Although we all know that prevention is better than cure, sometimes you need to react and act on unforseen crisises.
Every organization is vulnerable to PR crises.
You can play safe and sound, but it won’t give you a competor’s advantage in this fast-paced and changing world. Companies need to be bold and risk-seeking (only calculated). Your stakeholders will not be understanding or forgiving because we’ve all watched what happened with badly managed PR crisises; Enron, Arthur Andersen, Bridgestone-Firestone, Worldcom, Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, BP… The list goes on and on. All above scenarious from glory to  seem to disgraceful end contain common pattern – badly managed PR crisis. (excluding law and policy negligence and malpractice)
Often companies do not understand that without adequate communications:

• Stakeholders (internal and external) will not know what is happening and quickly be confused, angry, and negatively reactive.
• Operational response will break down.
• Media will run dramatised and exaggerated stories putting your company in the bad light
• In effect, company will be perceived as inept, at best, and negligent, at worst.

The basics of effective crisis communications strategy is not a rocket science, but it requires advance work and forseeing some possible events in order to minimise the damage. The slower the response while in crisis, the more damage is incurred. So if you’re serious about crisis preparedness and response, read and implement these 10 steps of crisis communications, the first seven of which can and ought to be undertaken before any communications crisis occurs.

1. Assemble Your Crisis Communications Team

A small team of senior executives should be identified to serve as your organisation’s Crisis Communications Team. Ideally, the team will be led by the organisation’s CEO, with the firm’s top public relations executive and legal counsel as his or her chief advisers. If your in-house PR executive does not have sufficient crisis communications expertise, he or she should choose to retain an agency or independent consultant with that specialty. Other team members should be the heads of major organization divisions, to include Finance, Personnel and Operations.

A few days ago I’ve had a very inspiring conversation with one of my best friends. We could not stop wondering how our society ended up being so stupefied by the mighty of this world – advertising agencies, profit-driven businesses, lobbists etc.. All that, just to make us feel like we always lack of something. We seem to be programmed on craving for instant disposable pleasure. We need to have everything right HERE and right NOW. We are constantly told that we can’t be truly happy without having an iPad to relax and read the ‘book’, trendy clothes and revitalising cosmetics to feel sexy and meaningful…  We all have heard stories about reactions of people who didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.…

If you live in a big city it gets even worse. You are working long, long hours; have a Redbull to get an energy kick. But wait, you seem so anxcious and stressed… drag a Rescue Remedy to calm yourself down. In the end it’s all natural flavours/ingredients so it won’t hurt you, right? Aren’t we lost in knowing what is what we really need and what makes us happy?

It reminds me of a scene in Fight Club where the main character becaomes the prisoner of materialism and in the end he decides to bring total anarchy in his life. I’m not saying we should abandon all modern technology and favour the outdated. Don’t get me wrong – I love technology. That’s why I’m working so hard on introducing Evoque and hopefully, revolutionising PR industry… But when does innovation stop being an innovation and become an intrusive demand creation?

Driven by the need or driven by the idea?

There are two opposing views on what drives the innovation and what’s customer the role in it. One school holds the view that all innovations start with conversation, observation, and understanding of the customer (current or potential) with the goal of shaping and then filling an unmet needs. The other school says that customers simply don’t know what they need, at least until they see it, and sometimes a need doesn’t even exist until a solution is available to fill it. Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users, argues that great innovation is about imagining and creating new needs, not satisfying unmet ones. Look at the Apple Co. Before introducing iPad nobody knew that they ‘needed’ a tablet. Computer seemed just fine.
There are many compelling arguments for both positions, and both have their strong advocates.

Brainless, pathetic pursuit of uniformity

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish if the thing you see is something unnecessary you just crave for or something what you really need.  We seem to be constantly chasing after something new, better, fresher. The purpose of innovation is making our lives better, easier and more enjoyable by solving our problems. We must not act impulsively but rather stop and think if the product/service we’re craving for is going to add real value into our lives.  We must not forget that no brand defines us, but our perceptions and attitude make us a self-satisfied individuality.

Adding value and leaving legacy

Despite existence of millions of unnecessary, ridiculous products, there are many companies being very creative in their innovativeness. One start-up which, in my opinion, does an extraordinary job on innovation is Quirky.  Founders call their company a “social product development”, where inventors can submit their product idea and Quirky’s product development guys do the rest. Inventor gets part of the profits from patents/licensing and Quirky’s talented and qualified developers do amazing job in bringing the product into existence.

Innovation as evolution

The truth is that almost all innovations are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. That doesn’t mean they are incremental — they are discontinuous, making leaps in design, technology application and functionality, but do so in response to evolving customer needs.

I believe that truly successful, emerging ideas need to be qualified for few factors in order to be perceived as innovation:

• make our life easier and more enjoyable
• solve incremental problems
• enhance competition and drive down the costs of current substitutive solutions

I believe that it’s entrepreneurial spirits who shape the world as we know it, and they are the ones who challenge themselves in the surrounding reality by abandoning their comfort zone. Saying “if it works don’t fix it” can’t be applied any more.  We live in a fast-paced world. However, we must not forget about real value and our true needs, which should be; pursuit of happiness and freedom.

Creating and maintaining a blog should be an obligatory task in each company. There is a lot of work involved in blogging;  researching material, content, design, multimedia and so on. However, this form of inbound marketing is a great return on investment – study conducted by HubSpot has shown that small businesses that blog get 55% more website traffic than these businesses that don’t.

A blog is an opportune place where you can share your expertise with your clients and potential customers. You should avoid dry, corporate tone of the conversation. Don’t be afraid to step a bit outside of company’s official image and show a great personality of the people who create your company.
In today’s post I’m outlining 10 excellent corporate blogs and why they stand out of the crowded blogosphere.

Let me know if you follow any other particularly noteworthy corporate blogs in the comments section below, and please include some details on what makes them outstanding.

There are six types of responses and they range on a continuum from defensive to accommodative. The way you choose to address  existing crisis depends of the nature of your business and the crisis itself. All six types of responses below have been used in the past with varying results. If chosen properly,they can help mitigate the damage. 

1. First, corporations can attack the accuser attempting to eliminate the attacker’s credibility.
2. Second, corporations can use denial claiming that no crisis exists.
3. The third response is justification where the corporation claims no serious damage was done or that the victim was at fault.
4. Fourth, the corporation can use ingratiation to appease the public, such as giving away coupons.
5. Next, corporations can use corrective action to right their wrongs.
6. Finally, the corporation can give a full apology asking for forgiveness for their mistake.

Have you ever dealt with PR crisis? How did you stave it off? Did it destroy your company’s image or did you manage to restore the its good image?

Financial and business development departments in big corporations like to measure things. They like to see ‘tangible’ results, which often in PR case – are very hard to define precisely.  How can you measure the impact of the latest article prising your brand in relation to the company sales results? PR pros have been trying many measuring practices, some of them being terribly inaccurate like AVE, while others seem to be making sense.

Measuring PR effectiveness is not a measurement for its own sake, but to determine which media channels and PR practices generate the best ROI. Online PR is about social media, and since it occurs online, is much easier to measure various PR elements. However, it can often be a challenge to know which ones are worth measuring. To get the most of your PR efforts, start by establishing a set of goals and objectives. Make sure they are realistic, so then you can determine your PR effectiveness by examining how you are hitting your goals.

1. Followers

Increasing number of your Twitter followers and Facebook fan page might be the fact that your PR campaign is working. Your efforts, should be focused on increasing the number of your followers through brand engagement and dialogue. While this is a tactic that should be pursued to increase the reach of your following, it is not a metric that should be obsessively measured and reported to your business development department. 10k Twitter followers and 15k Facebook fans do not mean anything when presented as pure numbers, anyway. It is better when you understand how your number of followers relates to conversions. If you know that for every 1000 followers or fans, you get five leads, that is useful information. If you are trying to get to 1000 followers just to show your boss that “social is working,” this is not necessarily something which result in increased sales.

In 2009, Forrester released a survey that linked business buyers and their research process to social media. More than 1,200 technology buyers in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Germany and France (with 100 employees or more in seven major industries) were interviewed to learn about their social activity. According to the responses, social media again proved to extend beyond consumers and B2C. In the real world of business-to business research, analysis, and decisions, the Forrester data points to peer-to-peer influence and collaboration in social networks and blogs:

• 69% are “Spectators”—this group reads blogs, watches user-generated videos, and participates in other social media for business purposes.
• 37% are “Critics”—they contribute comments or react to content they see in social formats.
• 29% are “Collectors”—they use social technology to collect information and stay on top of trends.
• 29% are “Joiners” who participate in social networks.
• Only 5% are “Inactives,” or non-participants.

Although the study has been done three years ago the above proportions are still accurate. This data demonstrates that companies can gain customers’ trust as reinforced through genuine, sincere, and informative interaction between consumers, stakeholders, and brands as majority of them is now actively using  social media.

Have you ever wondered what decides about the way we are perceived by others? How did others build the image of us? How did they value our aspirations, dreams and failures?
Previously, much of opinion building was happening within our closest circle, people whom we had a ‘real’ contact. Others had to be satisfied with scraps of information, usually resulting in building distorted image of us. Today, we have this privilege or/and a curse of living in the Information Age, which gives us strong control over how we want to be seen by the wide audience.

We decide how ‘close’ we want to let other people into our daily lives. We can easily share things that inspire us, move our imagination, make us laugh or upset us. We define ourselves by referring to the events and experiences of others.

But how exactly can we know if the information we are about to share has a value to others and puts us in a good light?
It is useful to know how people build opinion about others. There are few rules of opinion-shaping:

• The rule of priority

Information obtained during the first contact is a very strong ”anchor” in the consciousness of the people, first impression create a relatively stable opinion of others.

• The rule of clarity

Signals that are distinct from the other in the communication process is more easily recorded and have a greater impact on shaping the image of a person.

• The rule of grouping

The tendency to group people with some similarities, stereotypes (dress, habits, behavior) on the assumption that they are similar also in terms of psychology.

I am ashamed of once thinking stereotypical but I used to dismiss any career thoughts related to IT projects. I imagined 8h+ a day in front of a monitor, watching your life passing by without any meaningful (visible) contribution to the society. It was long before I realised web project may be the best way to leave my legacy.

What is IT business anyway? How is it different from any other type of business? You’ve got to do marketing, accounting, business development, HR etc….  In fact, it’s like any other kind of business…. but sexier.

• It’s scalable – Nassim Taleb in his book ‘Black Swan’ cited the case of scalability in professions; compare a typical prostitute (ok, let’s say exclusive call girl from London) and J.K.Rowland, the author of Harry Potter. Both ladies can earn large amounts of money, but a prostitute can earn only 24h/7 (- time for sleep, eating and other necessary activities), therefore she is limited by time and her profession is non-scalable. J.K.Rowland, in contrast, needed to write only one copy of a book to create scalable effect of riches. She did not need any extra effort to create additional income from her book. It was printers, licencing and all mass-effect phenomenons which contributed to extra money on Rowland’s bank account.  I do not need to add that web projects are scalable by their nature…

• You get to show your creativity to the mass  - Influencing masses can give you indescribable thrill and, although, I am yet to experience it, pure imagining it motivates me to do the best work I can. Whenever I read interviews about humble and daunting beginnings of other entrepreneurs and how their lives changed after… I know that there is no way back for me.  There is something sexy in giving, creating, adding value to society/industries/you name it; feeling is the same.
• Getting instant feedback – Web sphere is one of the most grateful and in the same time demanding places to do business. You create a product for your customers and they will tell you almost instantly if they like it. If not, you need to pivot. Where else you can get an instant quantitative AND qualitative feedback about your product?
• Everything happens fast – As Eric Ries in his book “Lean Startup” explains software industry:

When I tell this story to people who work in a slower-moving industry, they think I am describing something futuristic. But increasingly, more and more industries are seeing their design process accelerated by the same underlying forces that make this kind of rapid iteration possible in the software.

Most people like the thrill speed gives them. Working in web software industry gives you constant dopes of adrenaline. No day is the same. Sometimes you get to release x times a day. Changes happen here instantly and you do not need to wait long for the results. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said: ‘He who moves not forward, goes backward’ and it’s much more visible in software industry. You need to keep listening and creating in order to be ahead of your competition.

The above reasons helped me decide what I want to do with my life and how I want to be remembered. And I’m not afraid to be bold. I’m not afraid of making mistakes. Be different or be forgotten. I’m sure I want to be different rather than forgotten… and I WILL NOT stop trying until I succeed. I really do believe in my project and all those early feedback I keep receiving from potential clients is very encouraging. But if it’s not Evoque, it will be something else. Human mind is astounding in its unlimited complexity and creativity. Now I want nothing more than creating something which may revolutionise Public Relations and Media industry. Sure I dream about Evoque being chanting by thousands, Ba! Millions of people. It’s easy to be humble when success comes but you need to dream BIG before it can even happen.
So here I am, working with my development team on last pieces before launch (mid April). I know we may fail. 3/4 of startups do.

But at the end of the day, I will not regret of not trying.

Long-announced launch still hasn’t happened, but it does not mean our team is not working on Evoque anymore. No, project has not been abandoned, it just (as it often happens with software projects) takes more time than initially assumed.

We have completed 90% of functionality and user interface and all who are awaiting Evoque should expect its launch next month. I will keep you updated. Have a lovely weekend!

Today I came up with a brief of Cherie Carter Scott’s great book - If life is a game, these are the rules. It inspired me to write this post and share my plans with you.

I’ve always been ambitious but didn’t know how to manifest it. I’ve been seeking the perfect way to let my creativity and entrepreneurial spirit run free. I’ve read a lot of inspiring articles with other entrepreneurs, listened to great e-books such as Millionaire Upgrade, watched hours of TEDastic speeches and other presentations of successful entrepreneurs such as Guy Kawasaki, just to learn how others found their way, what decisions they made and what did it cause.