MetzMash

Making Your RSS Feeds Actionable

I altered a lot of my daily media diet recently. When I moved to Oakland almost two years ago, the local paper offered my wife and I a free subscription. We turned it down. Aside from books, I haven't consumed that much "tree-based media" (thanks, Dan Kaplan) since 2006. And a few weeks ago, I severely trimmed down my newsfeeds to stuff that I truly consider actionable.

I figure it this way; if what I'm reading during the workday isn't actionable, then I should be reading it for leisure, not during the workday.I've thought of setting up a leisure-reading RSS for all of the fun blogs I like to read in my spare time (Pitchfork, Jack & Jill Politics and Huffington Post all come to mind.) Set that stuff up as the "Sunday Morning" feed. Read it whenever you're not on the clock. That feed's not generally going to help your social web strategy unless you have some time and space to think about it.

So, here's how I do it for the day-to-day feeds: I've got my RSS cut up into the following actionable categories:

1. Brands - Usually branded product blogs put out by vendors that I really like (37Signals, CDW,etc.) - keeps me off of their email lists, and on the cutting edge of new features that come up on products that I use on a daily basis.
2. Consumer - A series of consumer advocate blogs like Consumerist. I mainly read them to save my company (or my family) money.
3. GTD - I've used a modified version of David Allen's Getting Things Done to take care of my workflow. Reading tips like this keeps me in top form.
4. Music - I follow a number of music blogs, more to keep track of upcoming concerts and new albums, so that I have cool things to do when I'm not working, or cool music to listen to while I'm working.
5. PR - I keep tabs on a few of the leading PR blogs to see how far social web strategy is evolving in those spaces. So far, not much, as far as I can tell.
6. Shopping - I subscribe to an Amazon Gold Box RSS feed to see if any cool things go on sale, so I can get presents for my wife.
7. Social Media - This is the main course - there's gotta be 15-20 solid strategy and analyst blogs in here. These are the people that I really comment on very often, and these blogs are where I derive much of my actionable stuff from.
8. Tech - These are the news roundups of the tech world (or at least the parts that I care about). The Mashables and CNETs would be in this bucket.
9. Client - These are client blogs; only actionable really to spellcheck and Monday-morning-quarterback, really.
10. Hardcore Surveilance - This is a combination of a few homegrown tools that my company has invented for client and client competition monitoring, as well as a few alpha-stage vendor solutions that I'm testing. This is the stuff that I don't share. A lot of actionables are also derived from here.

If you'd like a copy of my OPML feed (the combination of the few hundred blogs and feeds that I follow), leave a comment on this post. Per my usual "advice", this post was composed according to my one drink, one album-side rule (WL Weller 12 Year Bourbon, Fleetwood Mac's 'Mirage'). And yes, I wrote it last night, not at 6 a.m. this morning.

Pour Some Social Media Crisis Plan On Me

Most of the brands that read this blog will never experience anything even remotely on the level of 1982 Tylenol Cyanide tampering scandal  or even the recent Mattel Chinese toy recall of the past summer. That said, crises exist on different levels for different brands. For example, I use the Basecamp software service to help my clients manage the workflow of their blog comments. Since it's a SAAS (software as a service) offering, when it stops working, that's bad.

This past Monday, Basecamp went down for a couple of hours due to a traffic accident (a truck drove into a transformer, causing a "power event" at their main provider's data center in Dallas.)  37Signals copious and immediate response to this incident was totally textbook because they:

• Were totally transparent about what was causing a problem for their customers;
• Responded immediately to the problem;
• Allowed customers to talk back and exchange information and stories with one another, allowing the situation to be personalized, and
• Made sure every single customer knew about this incident by putting it front-and-center in their product and on their website the very next day.

Messages like this one from Dylan, a British Basecamp customer, were typical of the customer responses:

          "Shit happens but its the way you deal with it that makes the difference.

I really respect the way you guys provided a clear, concise reason why it happened without any blame-mongering or excuses but a commitment to move forward and get even better,

This is in start [sic.] contrast to several big corporates who have f*ed up my services lately but tried to pass the buck, not apologise and generally develop very slopey shoulders when it comes to accountability.

You’ve turned a potentially damaging incident into something that once again makes me smile at your level of professionalism compared to the big guys who are in the stone age when it comes to good service. Well done.

Hope no-one was seriously hurt. Dylan"

Well, this sounds great and all, but you need to have a toolset in place to do this when shit really does hit the fan. Outlined below are the social media tools that you'll want have in place in order to take your conventional crisis plan and execute in a social media toolset.

If you can answer the five questions below, then you've got a solid way to do social media outreach in a crisis situation. Stick to the four core plan objectives listed above, once you get these tools in place. They're listed in order of execution. Should a crisis occur, execute in this order.

1. Your blog and existing videoblog platforms- Do you have a blog? Do you have a $1000-2000 HD video camera? If not, make one and get one, respectively. Have a blog, if only to give monthly news updates and to save for the crisis that might occur every hundred years or so. I know that certain brands (financial consulting, etc.) may say they have no reason to blog. Well, this is the only reason that holds up against that statement. Twenty-five years ago, Tylenol CEO James Burke had to go on television and news conferences explaining the situation for why his company's product killed seven people and what they were doing about it, but his reach and coverage were at the mercy of the television networks. Today, your brand needn't play by those rules, as long as you're prepared. If you need to, get on YouTube, and explain exactly what is going on, immediately.
2. Micro-blogs - Numerous brands have reached out over their established microblog infrastructure to tell people what was going on during a crisis. Do you have a Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce platform to do this on?
3. Blogger relations - Do you have the phone numbers and emails of all of the bloggers that are currently writing about your brand? They won't mind if you wake them up in the middle of the night if they're your only pipeline to reach out to customers affected by a crisis. However, this is not an ideal strategy, and should only be used if the first two are  unavailable. Do all of your communications people know how to search within blogs for mentions of your brand's name? You can't make blog comments if you don't know where the conversation is. Get your team trained.
4. Social networks - Are your customers connected to you in the social graph? If you are touching them in social networks, you can message them there, en masse. Only use this kind of in-network email blast in a crisis situation. If you have discreet customer groups within the networks (like Facebook groups), reach out to them, and let them ask questions and answer them publicly.
5. Customer email - This is a last resort, but it's still a helluva lot better than saying nothing. Do you have an email list that will allow you to reach all customers, fast?

Tomorrow, we get back to social media assessment metrics and how to sell this stuff to the rest of the company.

Managing a Corporate Blog, Like HP's

[The following is a guest post from HP's Tac Anderson.]

I recently joined HP as the Web 2.0 Strategic Lead for HP's LaserJet business group. When joining HP I had a lot of free reign to scope out the initiatives I thought we should be engaging in. My only predefined initiative was to figure out how to build on the success of Vince's blog.

Vince has been blogging for nearly a year at The LaserJet blog by Vince Ferraro. As the VP of Marketing for LaserJet we feel it is valuable having an executive speak on our business and industry. The target audience is actually existing LaserJet customers and industry analysts. Using site traffic numbers it is consistently the most successful HP blog.

To build on this success we're having Vince post more frequently - ideally once per week - and we're launching additional blogs and assisting other HP blogs with relevant LaserJet content.  All of this will be possible without adding additional resources by using the following tactics:

Have a calendar

• The number one thing I recommend to every person who is tasked with managing an executive's blog is to have a calendar of upcoming posts.
• This will help you manage content and it will help the executive start thinking about what to say in the post.
• There are topics that the exec will want to blog about as well as topic ideas that you collaboratively come up with. Your PR team (agency or in-house) can also be a good source of topic ideas.
• The calendar needs to be flexible. Topics will arise that need to be addressed immediately. It's a good thing when the exec throws off the calendar with unplanned topics.

Have a process

• We have a process where Vince initiates the content, usually by just writing out a post in a quick email, we then give it a quick edit and search engine optimize the content. (For tips on how to do this for corporate blog postings and to make this dovetail with future press releases read MetzMash next week - Adam)
  
• If it’s deemed necessary, because of the subject mater, we will quickly run the post through legal. At HP this has been a very painless process to date.
• After Vince gives one final approval we have a more technically adept person post the content because our blog software requires some HTML editing.
• All of this can all be done in a few hours if needed but we usually schedule one week for all the back and forth, especially if legal is involved.

Over the summer I dedicated a post to my friends on "the inside" where I gave 6 tips for implementing new media inside your organization. I had no idea at the time that I would soon be on "the inside" managing new media initiatives for a company like HP. While those tips were geared toward internal uses of new media they are just as applicable to external tactics as well.

If you have questions about specifics leave them in the comments. I'll chime in to answer as best I can. I'd like to thank Adam for inviting me to guest post. If you liked this post, check out my blog www.newcommbiz.com.