Every Friday since the pandemic shut things down last March (here in the U.S.), we’ve highlighted communicators and marketers who at first were trying to figure out which part of the sky just fell on them in My Hot Mess. Then we shifted to those who are crushing the pandemic with Survive & Thrive.
Now it’s time to get back to business, even if it’s not totally normal. We’re going to do that with an Ask Me Anything series—an elevation of our previous Spin Sucks Question series.
Welcome back to another Ask Me Anything, which is a new series where we talk to our friends, our viewers, and our community. about what they would like to know.
Let’s take a look at the mailbag. This week’s questions are:
- Can you recommend a book or podcast for crisis communications?
- What is an insightful and easy-to-use platform to set relevant KPIs and track progress?
- What’d you think about the Burger King UK tweet?
The AMA Questions…and Answers
- Can you recommend a book or podcast for crisis communications? There is nobody better on crisis communications than Melissa Agnes. Her book is Crisis Ready—and she also has the Crisis Readiness Institute. Check both of those out. Of course, there are lots of other experts, but she’s top of the list for me.
- What is an insightful and easy-to-use platform to set relevant KPIs and track progress? There’s nothing better than Google Data Studio. You can integrate everything in there—email, social, analytics, earned media, content, and more. We have one client that I think our Google Data Studio for them is 42 pages because we have all of the things in there. I just go in there once a month and look to see how everything is going. We even have QuickBooks connected there so that I can see how much of the revenue is generated by marketing and how many of the leads we generated are contributing to sales. It’s great, I don’t think there’s anything better than that.
- What’d you think about the Burger King UK tweet? Burger King in the UK tweeted, on International Women’s Day, “women belong in the kitchen.” I actually think they knew exactly what they were doing because they had responses at the ready and their point was that there aren’t enough women going into foodservice to be in the kitchen from a commercial professional perspective. And that may very well be true. They’ve also created a scholarship to provide to women who want to go into foodservice. I don’t believe that all PR is good PR, but if you believe that all PR is good PR, the whole world’s talking about it. It wasn’t necessarily smart because I don’t prescribe to the “all PR is good PR” philosophy, but everyone’s talking about it.
There also is a bit of color commentary in the video so don’t miss that! We talk skinny jeans, calling people you just met (gasp!) instead of texting them, and aging, as well.
Have a Question For Us?
If you have a question for a future AMA, you can drop it in the comments here or join us in the (free) Spin Sucks Community.
Ask it there, drop ideas for multitasking I can do while answering your questions, engage with your fellow marketers, and have some fun.
I’ll see you next week for another enlightening AMA.