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?

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Photo Credit: Will Scullin

When I was at my old company I had a large outsourced team based in the Philippines.  Since I was only able to make it out there once every 10 weeks or so, we had to rely on tools that would allow us to transfer reports and communicate with one another from close to 18,000 miles away.  At the time this was primarily done via email, IM and FTP.  That feels so long ago because now, just a few years ago, we have seen a sharp increase in cloud-based tools for individuals and businesses.  At the heart of these tools is the goal to keep people connected by allowing for access to data and the ability to easily communicate through a variety of channels.

I utilize cloud-based apps all throughout my day and didn’t realize just how much I rely on them until I sat down and began thinking about how I store and retrieve personal data and how I communicate with a number of team members, clients, and partners on a daily basis.

Here are the top 12 cloud-based tools that I use to stay productive.  I use many other tools as well but these are the tools I wouldn’t know what to do without.

12 Cloud-Based Tools to Stay Productive

1. Google Apps/Docs: I use Google Apps at both New Marketing Labs and my steakhouse. I also heavily use Gmail and Google Docs in my personal life.
2. Google Bookmarks: Google Bookmarks ensures that I have access to my most frequently used bookmarks from any computer, anywhere I’m at.  I also use Delicious but I use that more for storage and curating together lists such as corporate social media policies or food recipes.
3. Google Reader: Google Reader is the primary way I’m able to consume so much information on a daily basis.  There are a variety of tools available for the iPhone and iPad plus I can access from any computer with a browser.
4. Mozy: Mozy allows me to sleep at night knowing that all of my data is being backed up.  I have other backup processes in place including external hard-drives and heavy use of Dropbox but Mozy remains at the center of all of these processes.
5. Backupify: Just as Mozy allows me not to worry about the data that’s stored on my computer(s), Backupify ensures that my social media data is backed up and available for future reference.  Backupify can secure your data from a variety of services including: Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Apps/Docs, WordPress, Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar, and many more.
6. Dropbox: Dropbox keeps my most used files available to me wherever I am.  Not only does this serve as a backup of those files, it also allows me to access from my iPhone, iPad, or any other computer.  This comes in handy all the time and helps me to stay responsive to business requests for copies of files.
7. Evernote: I have been a fan of Evernote since it was first launched. I have multiple notebooks that I use for all sorts of things including my task management, goal setting, lists of all kinds, and random notes.
8. Hootsuite: While technically I could’ve listed all of the different social platforms, I would like to think that would be sort of obvious. However, Hootsuite is important because it allows me to stay connected on too many Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages to count.
9. Yammer: We’re just deploying Yammer at New Marketing Labs but it is being used to keep our team connected so that we’re not constantly interrupting each other and so that we can stay in contact when we’re traveling.  We had used other internal networks such as Socialcast and they worked great but a few of our partners were already using Yammer so we decided to give it a try. So far, it’s pretty awesome!
10. ScrewTurn: ScrewTurn is what we use for our corporate wiki where we keep information on just about everything we do including our policies, timelines, meeting notes, discussions and lots of other great uses we’re finding for it.
11. Zoho: When we first launched New Marketing Labs we bounced around between a few CRMs and finally settled on Zoho.  I wanted a full-featured platform because I had spent 3 years as the administrator of NetSuite at my old company but we didn’t have the needs of, for example, a software company that has hundreds or thousands of leads coming in each day.
12. GoToMeeting: Even though Citrix Online is a client of mine, I have been using GoToMeeting for years.  I already travel a lot.  If it wasn’t for GoToMeeting, I would have to rent a closet at an airport because I would never be home.

What are some of your favorite cloud-based tools to stay productive and keep connected?

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Photo Credit: bestrated1

Right about this point you’re probably nodding your head up and down admitting that you’re experiencing this same issue.  It’s not surprising because the modern workplace has become addicted to meetings and other forms of interruptions.

This is a consistent issue for me even though my team tries to run as lean as possible and reduce the number of meetings and miscellaneous interruptions we have. However, when I’m not traveling, a normal week will have 40-60 meetings appear on my calendar. One of the reasons for this is because we’re a fast-growing company with big ambitions and a lot of moving projects that require our attention while the other part is that we have weekly status calls with each of our clients and I lead the majority of these calls.

As more meetings and interruptions have continued to find their way into my work day, I’ve learned to block out time on my calendar that is marked “DO NOT SCHEDULE!”  This allows me to schedule blocks of time to get work done instead of only small windows of time.

With how often I travel, I’ve also learned how to be productive from anywhere and how to leverage any time available even if it is only 15 minutes.  This has lead me to become very good at getting work done with short pockets of time in between meetings and at home.  Even if I have a day without a lot of meetings, I have found that I am more productive on projects when I’m workshifting because I find that I can focus more because it’s just me, my laptop and some great music.

Just as I was thinking about this while sitting on my couch doing work on a Sunday afternoon, I came across an interview with Jason Fried,co-author of Rework (affiliate link) and Founder of 37Signals where he addresses exactly this issue. Jason describes some of the tactics that his team uses at the 37Signals office and offers some tactical advice that you could implement into your office.

Have you broken your company of their addiction to meetings and other interruptions? If so, what were the tactics you used?

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As someone who spends the majority of their life online I come to rely on my ability to get online. I’ve become spoiled by my ability to virtually always get online from any location.

The majority of work that we do at New Marketing Labs involves needing to be online. One of the main reasons why I’m in England is to capture content to upload online. Sounded easy enough while back in Boston, right? Well, when planning the trip I knew that I wouldn’t have data on my iPhone. It’s just too expensive and I wasn’t going to get a UK phone just for this trip. I was ok with that. At least the hotel had free wifi, I thought to myself. Score. Except that as I’ve gotten settled at the hotel I’ve found out that they block access to every social site. So far I’ve found that they block Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Luckily I was able to get on to Flickr to upload all of the photos that I’ve been taking. But, otherwise, I’ve been basically disconnected from the social web for the past couple days.

Now, I agree that it is good to disconnect to spend time with family and friends but not when you’re traveling for work and need access. What I think is worse is that it’s like dangling a carrot in front of my eyes that I can almost reach. I can access the internet. I can even sort of access Twitter by going through TweetDeck. But, anything else = have fun trying. This means that I have to use precious time while at Goodwood huddled in the media tent trying to share a connection with 100 other folks uploading content of their own. It’s possible but I much preferred the idea of doing it from the hotel at night during my “off” time.

While I’ve been able to mostly get my work done, even if a bit delayed, it has been very frustrating. So, my question to you is what do you do when you run into technology issues that prevent, or greatly hinder, your ability to get your work done?

Correction: I’m apparently able to access Flickr but not able to see any photos while doing a search hence why there isn’t an accompanying photo with this post of someone running into a wall.  Their system is even classifying Chris Brogan’s website as a Usenet and is blocking it. Go figure.

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Do you ask for feedback on a regular basis? No, not whether or not you look good in stripes but feedback from your customers, clients, vendors, partners, employees and managers.

Some of us are scared of asking for feedback because we’re worried what the response will be.  It’s ok, it’s a natural feeling.  However, asking for feedback from those folks that we spend all day interacting with is important in ensuring that you’re always delivering consistent value.  If you’ve never asked if what you’re doing is valuable, how can you ensure it is?  Simple: you can’t.

At New Marketing Labs we just launched a quarterly feedback form that we’re asking all of our clients and partners to fill out.  It’s quick, it’s simple but it gives us a pulse on how we’re doing.  This is in addition to the many other forms of communication, feedback and reporting that we have in place with all of our clients.  When we were developing this report we knew it needed to be fast or else no one would ever fill it out thoroughly.  We decided that we would ask to be given a letter grade in 5 areas with an overall grade and then a simple question at the end.  Here’s what we asked for feedback on:

• Communications professionalism, effectiveness, & enjoyment
• Reporting effectiveness, usefulness, format & aesthetic
• On time, as promised deliverables
• Overall value added
• Meeting your expectations
• How can we improve to be a better partner and add more value (not a grade, but telling us how to be better partners!)?

Nice and simple but hits on all of the key areas that we care about to ensure we’re being helpful in a timely, appropriate and needed way.

In addition to asking for feedback from our clients, I ask my team members to provide weekly feedback on their wins (successes), opportunities (where they can do better) and to tell me how I can be more helpful to them in the coming week(s).  Just like with our clients, this is not the only communications that we have over the course of a week to ensure there is an open loop of feedback happening.

While feedback isn’t always fun especially if it is critical of the work you’re doing, it is necessary.  Burying your head in the sand and telling yourself that everything is going great even though it isn’t will lead down very dark, lonely and broke paths.  Also, remember, that not all feedback is negative.  Positive feedback can be energizing and help to boost morale.  But, if you receive positive feedback, don’t take that as a sign that since everything is good you can sit back and put it on auto-pilot.  Use it as an opportunity to go deeper, provide more value and try to be even more helpful.

Do you have feedback processes in place?

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Photo Credit: Padday

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.

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Recently I mailed out hand-written thank-you cards to every single sponsor of our Inbound Marketing Summits and Inbound Marketing Bootcamps, all of our clients and a handful of other people who have helped us at New Marketing Labs over the past few months. I figured that a personalized, hand-written thank-you card would mean a lot more than a standard email.

Plus, who needs another email? I know I sure don’t. As I continue to see the amount of physical mail I receive decrease due to paying bills online, receiving email newsletters, and communicating mainly via email and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, when a card or note from someone arrives, it means so much more. I actually take time to sit down and read it. I save it. It means more to me because I know that everyone in my circles run their lives from digital dashboards.

When I sent the thank-you cards I didn’t expect anything to come of it. I mean, all of these people have given us money or donated their time has a cost to it as well. The least I could do is take 2 minutes out of my life to send them a thank-you. Granted, I could’ve still sent everyone a piece of physical mail but made it a lot easier by typing a standard letter, printing 120 copies, signing them and then having them mailed out. But I chose not to. Why? Because that takes away the personal nature of the thank you. As great as standardization is for effectiveness, it does not translate to being more personal.

Right after I had mailed out all of the cards I had watched a MSNBC special about President Obama and the White House. While there were many things that I found fascinating during the 2 hour special, one thing that kept sticking with me was the fact that President Obama reads 10 letters from the public every single day. Now, I know that 10 letters doesn’t seem like a lot. Especially seeing that the White House receives over 100,000 emails, 1,000 faxes, and 2,500-3,500 phone calls every single day and over 65,000 physical letters every week (real numbers, not just estimations). A mere 10 letters per day isn’t even a drop in the bucket. But, before looking at it through that lens, stop and think about this for a minute.

The President of the United States is personally reading 70 letters from the American public every week. These letters aren’t being digested for him into a quick one-pager. These letters aren’t being scrubbed (except for security reasons) before the President sees them. Here’s the real win, not only is the President reading these letters every day but he personally responds to about 15 of those letters every week. No, not his secretary, not his Director of Communications, not his personal aide, or an intern, but the President is responding to them personally. Guess what? He hand writes every single response!

Check out this video of the President talking about why it is so important to him to stay in touch with the public:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Love him, hate him, you have to respect him for it. This is not a political debate but instead a look into a powerful tool that you can and should be employing into your businesses. Whether you’re an account executive, sales representative, manager, Director, VP or further up the structure, are you reaching out like this to your customers? I’m not talking about the obligatory holiday card or “thank you for your business” type stuff. I mean personalized, thought out, responses. How do you think a customer would feel if after calling into customer service or tech support, a few days later they received a hand-written note from that team member? Think you would win them over? Think you would create brand loyalty?  I think your chances are pretty high.

Need some other examples of people who are keeping their ear to the ground and listening to their customers?

*Tony Hsieh of Zappos is a perfect example. Tony is behind the company’s main Twitter account, currently hovering around 1.1 million followers. Tony responds to as many people as possible given the crazy schedule of a CEO of a $1.2 billion company, an in-demand public speaker and someone who has been featured in 2009 in every major business magazine. While I’m not sure whether Zappos reps send hand-written notes, they are empowered to help the customer in any way possible and they believe very strongly in building culture.

*Fritz Henderson. Fritz is the recently minted CEO of General Motors. Fritz has just a few things on his plate if you ask me. But, Fritz actively listens to customers by reading and responding to blogs, monitoring what’s being talked about in the media, and taking time to learn from people like Chris Brogan.  Fritz has even launched an online community called “Tell Fritz”.  Yes, I’m sure that Fritz has a substantially sized PR and communications teams as well as multiple agencies that work with those teams. Fritz also has my friend Chris Barger working social media for GM. But, besides all of those reports that he can call upon, Fritz takes an active role in listening and responding directly to his customers.

Want to listen like Tony, Fritz or many other executives now are?  Start by growing bigger ears!

Imagine how you would feel if Tony, Fritz or the President of the United States responded directly to you whether it be digital or hand-written (more points for the hand-written!). Now take that feeling and imagine how you could provide that same feeling for YOUR customers, business partners or your employees.

It’s not always the flashy things that make the biggest impacts. Something as simple as hand-written notes or a simple message to let them know you’re listening can win you a customer for life.

Are you doing this within your company? Do you know someone who is doing this and you want to recognize them for their efforts?

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Photo by: athena

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since I’ll be traveling over the next few weeks I figured my time to actually write will be hard, especially while at SXSW.  So, I have decided to do a lot more videos over the next few weeks.  I hope you enjoy

What are your thoughts?  Do you agree that face-to-face interaction is important?  Why?

Thank you for all that I learn and the friendships that I continue to make.  I hope that I’m helpful to you as well.

Note: This mosaic is a list of approximately the first 400 people of my Twitter list.  If you’re not included here, you were not left out on purpose.  I value that we get to interact.

If you’d like to build a similar mosaic, you can grab the code from Twitter Mosaic.

A few weeks later your company launches the product and your inbound marketing plan is working perfectly.  People are subscribing to your opt-in newsletter, signing up for demos, tweeting, commenting and digging everything they can find about your company and this new product.  The phones are ringing constantly.  But, then you find out something pretty disturbing.  The sales team is having a hard time converting all of these leads to customers.  Immediately you begin to blame them.  I mean, they’re wasting the leads that you worked so hard to get for them!  Finally, one night you’re out for drinks with a friend of yours who is on the sales team.  You ask them why can’t the sales team convert any of these leads and they tell you it’s because they never received any training on the product, they didn’t know about the timing of any of the marketing campaigns, and that made them unprepared.  So, when they’re talking to leads, they’re fumbling through the call because they’re learning as they go.

This little story highlights something very important but often overlooked.  As marketers we sometimes get so wrapped up in planning and executing our marketing plan to the rest of the world that we forget that we also need a marketing and communications plan for our staff.  We can’t just assume that they know everything that’s going on just because we do.  It is important that we are constantly aware of this so that we avoid operating in a silo or out on an island.

As I was thinking about this stuff over the past couple days, I came across a post by Douglas Karr on this very same topic.  Thanks to him, I found this funny video on the topic of internal marketing and communication plans.

If you have problems viewing this video in your RSS reader, you can view the video here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Photo by: hulksjedi