Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Since it was founded the social Q&A site Quora has mostly been restricted to individual users. This year a handful of companies were allowed to have company accounts for an experimental period. Now Quora has opened up company accounts to most businesses. According to the Quora announcement, to qualify for a company account "your company must have at least three employees and a mature and built-out website". But why should a company have an account on Quora? Here are five good reasons: Brand Protection . First of all if you don't create an account someone with the same of a similar name might occupy the space. Quora is ranked highly by Google so pages on the site appear quite high in search results. Even if you don't plan to apply much effort to the site it is still prudent to register an account early so that you get the username and URL you want. Market Intelligence . People often wonder what people are thinking about their products and pay market rese...

People have been predicting the end of email for many years. Already in 2009 the Wall Street Journal was arguing that the reign of email was over in Why Email No Longer Rules...   But email has stubbornly resisted every attempt to replace it. As a marketing tool it is still effective, even though there are better alternatives and spammy email universally despised, a topic I covered in 2013 in Why a 40 Year Old Marketing Tool is Still Relevant.  As a business communication tool it has also proved to be more resilient than it's successors like the now defunct Google Wave, a theme I discussed in 2014 in Why Email Isn't Dead or Dying Anytime Soon . In this post I argued that email would persist because you can email anyone anywhere using anything, almost. Other apps might be more elegant, but while some people use messenger others use WhatsApp. And you can email from an iPhone6 to an old Windows desktop. You can't do that with Snapchat. But now there another trend is giv...

Whatever your business, you probably need social media crisis monitoring much more than you think. It doesn’t matter if your business is low risk, it makes no difference that you avoid wrongdoing and it can even be irrelevant that you don’t even use social media – it can still cause you a crisis.  Not convinced? Here are the reasons why for each of these scenarios. WE HAVE A LOW-RISK BUSINESS .  Some companies operate in such risky businesses that they are – or at least should be – always braced for a crisis and recognize that their social coverage is going to be mostly negative.  Military contractors, oil companies and drug makers, for example, should know that what they are doing is bound to provoke some reactions. But what about the others? You might think that a soft toy maker or the Red Cross have nothing to fear but this is not true. There is no such thing as a low risk company because everyone can have rogue employees, everyone can have accidents, everyone ...

As a child I recall being taken to see public lectures by explorers, mountaineers and other enterprising people. After all these years my lasting memory of these talks is how some people can do amazing things but be astonishingly dull when describing it. Part of the blame lies in the style that they used. Every single one of them used a technique where they simply presented a sequence of slides and then described each slide. "This is me putting on my boots". "This is me eating breakfast". "This is me on the summit". Which is almost inevitably dull and uninteresting. Once you make a decision to describe slides you are forced to adapt to the images and this simply doesn't work very well. Good talks are based on good storytelling so it is much better to craft your story first, and then to illustrate it with images, words, videos, props and demos that support that story. A really good talk would work without any slides at all, which is an ad...

In an earlier post Five Things Every Startup Founder Needs to Know About Getting Media Coverage I mentioned that one way to get more media coverage for a startup is to make it easy for people to find contact information: every website should have some clearly marked contact details -- and not just a web form. But it's not just websites. People sometimes forget to provide contact information on emails and even business cards. And sometimes it is there but it is wrong. Recently at a networking event someone gave me a business card. The next day I tried sending a message to the address on the card but it didn't work. I then went to the company website and that provided just the same address. It can happen to anyone. Adding a new email account to my phone recently I made a mistake in my own phone number, happily discovered and corrected very quickly. But these episodes reminded me that sometimes you might miss opportunities simply because people have had trouble contact...

Many of these blog posts are inspired by questions that people ask me in lectures and workshops, some by questions sent to me by email and some from questions people ask on the popular Q&A site Quora. Most of the time if one person asks a question thousands more have the same problem so I put an answer here, too, where everyone can read it. Just this week an anonymous user on Quora asked " Long term job seekers are advised to build a network but who would want to network with them? " .  This is a very interesting question because it highlights two misunderstandings about networking and there is actually a fairly straightforward way to solve this problem. First of all, you are not supposed to wait until you are long-term unemployed to start building a network. It can take years to build a solid network -- though much less to get started -- so you should be doing it long before you are unemployed. Network while you have a job, and even network while you are still...

When you are preparing replies to questions from journalists your media training person will teach you to reply in complete statements. So if the question is "Do you think that social media is just a fad?" an answer like "No" might be technically accurate but is unusable for the journalist. You will get much better results if you reply "I do not think that social media is a fad". This is easier to quote in video and much easier to use in a written piece. This same technique can also be used in email threads to make communication more effective. When someone sends a message like "Will you be able to help with the pitch coaching at the next startup event?" you could just reply "Yes". This has two disadvantages. First, the sender has to re-read their message to see what you replied to. Second, restating it as a complete statement means that the other person can see if you understood correctly. For this to work it is best to use your o...