Marketing Archives - Page 4 of 67 - McLellan Marketing Group

How to market when no one is listening

March 25, 2020

We are in seemingly unprecedented times. As our country and state readies itself for whatever the coronavirus is going to throw at us, it’s a little tough to be thinking about your next marketing tactic.

I want to remind you that this isn’t actually the first time most of us have seen a season like this.

9/11 and the Great Recession were very similar. Events outside of our control had an incredible impact on the economy, our businesses, families, and personal finances. This particular threat feels even more imposing because we’re also facing a health concern.

The country and Iowa will survive this. The question is – how will businesses fare? There’s no doubt that companies will be harmed. Our goal is for you to mitigate as much of the risk as possible and prepare your organization for the calm that always comes after the storm.

That’s the good news – no storm rages on forever. There’s always a calm that comes after the storm has run out of steam. We’ll get to that point too, just like we did after 9/11 or the recession. But first, we have to do all we can to survive the storm.

How do you market when no one is listening, and even if they are, they’re probably not in a position to buy? It’s time to move to a long-term strategy. What you do in these coming weeks isn’t about immediate sales. It’s about making a sale in six months or a year.

This is not the time to capitalize on the situation. I’m already seeing opportunists re-tooling their marketing to seize the opportunity. When people are in panic mode, they don’t react well to feeling taken advantage of by someone they thought they could trust.

No sale or coupon is going to get people to care what you have to sell right now unless it’s a necessity as they wait out this storm.

It’s time to shift entirely into “be of service” mode. It’s time to focus your attention, time, and efforts into helping your customers, prospects, and employees through this season.

How can you help? That’s the question to keep asking yourself. What can you do that will genuinely be of service to your most important audiences? What do we have (access to your product or service, knowledge, introductions, strategic counsel, etc.)?

Let me give you an example.

Shine Distillery & Grill, a small distillery in Portland, OR found a unique way to help. The first batch of alcohol in their distilling process isn’t drinkable. They’ve been throwing it away after using a little bit of it as a cleaning agent to keep their facilities shiny and disinfected.

As they watched people scrambling to find hand sanitizer, it occurred to them that they might be able to help others during the coronavirus. They reached out to local authorities to find out what they would have to do to use their waste alcohol as a sanitizer. Turns out as long as they’re not making medical claims – they can bottle it and give it away. It’s an 80% alcohol solution that is well above the CDC’s 60% recommendation.

Maybe you can’t replicate that. But perhaps you can create some financial relief through a payment program for your customers and then build a communication strategy around that. Perhaps you can hold educational webinars that help your prospects, and customers save money or serve their customers better in this odd moment in time. What if you gave your smaller customers access to some of the perks that your more prominent clients enjoy?

That’s being of service without remuneration. For now. I believe that kind of generosity is our marketing mandate for the next couple of months.

Be of service.

Originally published in The Des Moines Business Record as part of Drew’s weekly column series.

Go Old School – Email Marketing

March 11, 2020

Even though it seems a little old school in the days of virtual reality, artificial intelligence and bots – email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing tactics available to us. A recent study by SmartFocus looked at over 1.4 billion email marketing messages to identify best practices to drive engagement and customer impact. Let’s take a look at what some of those are:

If you want your audience to take action, click on a link or respond to an offer, then Tuesday should be the day you launch your campaign. The study revealed that click-through rates were 30 percent higher than other days.
If you’re sending out a more educational, informative email and don’t care if your audience clicks on anything in your correspondence, Sunday is your go-to day.
The time of day was also reviewed in this study. Interestingly, most marketing emails were opened between six and nine pm. And the time that was least likely to lead to an unsubscribe was 6:30 pm.

Naturally, when you send the email is just one element of a successful email campaign. If you send the wrong content or take the wrong tone, even sending it at the perfect time won’t help. Here are some other best practices that you should keep in mind as you plan your campaign.

Create a relationship: Email can be a reliable way to actually create a relationship between you and your audience. But that requires consistency. Have you ever known someone who only reaches out to you when they need something? That’s what your sales emails feel like to your audience if that’s the only time you write to them.

If you’re going to write on a consistent basis, be sure you invite your audience to write back or to generate more of a dialogue. It’s pretty tough to feel connected to someone if the conversation is just one way.

Be mindful of your tone of voice in your emails as well. A super formal tone isn’t going to help you create a connection. The biggest compliment you can get when you finally meet someone on your email list is that you sound just like your correspondence. That means you’ve successfully adopted a conversational tone in your emails.

Be interesting: Sure, you’re interested in your sale. But your audience may not be. Never hit send if you aren’t confident that your content is going to be useful, interesting or entertaining to your recipients.

The only way to be interesting to anyone is to know them a little bit and put them front and center before you communicate. Building personas of your audience is a really smart way to make sure that your content is truly aimed at being beneficial to them. Personas help you think of your audience in a more personal way – which makes it much easier to talk to them about topics that they actually care about.

Be generous: I know you are sending the emails because you want your audience to do something (click on a link, download a coupon, sign up for a free assessment, etc.) but before you ask, give. Be helpful without asking for anything in return. If you’re consistently providing value, they’ll stick around and eventually, they will be ready to shift from being the recipient of your generosity to a paying customer.

Email is one of the most effective marketing options that you have. But it can backfire in a hurry if you aren’t careful about how, where, how often and what you include in your communications. Think of your email list like your best pen pal. Find ways to create a genuine connection and keep nurturing it, so it can grow over time.

Email isn’t a quick fix, so be ready to settle in for a long, good conversation with a friend.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

Are you hiding in plain sight?

March 4, 2020

Who doesn’t want to be found? Whether you have a retail shop or sell your time and talent – every business needs to be findable. There’s an expression that says “if Google doesn’t know you exist, then you don’t exist” and in today’s world, there’s a lot of truth in that statement. You need to make sure you’re not hiding in plain sight.

We know that 80+% of people use the internet to do research before making a purchase. That number gets even larger when the purchase is expensive or is business-related. If Google doesn’t offer you up as an option, you may never get the opportunity to try to win the sale.

For many businesses, their circle of influence and potential customers are within a certain radius of their physical location. If you’re a dry cleaner, then you know your radius may not be more than a couple of miles. But if you’re a financial planner or lawyer, it may be 100 miles or more.

There are some strategies you can employ to make sure you’re found when someone in your local market conducts a search for your kind of business. None of this is a promise of first-page placement but the more of these tactics you put into place and keep updated, the better your search ranking will be.

You absolutely can spend money on Google Adwords or other paid search options. But before you do that – make sure you have a strong foundation laid.

Make sure you are listed: Go to https://www.google.com/business and search for your business. You can claim your business (you’ll have to verify it through the mail or by phone). Be sure to include quality photos of your business, your team and even a few of the items you sell.

Even though Google is the king of search, don’t neglect Bing, Yelp, Apple Maps, Facebook and any other directories specific to your industry.

Establish citations: Citations are websites where you can list your business. There are a bazillion of these sites, so don’t try to do it all by hand. There are sites out there called aggregators that will provide your information to all of these citation sites. Or you can use a service like Moz Local (https://moz.com/local/overview) or Yext (http://www.yext.com/).

Actively seek reviews: Most business-to-business organizations dismiss reviews as being “a retail thing.” And most retail businesses dread the review discussion. The truth is, you’re going to trigger reviews, whether you want them or not. So why not influence them so you can invite your happiest, best clients to speak out?

Unless you’re in an industry that has a very well-known specialty review site, focus on Google and if it makes sense for your business, Yelp. Don’t waste a lot of time on obscure sites that don’t get a lot of traffic.

Credibility links: Are you a member of the local Chamber? Or is your company profiled on a trade association’s site? Think about all of the places your business exists online and link to them within the context of your site. Whether it’s a membership, an award or even a media story – take advantage of the power of the other sites’ credibility and Google juice by linking directly to them.

Build your site with search in mind: Some of the basics really matter. As you write or add content to your website, remember to be smart about keywords, the number of words on each page and other organic search basics.

No matter what your company does, search is incredibly competitive. You can’t afford to ignore this marketing playing field anymore. But, before you spend a dime, make sure you’ve done everything you can for free to impact your listings. That will become a much stronger platform to launch from.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

Slow down!

February 26, 2020

One of the more common and popular patterns of today’s lead generation and nurturing tactics goes something like this:

Offer something for free or low cost in exchange for an email address
Nurture the relationship to earn the prospect’s trust
Over time, offer them something of more value and with a higher price tag
Continue to provide value and, as needed, continue to offer more services

On paper, it makes perfect sense and in practice, when done properly, it works very well. It’s built on the understanding that no one will buy anything from us until they know, like and trust us.

Trust is built over time, as the initial purchase (for a few dollars or in exchange with an email address) proves valuable. From there, the buyer’s confidence is boosted and they stay open to considering the next level of both purchase and trust.

Unfortunately, it’s often not done properly. This weekend, I saw an ad on Facebook for an information product that looked like it might be useful. I clicked on the ad and watched a brief video about the product. It held my interest, had some credible testimonials from people I recognized and so I made the first purchase for $37.

Before the site brought me to the cart so I could check out, they offered me several other, more expensive products that I passed on, because they hadn’t earned that level of trust from me yet.

Right after I checked out, on-screen, I was told that I’d be getting an email with a log in link so I could access the information. Within minutes, I did receive that email.

So up to that point, they’d executed the tactic well. They’d earned my attention, held it with some valuable information, reassured me with some credibility elements and led me to make my first purchase.

But then, they went off the rails in a hurry. Within five minutes, I got four additional emails. Three of them tried to convince me to buy the more expensive offerings I had just passed on a few minutes before. That was bad enough. But the fourth email is the one that really ruined any chance they had with me.

The email was from the CEO and he wanted to tell me about a special beta program they were just launching. The email went on to say that because I was clearly the kind of leader who could really contribute to the beta, just yesterday he had gotten special permission to invite me into that beta. Of course, he had no idea who I was yesterday. I wasn’t on their radar screen until ten minutes prior.

Both the volume and the insincerity of their emails cost them any future purchases from me. I went from being interested to feeling bombarded. My next thought was that I needed to harvest all of the information from the site I’d paid to access as quickly as possible because if I got four emails within the first hour – what would the first week be like?

Their heavy-handedness had the opposite effect of what I am sure they were going for. Instead of growing my trust slowly and giving me time to get to know them and value what they offered, they put me on guard. Even worse, the flurry of emails also tainted my opinion about the content I had already purchased from them. They got my $37 but they lost my confidence and any future purchases.

Email sequencing can be one of the most effective marketing tactics available to you. But a misstep can not only cost you a customer but it can cost you your credibility.

Do you keep score?

February 5, 2020

In marketing, keeping score matters. There was a time when being funny or memorable was enough. Back then, there was an obvious line between marketing and sales and we marketing types didn’t need to worry as much about ROI.

Today, that’s how a CMO or agency gets fired. Every dollar spent needs to contribute to either increasing the bottom line or cost savings somewhere along the way. Big data and digital made it more possible and the recession made it mandatory. Knowing that we need to keep score is different from knowing how to keep score. It’s an area where mistakes are easy to make and expensive to fix.

No matter how large an organization is — no one has an infinite budget. Every dollar spent has to get the company closer to their defined finish line. That doesn’t always translate to more dollars. Sometimes the yield is that we learn something new about our prospects. Sometimes it’s that we get a repeat sale from a happy client. And often, it’s that we’ve moved a prospect a little further in the sales funnel towards their first purchase.

Marketing is an imprecise science for sure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t measure. To survive and thrive, we must start every new client relationship and project by defining what we are going to measure. If we don’t determine what success looks like, how will anyone know if/when we get there?

There are some obvious and easy to calculate metrics like new client relationships and an overall increase in sales and profits. New customers are a win for sure. But we need to dig a little deeper.

It’s easy to get so enamored with chasing after the prospects that it becomes a volume game. Unless you’re the Wal-Mart of your industry, it has to be more refined, or you’ll lose your shirt. If you cast the net too wide, it’s easy to catch prospects that are not a good long-term fit. Sometimes we forget how expensive those first sales can be. The win is exhilarating, but it’s costly. The real profit comes from cultivating an on-going relationship with someone that aligns with your brand and offerings, so they quickly become a repeat customer and a loud referral source. When you land a bunch of “one and done” sales, you can actually lose money in the long run because you never have the opportunity to level out the cost of acquisition.

That’s why you shouldn’t set those success metrics before you define who your ideal customer is and what they need and want from you. Take a look at your current client list. Identify which ones are the top 20% in terms of both profitability and repeat business. It isn’t helpful to build your target audience profile on the very profitable but very occasional client. It’s also not smart to create that profile based on the frequent buyer who cuts your margin too thin.

The other element of realistic goal setting is that your budget is going to have a significant impact on how quickly you can get to your goals. I know this sounds rather obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many organizations do not connect those two data points. It might be awesome to double your customer base, but if you have a meager budget, that’s going to take a while.

We have to keep score, there’s no doubt about that. But there are some pretty costly mistakes we can make if we don’t factor in the understanding that every customer is not a good customer and that the resources we have are going to play a significant role in timing. Combine those elements wisely, and you’ll be much closer to scoring a win.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

The Mechanics of a Successful Webinar

January 29, 2020

When I’m talking about a webinar, I am not talking about a one-on-one web-based demonstration or sales meeting. I’m talking about an event you would promote to a larger audience, and the event itself is intended to be a group experience.

Webinars are a smart tactic if you want to:

Educate prospects or customers
Field objections and questions in a live environment
Demonstrate aspects of your product or service in an interactive way
Establish your thought

Note that “drive sales” is not on that list. A webinar is not a hard-driving sales tool. It’s higher up in the funnel and serves more of a marketing function. That doesn’t mean you won’t garner sales from the webinar. But it shouldn’t be your focus. Webinars are successful if they’re helpful, if people connect to the presenter and feel like they walked away with knowledge or insights that are valuable.

Here are some mechanics to consider as you think through your webinar strategy:

Tools: There are many good webinar tools out there and the right one for you will depend on price, number of attendees possible, the ability to record and other factors.

Timing: Assuming you mostly serve North American clientele, shoot for 1 or 2 pm eastern. The east coast attendees aren’t so close that they’re wrapping up for the day and at the same time, the west coast is up and into their productive zone by then.

Promotion: Webinars are not a “build it and they will come” sort of thing. You need to get the word out and issue multiple invitations. Give yourself at least a 30-day window for promotion. If you already have a list of prospects, that’s a smart place to start. You’ll get your biggest flurry of sign-ups around ten days before the event. If you make a big deal out of the fact that they’ll get access to a recording of the webinar whether they attend or not – you’ll get more takers.

Leave behind: I think of my PPT deck as a leave behind when I am working on a webinar. I’m always going to offer it to the attendees at the end, so I build it with that in mind. Unlike a deck for a speech, where I might have a single image and no words, I use a lot of bullets and text for my webinar decks. I know I am in essence taking notes for the attendees, so my slides are a little denser in content.

Format: As you think about constructing your webinar, explore easy to grasp “packages” for the information you want to share. Like:

Five mistakes to avoid
Ten questions to ask before…
Four unexpected benefits of…

This style of formatting will help you tease and promote the content. It will also help you avoid trying to pack too much information into the webinar. It lends itself to a strong wrap up for you as a presenter and gives your attendees something to grab hold of and remember.

No matter how or when you deliver your webinar, be sure you know what you want to happen once you sign off. Do they get a “thanks for attending” email? Do they get a link to deeper content on one of your key points? Don’t lose the momentum. When the webinar wraps, it’s not the end, it’s the beginning.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record, as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

Build your buying journey step by step

November 27, 2019

One of the staples of marketing is the ability to understand how a human being goes from never having heard of you to actually buying something from you, time and time again. In simple terms, it can be thought of as a sales funnel. But, that suggests a very linear, logical progression and if there’s anything we know about humans, there’s nothing linear or logical about them!

When marketers talk about the buying journey and it gets plotted out, it often looks like a roadmap for a very squiggly, hairpin-turn filled cross-country trek. It used to be pretty easy to map out the customer’s path from lead to loyalty but the Internet has completely changed that. The linear buying pattern no longer exists.

Today, the buying decision is very fluid and three-dimensional. The prospects flow in and out of the stages (Awareness, Credibility, Connection and Loyalty) in a more web-like fashion – with some staying in the early stages for months or years and others rushing from “you’re on my radar screen” to “do you want to get married” in what feels like a nano-second. There are so many more entry points today, that it’s easy to get stuck along the way, especially if you haven’t built in escape hatches to the next level.

In general, prospects are more cautious and reticent today than ever before. The stakes are higher because their organization’s tolerance for slow or no results is very short. Potential customers are often very skittish and slow to make a decision. In fact, in many industries, the sales cycle is twice or three times as long as it was ten years ago.

Prospects can linger in the Awareness and Credibility phases for years. At MMG, we had a prospect carry newspaper clippings from some of my Business Record columns for years before he picked up the phone to set a meeting. Until that call – we had no idea he was in our sales funnel or that we were on his radar.

Some elements in the prospect’s buying journey are accidental and difficult to plan or replicate. Others are very deliberate. It’s important to sketch it out by identifying ALL of the elements you can think of, whether you created them on purpose or they’re just happy coincidence.

For the awareness phase, for example, think of all the ways someone could learn about you and your offerings for the first time. That might range from seeing you at a trade show to clicking on a digital display ad. Put together as comprehensive a list as possible.

In the next phase, it’s all about earning your credibility. Why should they pay attention to what you have to say? Build out that list. It’s going to include tactics like content marketing and public relations. But you’re not done once the list is complete.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the buyer’s journey is the connective tissue between phases. How will you move someone from awareness to credibility?

Once you’ve mapped out the tactics that live in each phase and the activities that connect one phase to another, there’s one more step. Because we’re so visually oriented, I want you to create an infographic that captures this information in a way that you can use it to educate your staff and think through your actual business development activities. There’s no way you’ll be able to actually execute on all the tactics in each phase but mapping it out visually will help you make better decisions and identify those tactics that you need to move prospects from one level to the next.

From there, you can create a marketing plan and activities calendar for 2020 that will guide your budget, decisions and action plan.

This was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record as one of Drew’s weekly columns.

Tools of the trade

November 13, 2019

One of the best outcomes of the proliferation of the Internet into all of our worlds is the access that it affords us to information, each other, and tools that make our jobs easier. In our work for clients, we’ve found some tools that allow us to help clients react faster, smarter and produce more relevant marketing materials.

Help A Reporter Out (helpareporter.com): This site allows reporters to post stories they’re working on and in response, for brands to offer themselves as a source to those reporters. Three times a day (5:35 am, 12:35 pm and 5:35 pm) you will receive an email filled with source requests from reporters.

If any of the stories they’re working on are related to your product or service, you just email the reporter, answer the questions they’ve specified and if you’re a good source for the story, the reporter will reach out to you for more details, an interview, etc.

The story topics and media outlets are as varied as you can imagine. But these are not no-name publications. Reporters from the New York Times, Fast Company Magazine, Good Morning America and many other mainstream media use the tool on a regular basis.

Just Reach Out (justreachout.io): This site in some ways is the flip side of Help A Reporter Out. Instead of reporters listing what they’re working on, this site allows you to add keywords or a competitor into a search query and the site will search news, blogs, and articles to find reporters who have written about something similar to what you do.

Then the site will show you the journalists, their contact information and offer up templates that you can modify so you can reach out to the reporters. The site also helps with timing your pitch and other elements (subject line, etc.) to increase your hit rate.

Sell Hack (sellhack.com): This is a tool that will help you build out your list of potential sales leads. SellHack is a browser extension that helps you build targeted lists so you can reach out to people who you’d like to reach. Let’s say you went to a conference and got a list of attendees but not their email addresses. You can upload that list into SellHack and they’ll do the heavy lifting by uncovering your sales prospect’s email addresses while searching their social profiles.

SellHack checks the information you provide against multiple data sources. If the search is successful, you will get a validated email for the profile. If SellHack can’t find a valid result, it will present a ‘copy all’ button to copy/paste or email the different variations it generates.

Video Lean (videolean.com): This website allows subscribers to create template videos on the fly. We all know how important video is on the web and for many companies, producing a custom video is just not in the budget. Don’t misunderstand – the videos you can make on the site are a far cry from a custom project. But if you need to produce some down and dirty video content for your website or blog – this may be the ticket.

You choose a template based on your type of business and the kinds of information you want to convey. You customize the template by adding text, images and music in a very simple to use interface and three minutes later, you are served up a low-resolution preview so you can tweak any of the details. Once you’re happy with the video, you can download a high-resolution version to add to your website, YouTube or wherever you want to use it.

Give these a try and let me know how they work out for you!

Mini marketing

November 6, 2019

The list of marketing tactics that you can use to reach an audience is staggering. The different ways you can slice and dice humankind into different audience segments is never-ending. The stories you can tell and the messages you can deliver are countless.

And that’s exactly what is ruining your marketing.

The truth is there is not a business on the planet that needs to be on everyone’s radar screen. Whether you are a global business or a Mom and Pop local shop – you have a very finite number of people who actually can benefit from what you do. One of the biggest mistakes marketing people make is inflating their number. They fish with a very wide net when a speargun is a much better choice.

Stay with me on this analogy. When you cast out a wide net, it gets filled up with a wide variety of fish, debris, and seaweed. You spend a lot of time sorting out the good from the bad. You often will talk yourself into trying some odd fish that looks good but turns out to be hideous. And by the time you dig down to the ones you actually wanted – they’re a little worse for wear. If there’s even one in the net at all.

That’s how most businesses approach their marketing. They cast a wide net, trying to have a presence everywhere because they don’t want to risk missing someone. I’m here to tell you, you can miss most of the someones as long as you connect with a relatively small number of the right someones.

Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, has been talking about this idea since 2008. You’ve probably heard of the 1,000 fans theory. His hypothesis is that an artist (performer, author, artist, etc.) can survive on 1,000 true fans. The number 1,000 is not a precise number but more of a ballpark. But the concept holds either way.

The idea is basically that as your fan base gets larger and larger, the ROI per fan gets less and less because you can’t possibly cater to them all. The long tail is past the sweet point of the effort to engage. According to Kelly, if you want to make money, you will make much more from the first 1,000 fans that are diehard because they’ll buy whatever you produce and engage no matter what. They will also tell the world about you and how much they love you. Back in 2008, the world looked very different, but changes in our connectedness and online behavior only make this base idea more relevant.

Odds are your business is a little bigger than a single artist, so recognize that the number 1,000 is symbolic. But the message is dead on. You need to figure out who your fans are and talk to them on a regular basis about the things they care about. That will attract more of them.

Here’s the danger zone in this effort. Once they have their attention, many marketers just check the box and consider it done. And they’re off to chase the next audience.

That’s where you can do it better by being smarter about keeping the target small and focused. The minute you broaden your message or your channel, you make your fans feel like customers. That shift – from being someone you care about to someone you want to convince to buy something, changes everything. They don’t feel special. They don’t feel catered to and they sure don’t feel like telling the world about you.

Marketing shouldn’t be wide. It should be deep. That’s where people evolve from prospects to customers and if you stay focused – become your raving fans.

Social media fails during a crisis

October 30, 2019

Social media has changed the way we learn about, share and react to big events – good or bad. We rush to it to celebrate but we also rush to it when the world is in danger or a tragedy has occurred, whether it’s a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy or acts of terror like the shootings in Pittsburgh or the riots in Charlottesville, VA.

For many of us, social media has replaced traditional media and news sources for that initial alert. I don’t know about you, but I learned about the attacks in Charlottesville on-line. It’s true that I, and many of you, still turn to our more traditional news outlets for ongoing news and updates, but Facebook and Twitter seem to not only inform us of the minute by minute happenings but also uniquely reflects the sentiments and the humanity of the situation.

When we’re in crisis, we want more than the facts. We want to share the experience. We want to express our outrage or sympathy. It’s the emotion of the moment that pulls us into the social channels and keeps us there, eager to participate.

That’s why people react so strongly when a gaffe occurs. The emotions are so heightened that when someone does or says something insensitive or self-serving, people go nuts.

So, how should we handle social media when the country or the world is in crisis? The truth is, if it’s not handled well, you can create your own crisis. And where will it explode? On social media, of course.

When your brand stumbles on a regular old day, you may get blasted for it, but it passes. But when you fail during a heightened time of emotion and scrutiny – that can stick on your brand forever.

Here are some social media fails to avoid when the world around you is focusing on something serious.

Curb all regular postings: This is not the time to share articles, post photos or promote your business. And by the way – doing any sort of hybrid posting where you speak of the situation AND your company, well, that just smacks of borrowing from someone else’s sorrow for your own gain.

Pause all auto postings and auto-tweets: Many people use tools that auto-populate their feeds with great content. But accidentally acting like everything is normal when it most definitely is not can make your brand look at best, out of touch and worst, insensitive.

Don’t use the tragedy to get social cred: This is not the time to solicit likes or followers, even if you offer donations or some other support for whoever is suffering. Profiting in any way from the circumstance makes you look petty.

It’s never funny: I’m sort of stunned when it happens but it seems like some moronic brand always tries their hand at humor. Trust me, it’s never funny. During Hurricane Sandy, Gap joked in a tweet that everyone should just stay inside and hit gap.com for some retail therapy.

Make sure you know which profile you’re using: There have been many incidents where a social media brand manager thought they were using their own personal account to comment on a tragedy or social happening and instead, embarrassed their brand and got themselves fired.

Do all of these faux pas mean you have to stay silent during a national or international crisis? Absolutely not. Share authentic emotion. Let them see the humanity behind your brand. Be a resource. Be encouraging. Be genuinely helpful. Be real.

Just don’t be a social media failure. This isn’t the time to promote, profit or proselytize. It’s time to be human.

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