If you ask marketing executives what keeps them up at night in the age of social media, one of the most common responses is fear of a PR debacle lighting a brush fire on the web.
Every marketer knows there are a hundred things that could go wrong on any given day–from product failures to employee indiscretions–and the fear of being caught flat-footed while the news lights up the social universe is a very real fear.
In fact, one of the biggest market drivers for my company SocialRep is the need for businesses to have an ear to the ground and a way to effectively manage engagement.
Surprisingly few companies, however, have protocols in place to manage social media disasters as they unfold–even those that have sophisticated crisis management protocols in place for non-social media issues.The good news is, it’s not that hard to create a plan. In fact, the most important things you need to know were modeled for you in kindergarten. Remember those fire drills? The simple but critical idea was that everyone should know exactly what to do and where to go when a crisis happens, and to practice it even when the possibility of an actual crisis seems remote. Same idea applies to social media.
Why is this important? Think of social media as a massive global amplifier. Events that you used to be able to ignore until they went away can now become an overblown incident with a permanent record on Google. A trivial customer complaint magnified through social media can become an international embarrassment overnight. If you need graphic examples of disaster, Jeremiah Owyang offers a chronicle on his blog.
So here’s a primer on how to build your own crisis plan for social media, whether the crisis is an overblown customer complaint, or a true business disaster affecting many customers.
These recommendations should dovetail with an established crisis management program. If you don’t have established crisis protocols, there’s a section at the end of Part 2 that will lay out the basics.
Be Prepared
We put a lot of resources into maintaining resources like flood control systems and fire roads. Why? Because the cost of eventual disaster vastly outweighs the cost of being ready to respond. Social media is the same way. Facing down a crisis is not the time to wish you’d developed the resources to respond.
1. Start getting engaged now. If you don’t already have people in your company building social relationships with your business communities, you won’t have the channels to deal with a crisis when it hits. When a crisis happens, you need to be able to communicate directly with your business communities through channels you’ve already established; you can’t borrow or buy them from your PR firm.
2. Build your team. If you don’t already have a social media A-Team, you should. Social media should not be relegated to the PR team or the young people in your organization. It should be a distributed practice that helps your company develop relationships on every operational front. Your engineers should be engaged with the engineering community. Your customer service reps should be engaged with customers. Your legal team should be engaged and up to speed with the legal community. You get the idea. Fortunately, building an A-team isn’t hard, and I’ve written a primer for that too.
3. Get your ears on. One of the big advantages of being socially connected is real-time intelligence. If you’re tracking social media–even using basic tools like Google alerts–you’re likely to get wind of a problem before it becomes a brush fire. The more sophisticated your tracking experience, the more you’ll be able to discern real threats from fire drills. This is something that should be distributed across your team, as explained in the A-team primer.
4. If you don’t already have a news section for your website with a feed for the latest news on your homepage, you should think about establishing one. When a crisis hits, traffic to your site will spike with people looking for information. Provide updates people can find quickly. If the crisis is a fast-moving or emerging problem, use your CMS system or a blog to give updates with an RSS feed your market can subscribe to.
5. If the crisis is substantial, create a dedicated response page, and do so quickly. This goes beyond providing information, and impacts search engine results. In time of a crisis, search engine requests for information about the crisis will grow, and you want to have a point of presence in the top organic results. If you have a blog, write posts that point to your news item and your dedicated page. If you have a Facebook group, and Twitter handles, do the same.
6. Some SEO experts recommend buying search terms, and even domains, with generic crisis terms to ensure search engine positioning when something goes down. Like [your company] and “failure”. Or “breach”. Choose words that relate to the kinds of crises you would plan for in your line of business. Create landing pages with neutral and generic language to optimize search traffic. When a crisis hits and someone Googles it, you’ll already be ready with a page in the top results.
Know the Tools
While standard crisis communication tools like press releases, press conferences, and video press releases are still important, social media has its own resources that can help you get the word out in a crisis. In most cases, you’ll use social media channels to point people back to your response page on your own web site or blog, where information about the crisis is provided.
1. Tracking. Staying on top of the daily stream of dialog is the best way to identify a crisis before it blows up. For basic tracking, set up Google alerts to track your corporate and product brands. You can use Twitter search to find discussions about your brand, and set up an RSS feed for monitoring. If you have more complex tracking needs, this is precisely what SocialRep does, but I don’t recommend jumping into technology adoption before you start with the basics laid out in the A-team primer. Your proven business processes should drive technology, not the other way around.
2. Twitter has emerged as probably the fastest conduit of news in the world today. It’s ubiquitous and immediate. People were tweeting news of the Mumbai attacks in real time, and even news networks were following the threads. If you have a crisis, getting the word out with a link to your own response page is critical, and Twitter is one of the best ways to do it. Having an active Twitter presence is a good idea aside from crisis management, but having an existing network in the event of a crisis will ensure you’re able to get the word out far more quickly.
3. FriendFeed is rapidly emerging as a channel for real-time threaded dialog, kind of like Twitter, but with more emphasis on dialog, as opposed to broadcast micro-posts. Like Twitter, there’s good reason to be engaged on FriendFeed aside from crisis preparedness, but having an active network will be invaluable when a crisis happens. In a crisis, post a one-sentence announcement with a link to your response page.
4. Facebook is a great tool for managing the ongoing dialog with your community after the crisis initially unfolds. An existing corporate Facebook group may be fine for managing minor crises, but if there’s a major crisis that gains substantial attention, you’ll want to establish a dedicated group, with a reference to the crisis in the title. Others will create groups to talk about it, so you want a presence in Facebook’s Group search results, not buried in your corporate group among discussions about your Christmas party. You can post links to your response page, video, and discussions group threads. Ideally, you’ll want to point any traffic for dealing directly with the crisis back to your own Web site rather than have crisis response distributed over the Web. But you can use discussion threads on Facebook to talk about the broader issues that impact your brand, such as how you’ve dealt with the crisis and the aftermath.
5. LinkedIn has far less utility for crisis management than the tools previously mentioned, but if you maintain links to professional or corporate groups relevant to your business, this could be a good channel of communication in a crisis. Especially to the extent that communications in this channel are managed primarily by email, so you may reach professionals who are not yet wired in to the other social networks.
6. YouTube and Seesmic are potentially good channels for posting a video message from your CEO in response to a social media crisis. In most cases, this will be most effective for wrap-up information and framing of the whole event, rather than real-time management of the crisis. Though I’m sure someone will do a YouTube press conference one of these days.
In Part 2, we’ll look at crisis management techniques for social media, basic crisis management planning, and do’s and don’t’s of dealing with a social media crisis.
If you have your own ideas, tips or criticisms, feel free to comment.
Lead Nurturing is Walking the Buying Path with Your Customers
Get out your walking shoes. This ain’t no walk in the park.
Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture.
I define lead nurturing as that consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution) regardless of their timing to buy. It’s NOT “following-up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path but along the way you you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.
A recent study of business-to-business buyers shows that sales people who become trusted advisors and understand the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale!
So, the first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.
1. Walk IN your potential customers’ shoes. This means thinking like your customer and considering the questions they will have for you and your company.
Consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:
• How will this product/service help my company?
• We’re doing okay, why do we need it?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?
Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite sized chunks.
2. Plan your path.
Here’s what a typical lead nurturing program should include: a series of letters, emails, voicemails, case studies, success stories, articles, events, white papers, and web events that are meaningful to your potential customers. Through the combination of all these, you’re providing relevant educational or thought-leading content.
Worth noting:
• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.
3. Now, walk the path WITH your customer.
Your only job is to make certain that you nourish them along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.
Think of your marketing team as the trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.
Slow down and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.
“How you sell me is how you will serve me.”
Most economic buyers subscribe to the notion that how you sell me indicates how you will serve me. Here’s where that little stat I started off with comes in. Sales people who become trusted advisors and understand the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale. The complex sale requires that:
• Your prospect must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Your prospect must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Your prospect must believe that you and your company understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.
• Your prospect likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.
• Trust therefore becomes the theme for a new type of marketing.
Building trust:
By providing valuable education and information to prospects up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell, you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise, and become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.
Make your marketing program’s single point of focus that of developing trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price; selling per se is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects; you win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.
4. Keep marching.
Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from ten years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40% to 70% of potential sales.
Sales lead expert, Mac McIntosh, notes an in-depth study for Cahners Business Information of 40,000 inquiries generated by ads and press releases in magazines serving the manufacturing marketplace found that six months after inquiring, 23% of the subjects had bought the product or service, from the promoter or from a competitor. An additional 67% indicated that they still intended to buy.
It was further revealed that of those from earlier inquiries who bought, 11% purchased within three months of inquiring, 17% purchased within four to six months and 25% purchased within seven to 12 months. And 47% bought in a year or more.
If inquiries are simply passed on to sales people, reps, dealers or distributors for follow-up, beware. You may be leaving as many as eight out of ten sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.
Now get your compasses out and begin the long yet fruitful walk toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers you will find who want to join you along the way.
May 26, 2009
Video: How to Grow Your Social Media Stature: An Interview With Jason Falls
Wondering how to grow your popularity in the social media world? Then watch this video…
I recently sat down with social media guru Jason Falls (SocialMediaExplorer.com) to talk about how he grew in popularity using good old fashioned networking.
In this video, Jason talks about:
• How he strategically grew in popularity on the social media frontier
• Social media tips for PR professionals
• Measuring return on investments with social media
Telltale Signs of Product Messaging Problems
Yesterday a high tech VP told me, “I am painfully aware that sales are down this year versus last but I’d really like to pinpoint exactly where the problem lies. Something tells me my product-level messaging is off but I’m not sure if that’s one of the key inhibitors or not.” I told her that we can look for telltale symptoms of a product-level messaging problem. By that I mean, not corporate level branding but rather messaging that is specific to a particular product.
See my blog post, The Power of Excellent Messaging, for more on corporate level messaging. Here are some symptoms that point to product-level messaging issues. I use ”product” to mean any offering – product, solution, or service.
• Sales reps complain that the product is not differentiated, and that they're struggling to compete.
• Sales reps are asking for a "hook" or way to speak to a higher level decision-maker to capture their interest in the product offering.
• PR firm is asking for evidence that the product is valuable, unique, and addresses a real problem so that they can get above the noise level of competitive claims.
• Channel partners are telling you that your product is too difficult to explain, not worth the selling effort.
• Lead generation efforts produce too few highly qualified prospects, a quantity versus quality problem.
• Marcom team is struggling to convey a strong, consistent message in all deliverables.
• Company employees cannot succinctly and consistently explain the solution when asked.
So what do you do if you’re encountering these challenges? We recommend sharpening your product-level messaging which would include being able to answer the following questions:
• What is the pain point your target customers are experiencing?
• What does your product do to address this pain?
• Why does that matter?
• Who will care the most about addressing these pain points?
• What makes your product better than other options that customer has?
I’ll be writing more on this topic so stay tuned for more thoughts and recommendations on product-level messaging. Here are just a few examples of product-level messaging that I consider very well done: VMware, Citrix, Informatica, Timebridge, and Arena Solutions.
Please let us know your thoughts on product messaging, and examples of great work you’ve seen.