Andrew Hennigan's Blog

Last year I argued in this post about social media crisis management that when a PR crisis strikes your business you should suspend all scheduled tweets. This reflection was prompted by a case where Eurostar trains were blocked in the Eurotunnel for hours but the company was still tweeting invitations to take the train to Paris for Christmas. You can be entangled in a crisis that is nothing to do with your actions, so you need to be prepared for that, too. This week we have seen that even this is not enough. One thing that the Boston Marathon bombing has highlighted is that you should also suspend all of your scheduled tweets when there is any sort of disaster or tragedy that could make your tweets appear tone deaf, insensitive or even inappropriate -- even when the incident is completely unrelated to your business. Looking at some of the reactions on Twitter explains why. As soon as the news broke in Boston the focus of my twitter stream shifted to news about the tragedy, mess...

If your startup is still at an early stage you probably can't even afford a PR consultant and an agency is out of reach. Maybe you also don't have any PR expertise yourself. But there are five simple things you can do yourself that don't take much time or expertise yet can make it much more likely people will talk about you. I learnt these things working on both sides of the business: I have worked both in PR and as a freelance journalist, writing often about startups. BUILD A SOLID ONLINE PRESENCE . When someone googles your company name they should find at least several pages you control on the first page of search results. This is much easier than most people think. First of all make sure that your own website URL has been submitted to the top search engines. For example, you can submit a URL to Google using this Webmaster Tools page . When that's done create profiles in the name of your company on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. These will rank ...

There are still some companies and managers who have mixed feelings about employees who use networking sites like LinkedIn. They fear either a loss of productivity or perhaps even losing the employee to a competitor. Neither risk should be a serious problem. You can easily avoid time wasting by better training and easier recruiting benefits your company, too.  But the upside of networking far outweighs the downside risk, so companies that encourage their employees to network internally and externally have an advantage over the others. There are many reasons for this, but here are the top three: NETWORKING IMPROVES PERFORMANCE . Nobody can do their job entirely alone, so that an employee with average ability but a rich network can actually outperform a genius with a weak network. The reason for this is not hard to find. Whatever you do for a living you are going to get stuck from time to time and need help. A well-connected employee needing help just asks their network and they...