? Probably.  Develops raving fans who continue to buy?  Absolutely.
7. Be human

Do you agree with this list?  What are other ways that you develop raving fans of your brand?

So, on Saturday morning she came into the bedroom and woke me up waaay too early to go outside.  I suited up and went outside to start jumping through snow piles, rolling around, and throwing snowballs.  Sasha acts just like a kid in the snow.  She runs head first into the biggest piles of snow she can find.  She bites snowballs as they’re thrown at her.  She runs as fast as she can on the pavement then stops so she slides.  We repeated this every couple hours on Saturday and Sunday.  It was tons of fun.  But, then as I was watching her run around, something occurred to me.  Though she was having a lot of fun, everything she was doing was a calculated risk.  She never jumped into or off of anything that she didn’t know.  Sometimes she miscalculated and once she even hurt her paw for a brief minute.  She knew the general layout and then just had fun.

Going into 2009 we need to take calculated risks.  In order to take these risks, we need to know the general landscape of the area.  Once we assess the potential risk and determine that it presents a good opportunity then we need to jump in and have fun with it.  You must have fun.  There may be bumps along the way, there are always bumps.  Sasha tweaked her paw a couple times so then she slowed down for a little while but then jumped right back in not afraid.  We need to do the same when those bumps happen.  Slow down, assess, and then figure out how to overcome that issue but not be afraid to try another idea, grab another project or whatever the opportunity may be.

How am I doing this in 2009?  I am setting sail by taking a new position with a new company in a new state.  This includes my fiance having to find a new job, paying all of the relocation costs and diving into something uncertain.  Oh yeah, and we’re doing all of this 6 months before our wedding.  Why?  Because I know the landscape of the field that I work in and of where I want to get to.  I assessed the opportunity along with the potential risks and decided to jump in and have fun.  For me, 2009 is going to be a lot of work, a lot of change but it’s also going to be a lot of fun.  I’m capitalizing on an amazing opportunity and am looking forward to seeing that risk pay off.

What risks are you going to take in 2009 to make sure you succeed?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.