Connecting Businesses One By One
In one small sentence Seth Godin figures out my problems:
"Are you too busy working to make any money?"
It seems I have been chasing my tail here the past few months only to find out when I finally caught it was no big deal. I have been so busy trying to keep up with the little things, I guess you can call the IRS little, that I have forgotten about the things that really matter. Perhaps I should work less and make more money.
Tags: Seth Godin, IRS, small business
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Does you company have a crisis communication plan? I have heard many talk about the current hurricane season starting again, but that disaster crisis is not the crisis I discuss here. I’m talking about a company crisis unique to the company. A product failure, bankruptcy or any number of other types of crises a company can endure.
We have seen examples of a company in crisis like the Kryptonite bike lock company and their problems with their bike locks. Truly a company in crisis, that is talked about in Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book Naked Conversations. This is a prime example, and one we can all use as a learning tool. In fact we invited Donna Tocci to contact us to set up a Kryptonite blog, but at the time they were still thinking about its possibilities.
So with that said, does your company have a crisis communication plan, and does that plan involve blogging?
I entered into a discussion forum about this very subject today at Soflow where I moderate a forum called Blog Buzz. (Let me know if you would like an invite, and I’ll send one for you to join the forum.) In this forum today we discuss the issue of a company in crisis and whether a blog should have open comments, if the comments should be moderated or if there should be any comments allowed at all. There are many things to consider and facts that need to be addressed before a position can be made on blog comments in a situation of crisis. These types of facts must be listed out and specific responses need to be addressed to meet the needs of the blog and the communication with the company’s customers.
The best policy is to be open and honest in your approach. If you do not have all of the answers or if you are working on getting answers to certain things, explain that to the people in the conversation through blog posts. If comments are allowed, be prepared to answer every question or concern with a comment in kind or a complete post on each of the topics discussed. Being prepared for what is likely to be discussed is a key factor.Â
If your company is not prepared to meet the comments of customers or others, perhaps now is not the best time to turn on the comments section of your blog, but to explain the company’s position that it will be opening comments when it is prepared to meet the crisis head on with better answers and ideas. This protects your company, protects you from making further mistakes and growing the crisis, and also ends the conversation before it can begin. This can be a decision with some terrible results as well.
The issue of comment moderation was brought up, and this seems to be the best approach for some in the group. This would allow the company to only allow those comments through that were on point, not distasteful and not making the problem more difficult. Comment moderation can be a tricky proposition. What comments do you allow and which comments are you going to delete? Are only distasteful comments, going to be disallowed? What if the comment touches upon a subject that is very proprietary to your business? Perhaps you are investigating a certain aspect and don’t have the results of that investigation and discussing it on the blog would hinder your ability to make a meaningful review. This type of comment moderation is a very hands on approach. You could create more of a crisis by moderating than you would opening up the comments, or disallowing them completely.
Each company and each crisis is different. Blogging can be a very effective tool in communicating your company’s message while in crisis. Now is the time to create a company crisis communication plan, because being prepared is not just for the Boy Scouts.
Tags: Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Naked Conversations, Blog PR, Business Communication, Kryptonite, Donna Tocci, Soflow, Blog Buzz
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I wasn’t able to complete the adage above. I was trying to make the point similar to “A cobbler’s son has no shoes.” We here at One By One Media will soon be getting a new look. We have found that we were working on everyone’s blogs except our own, and frankly, it showed. We were not happy with the look, the template design and we needed a way to tie in all of our work, and also allow people to meet us, contact us, and see some of our work first hand. All we had was merely a cool logo, and a WordPress blog. Not the most impressive showing given that people put lots of some money in our hands to make their blogs the best in the business. I have seen the new design and template put together by Scott Goldblatt, and frankly I think it is some of his best work. I can’t wait to get it up and running and show off our new look. Stay Tuned!
Niall Cook has a great post today showing some hard numbers and how the power of blogs can be a great tool for launching products.
These are the types of cases and studies that we want to be presented on the Blogonomics Business Blogging Cruise! It’s great to talk about how blogs can help your company in theory. It is quite another to show actual hard numbers of a campaign that the client can sink their teeth into.
Great job Niall!
According to The Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs based on Alexa rankings, we here at One By One Media fell just a little short of the mark. I guess our work is cut out for us! We better kick it up a notch!
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Blogging can be tough at times and it can be also very easy. I know that I have experienced both spectrums in my blogging life. I have been a power blogger, posting up to 5-10 posts a day, and managing to post content on over a dozen blogs. I have been a contributor to other blogs I did not own, and have owned blogs where I did not contribute. My experience is broad and yet very specialized in the blogging world. I try to keep my finger on the pulse of what is happening in the blog world through the use of RSS, forums, reading many articles, and other information about blogging.
Aaron Brazell has a great article today about the life of a blog, and the peaks and valleys that can be seen in a blog of high exposure with many visitors and readers. The Blog Herald, not unlike Business Blog Consulting where I contribute, is a great news source for things happening in blogging. I continue to get information in blogging from The Blog Herald, but Aaaron is correct in that that blog has lost some of its zest.
I know exactly what Matt, the current author of The Blog Herald, must be going through with trying to run a business, a blog network, and still be on the cutting edge of blogging and churning out post after post of good content. It can be overwhelming at times and certainly exhausting which is why I can relate to Matt bringing on a writer. I too have had some down time both here and at my other blogs which can be attributed to being overwhelmed and exhausted.
The good news is that The Blog Herald has great earning potential in the hands of a charismatic writer and someone committed to making it return to the leader as a blogging information source. In the meantime Matt, if you need a writer or two to get things rolling before you are able to hire on a full time writer, I know a certain company that can provide the charismatic expert!
Being a small start up, unless of course being over the age of two no longer qualifies as a start up company, we are faced with many difficulties in our day to day operation. Money is always tight, productivity is not what we would like it to be, and the catch 22 is in order to increase productivity and expand and grow, it takes money.
Lately we have been working on our own projects outside the realm of actual paying clients and contracts. We have been trying to get these other projects off the ground at the expense of those paying gigs, actually turning work away. Why? For one reason, the other projects we are working on will generate income that we can then plow back into the company to expand and grow and continue to make this a prosperous venture. As any good entrepreneur knows, not all projects work out the way they were first planned. Still others become dead and merely fade away, while some thrive to a certain degree and plateau only to grow again, and still others take off like a rocket and require unlimited amounts of time, resources and effort. We have experienced every facet of this part of running our business. It has allowed us to grow, to learn, and to actually see some work come to fruition.
One of the things that has been learned recently by our company is not to rush into a project that sounds great on paper, but has not been thought through completely. Such is the case of our latest and greatest project. We have been trying to launch this project for approximately the last three months, each time having an issue that has popped up related to things not thought of before, it may have been related to a change in technology or the way we can be most efficient given that technology, and perhaps manpower changing as others matters popped up unexpectedly.
As I sat trying to generate a press release for the latest launch of the project, I could not help but think back on the last three months and see the amount of time, effort, sacrifice and money that has gone into producing this project. The only thing that was completely clear, is the project was a horrible representation of what I wanted. It never reached the pinnacle of pride I would have in presenting it to the world as a project our company would stand behind. It in essence was a failure or pure unadulterated crap. That is a hard pill to swallow for a business owner and entrepreneur, but a pill that is required to be taken. I’m not sure the future of the project, but for now we are going to approach it with a different vision. We will do this the old fashion way, we will not rush in and present an unacceptable product that will be a representation of our company and our work.
You will be seeing more effort put into what matters most to us at One By One Media, and that is blogging and making companies understand how blogging can help their company cross over to the next level in an online presence. Business like life, involves the learning of hard lessons, but a lesson learned nonetheless.
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