Lickety-Split Blog Content Writing

Part of expecting the unexpected should include a crisis communications plan, advises Christine Birkner of Marketing News. Every so often, quick responses yield marketing gold, Birkner explains. She tells the story of how, when a blackout at the New Orleans SuperBowl left football fans waiting for play to resume, the Oreo Cookies marketing team quickly posted the slogan “You can still dunk in the dark” on all their social media sites. That message ended up reaching five times the number of people who actually watched the game!

Oreo took advantage of someone else’s crisis, but even when it’s your own problem, I believe any business or professional practice can exercise journalistic crisis control through blogging.  Even the best-designed websites are rarely flexible enough to allow day-to-day, even hour-by-hour updating, but with blog posts, especially when supported by other social media, businesses have the ability to put out the news about themselves with their own slant!

Even business owners with little time to manage social media or create content, can, through hiring a blogging professional, be assured of putting their own “spin” on reports about their company.

As an added bonus, material that is both recent and frequently posted is more likely to be indexed by search engines and help the business “get found”!  Meanwhile, if ever there is any negative news about the company, the blog is the perfect place to field questions and comments head-on.

Be flexible, cautions Birkner. Even though Oreo probably had an outline of all the tweets and posts they were going to do throughout the game, they had the nimbleness and the communications team to respond quickly.

Does your company or practice have a crisis communications plan in place?