Morgan McLintic on PR and Performance

Taming the email Inbox

Communicators use email. A lot. In fact, it's not uncommon for email to be the defacto means of correspondence with clients, media and the rest of the team. Many agencies use group email aliases to simplify comms, so it's not uncommon to get over 400 emails a day. If each email takes an average of 60 seconds to open, read and deal with, that's over 6.5 hours of your day taken on email triage. Not good.

I am a big advocate of Inbox Zero. If you're not familiar with the approach, broadly it suggests you stop working from your Inbox, which should only contain unprocessed mail. Everything else is deleted (preference), delegated, stored or done (following the 2 minute rule). I once routinely had 6,000+ mails in my Inbox which I used as a to-do list (yes, that one people can write on). A year ago, I piled the whole lot into a folder called Old Inbox, and started with a clean sheet. Right now, I have one email waiting to be read, and a list of 43 others which are active projects or will take more than 2 mins to reply to.

Here are a few tips I've learned which might help:

• Create an Action folder to store emails which will take 2+ minutes to deal with - mine is a sub-folder of my Inbox to keep it at the top. I put mail in there which needs thought or other action prior to response. It's easy to find open actions, and at the end of the day you can transfer anything lingering to your To Do list.

• Don't have a fancy filing system - you're probably not going to need it, and search/filter tools are good enough now to find important corrie you are missing. Pile, don't file.

• Don't file your Sent Items - I've no idea why people do this.

• Work Offline - I do a lot of work using the email program, but that doesn't mean it needs to be connected all the time. Remember how much you used to get done on the plane before wifi? You'd reply to all those mails, unencumbered by incoming distractions, and blast them out in one go when you arrived. Offline is your new best fried for that.

• Use Rules - for some reason, if you send an email to an alias you are a member of, Exchange decides to send it to you as well. Perhaps it thinks you have a short memory. To overcome this, you can set up a Rule to Delete all email which you yourself have sent. You already have a copy in your Sent Items after all. I know others use Rules to file newsletters or forum discussions for later consumption. It's easy to set them up. Easier than you think.

• Unsubscribe - sometimes we end up on mailing lists and get blasted with such frequency we almost stop seeing those emails. 'Oh that's just the Crate & Barrel special offer newsletter again'. Well, if you're no longer in the market for that product or service, take 20 seconds to unsubscribe. Invest in your future email serenity.

• Don't send emails - many emails are conversations. If you don't initiate or participate then you tend to get less mail. It's a Sisyphean task if you keep sending them, you'll never get to the top.

• Keep at it - it's easy to fall behind in crunch times. The Inbox expands again and you're back to old habits. When this happens, and it will, just go Offline, work through them and get back to zero. Or if you don't have that time, dump them into a folder for processing later and tackle anything new from then so you stay at zero. It's ok to falter, just don't let it put you permanently off track.

I hope this helps. I'd love to hear any other tricks you have - color coding, smartphone triage etc to keep your Inbox tamed. Meantime, good luck. p>

Seven ways social media changes crisis management [video]

Social media is changing crisis management. Here we look at seven ways that's happening, for good and bad, right now.

The top 5 social media monitoring services [Poll results]

We recently ran a poll to find the most popular social media monitoring services in use today. Over 1,450 votes were cast (thanks!). The results are fascinating, not least because one of the most popular wasn't even on our radar, and the most high profile firms didn't attract the most votes. So here we go.

Total votes - 1468

1. Viral Heat - 511 votes (35%)

2. ListenLogic - 265 votes (18%)

3. Biz360 - 204 votes (14%)

4= Radian6 - 121 votes (8%)

4= Filtrbox - 121 votes (8%)

Viral Heat emerged as the clear winner with over a third of the votes cast. ListenLogic came an impressive second despite the disadvantage of not being on the list. I'll stick my hand up and say this is a new service to me (sorry guys) but obviously one which companies should evaluate when selecting their paid monitoring platform. It was interesting to me that high profile Radian6 was not more popular and that Scout Labs was unplaced. In fact, Sysomos is worthy of mention securing 101 votes, again despite the fact it was unlisted. Congratulations too to Filtrbox for making the top 5, alongside Radian6.

So what can we conclude from this? First, judging by the scale and range of response, there is a lot of interest in the monitoring space and the field is hotly contended. Second, the traditional services you might have used a few years ago to search for news like Factiva, Vocus or Lexis-Nexis are not being deployed here. Third, we should check out winner Viral Heat, but there is a long list of services which others comfortably use - in fact 25 were named in the Other category.

I think this is a good thing for brands - the competition will encourage innovation and lower prices. For instance, no single service can be used yet on a global basis, so there is huge opportunity for each of these companies. Thanks once again to all who voted and shared their opinion, and well done to all those in the top 5.

Navigating a crisis in a social media landscape [Slides/Flowchart]

At the Social Media World Forum earlier this week, Lucy Allen and I ran a workshop about crisis communications. It's called 'Red Alert - Navigating a crisis in a social media landscape'. As the title suggests it looks at how social media has changed very nature of the crises which impact a company, and what this means from an issues management perspective.

Red Alert - Navigating a Crisis in a Social Media landscape

View more documents from Morgan McLintic .

Essentially we believe:

• There are two types of crisis - event-based crises (like a chemical factory explosion) and information-based crises (like a negative blog post, inaccurate statistic, or damaging opinion). Most companies are likely to face the second, informational type of crisis, whereas traditional issues management is aimed at countering the classic something-bad-has-happened crisis. So there's a gap which this approach aims to fill.

• Preparation is important - which means mapping out the likely crises across the axes of likelihood and impact, getting your messaging straight etc. But it also means opening up the channels of communication (blog, Twitter) which you'll rely on when a crisis breaks now (not during).

• Whether to respond or not is key - but how do you decide? We offer a workflow (see below) to help you. It's based on the excellent framework from the USAF Public Affairs Agency Blog Response Guidelines but moves it forward to cope with other channels and situations based on our experience.

• How you should respond - OK so we're going to respond, but how and what should you actually say? We offer some factors to consider, as well as some Dos and Donts.

I hope you find this a useful and practical framework for your crisis communications. We'd love to hear your feedback, or any lessons you've learned in the trenches so we can continue to build on this. Please feel free to share the response workflow or this slide deck. We have poster-sized copies of the workflow if that's useful, just let us know and we'll pass one along.

LEWIS - Blog Response Workflow Nov 2009

Social Networking World Forum

I'm on a panel at the Social Networking World Forum on Tuesday - 'Monitoring and measuring people talking about your company'. Along with some other excellent speakers:

• Richard Jalichandra, CEO, Technorati
• Jack Teuber, Director, US Online Marketing, PricewaterhouseCoopers
• Donna Goff, Advertising Manager, MGM Grand Hotel and Casino
• Tim Moore, founder, SayItSocial.com (moderator)

This is a great topic and we only have 30 minutes so we'll try to make it as jammed packed with info as possible.

Later in the day, Lucy Allen and I are running a workshop between 1.00pm-2.00pm. If you're at the event, please do swing by:

Red alert: how to navigate a crisis in today’s social media landscape

• How do you monitor for crises before they get out of control?
• Should you respond? If so, how?
• What can you do in advance to prepare?

If you don't yet have your ticket you can get a 20% discount by using the promotion code 'LEWISPR09'. Hope to see you there.

How does social media affect crisis management?

Social media is making crisis management more important in public relations. It's changing the number of crises, their speed, rate of proliferation and the response mechanism. Let's look at the impact social media is having on crisis comms, and what that means to us as communicators:

Frequency - there are more crises overall. Not the physical type (accident, mishap) but the informational type (misinformation spreading). Given the increase in the amount of information flowing, there are more errors, misunderstandings and simply countervailing opinions in circulation which need to be corrected, countered or somehow contained.

Speed - crises break much faster in line with the speed of the news cycle. This places more emphasis on monitoring.

Reach - the proliferation of a crisis is broader, reaching a bigger audience. This means issues are no longer local, but global. Crisis comms needs to be a global portfolio.

Permanence - Google never forgets, so once the crisis has blown over, it stays in the collective memory for a long time. Even though it happened in 2004, a search on 'Kryptonite Bike Lock' on Google still has the second entry as the biro story. That was five years ago - ouch.

Measurability - we've always known that a crisis hurts the brand, but not by how much. Now we can get a glimpse since we can track the traffic from online sources to the main site, we can track the proliferation of the story, easily see the number of recurrences of a damaging phrase/statistic.

Addressability - if appropriate, we can fight back. There is a right to reply on almost all social media outlets, so there is a chance to comment directly and indirectly. No longer just a letter to the editor or a belated correction, but a comment directly tied to the relevant article.

Length - they may be permanent, but they are normally short. Phew. The speed and frequency dynamics mean that crises normally burn quickly then blow over as the next one breaks and attention moves on. This doesn't mean that the issues don't need to be addressed but you won't be under the spotlight for long.

Given these dynamics, in a follow up post we'll look at how social media impacts our response to crises.