c+p digital

Conversion driven digital marketing agency, focussed on creative content.

crisis communication

The Benefits of Daily Stand Ups

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Welcome back to 🎙The 4am Report🎙. We have a Mara Svenne back on the show to talk about the benefits of Stand Ups🧍‍♀️🧍️. Not the funny ones (usually).

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Disclaimer: We love funny at c+p digital, so don’t be scared to use a little bit of humour to make Stand Ups fun. Some of our Stand Ups have featured onesies and terrible puns(ies)🤣🤣🤣. 

With our shifting workforce and the likelihood that we’ll continue to be virtual or hybrid for a while still, team Stand Ups (aka short, focused, and productive meetings) are incredibly useful right now.

Let’s face it, it’s so easy to miss emails or forget to respond to something. A Stand Up is a collaboration tool that reduces emails in your inbox, and helps teams work better and more efficiently. We use Stand Ups as a productivity tool for our team at c+p digital.

Mara is an agile coach and facilitator, who works with many software and management leadership teams. We worked with her on a large content audit a few years ago, where she introduced us to the value of virtual daily Stand Ups to help manage the multiple moving pieces of the project. Here’s some of the key benefits of Stand Ups:

Short, sweet, and focused

According to Mara, a Stand Up is a daily 15-minute planning meeting of what’s going to happen and how to help each other. “It’s not a status report, it’s, ‘here’s what I’m working on, I’m making good progress’. ‘Or here’s where I’m struggling’. ‘Or I might need somebody to help me with this, because I don’t understand this area of the work’. ‘Or I’m missing something, can you help me get that information so I can continue’. The idea is that you’re continually checking in with each other to see how the work is going.”

Keeping things moving

“Ideally, you actually stand up. because it forces the time box to be 15 minutes because nobody wants to stand up for an hour. And it gives the energy in the virtual room because you’re all standing up.” As Mara relates, key decision makers and executives are present to move things forward. And if somebody has an idea, you park that for after the stand up. “So right after the stand up, you say, Will and Susan need to meet with Mary, the rest of you can go to finish your work. And you guys stay behind to talk about the question or challenge or ideation in depth.”

Getting your priorities right

“What’s important about today that you want to accomplish today. This is about going through a whole project plan for the next six months and when this is happening.”

Multitasking is a myth. 

“Even women cannot multitask, no matter what they say! Your brain can only do one thing at a time. So, finish that and get to the next most important thing. It’s worth saying, ‘I’ve got two things. I can’t get both done today. What’s the priority?’”

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In this episode you’ll find out why you need to lay the groundwork and establish team norms to build that trust within the team – so that you have each other’s back.
You’ll also learn some key time management tips used in Agile, like Scrum and Combat (for more on Combat listen to Getting Sh!t Done with Mara Svenne). 

Tune in to learn more about how to support your team, build relationships and prevent burnout by making extra time to talk and be there for each other (often before or after the Stand Up). 

And if you need more convincing before you hit play, Mara talks about how focusing on the things that are closest to being done, gets things done. Along with the value of retrospective Stand Ups, so you can “inspect and adapt as you go along”.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

The 12 Formats of Podcast Episodes You Should Be Using

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Surprise! The good kind…because we’re talking about podcasting again. Susan has put together a framework for how to come up with endless amounts of episodes and formats to keep things interesting. 12 formats that will help you hook your audience, cut the clutter, and may even make your work a little easier. 

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We’re going to talk about a few and hopefully, get you so curious and eager to hear the rest that you’ll feel like you have no choice but to listen to the podcast! 

  1. First up is strategic teaching. This revamps the tired and bored podcasting format of interviewing a guest or just sharing your thoughts, because you get to showcase your expertise. For example, on The 4AM Report we might share a particular way of operating or a system we use, or even something we know, like audio and how it’s going to impact people’s business.
  2. Then there’s tactical teaching, which is another format that mixes things up a bit because you can provide a bunch of tools or tactics for your listeners to use or download. “I think people really love that, they’re like tell me what to do. Give me the blueprint, and I’ll run with that.”
  3. Another cool way to change up your podcast format is to create an episode arc. This can really make your production more efficient. We could record a 30-minute episode for The 4Am Report, but why not break it up into three parts and create a three-series arc? It’s more digestible, goes deeper over a shorter time span, and gives you a bit of breathing room if you are tight on time and bandwidth. Instead of drowning your audience with information and scaring the sh!t out of them, you’re giving them one piece of info. at a time and letting them run with it.

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This very podcast is a great example of a potential episode arc. We could do a separate podcast on every one of these points. So that’d be a 12-parter! Long live long-winded content✨! 

5 and 4. Another way to really turn the traditional podcast upside down is the podcast cohort, basically getting a panel of experts together to weigh in on something and how this amplifies your audience (we spoke about this here). There’s show & tell which is profiling a case study or use case on your show. This can also feature two or three people talking about something you’ve achieved and how you did it.  

  1. This one is fun because you can draw from your internal team and tactical processes. It’s a way to showcase your team on the inside or a process you use again and again. You could have a  team member come on or a client who uses that process and just beak it up and bring in different perspectives. For example, we did an episode on The 4AM Report where our writers came on to chat about their process and share some tips on how they approach different tasks, like social media or researching long-form copy. 
  2. You’re in touch right? Maybe your business wants to be inclusive or get known as a thought leader. To establish credibility, you can bring together industry analysts or workplace commentators to talk about things that are impacting our times and start making wider social commentary on more than just your business. 
  3. Every week, we newsjack with pride. If you don’t know what this is, read more here. We have Thirsty Thursday, which is a roundup of the hits and misses in the world of marketing, pop culture, entertainment, social injustice and more. We pick our top five to seven favourite stories, and we chat them out on video. But then we also release this as a podcast episode.

So, that’s a sneak peek into newsjacking. For more on why newsjacking needs to be agile and quick, you need to listen to the episode. And you’ll also find out why this helps you jump on the topics that people are searching for (aka more traffic) and can even show you care🤗🤗🤗.

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9-12

Let us summarize points 9-12. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose, and repurpose again! From combining podcast episodes or repurposing and clustering them together, to rolling out episode highlights or bringing together themes, repurposing can be as easy or involved as you want it to be. You can also repurpose events, like your mastermind / live event or zoom recordings and make these into podcast episodes… And guess what? This is when the podcast flywheel starts to work for you because it just gets easier and easier to get that volume and promote the hell out of yourself👏👏👏. Plus, nobody gets bored with it because they haven’t heard it yet. 

We ♥ that so many people love podcasting. So, let’s all pick it up a notch by 🎧listening to this episode🎧 and learning how to entertain and engage your audience with a bunch of great formats.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

What do The View and The 4Am Report have in common? Introducing Podcast Cohorts

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Welcome to The 4AM Report. To start, we’d like to share a quote:

“I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views. A working mother; a professional in her 30s; a young woman just starting out; and then somebody who’s done almost everything and will say almost anything.”

-Barbara Walters

If you haven’t watched The View, which kicked off in the late 90s, each episode started with Barbara reading this. The show, which was revolutionary for its time, featured 5 different women who joined this panel on daytime TV to talk about politics, social justice and share their expertise.

We keep talking about The View because this show is what we’re trying to do with podcasting. We’re replicating the idea of people coming in and sharing different perspectives with a wider audience. And we’re doing it by creating podcast cohorts of five people.  Here’s a sneak peek into the five key reasons you should consider a podcast panel:

  1. More accountability

When you’re in a mastermind or in a cohort, you tend to get things done purely because you don’t want to be the person that shows up and says, ‘I didn’t get it done’. 

  1. Reduced Bandwidth 

The first resistance we hear when it comes to creating a podcast is ‘I don’t have the time to do this’. Especially if you’re working solo. But if you’re working with podcast cohorts, you’re cutting your bandwidth by creating syndicated content. You’re releasing similar material that’s now going out through four or five different feeds, which are going to be cross-linked. It’s going to give you good Google juju. That’s how you can do the same amount of work for an incremental amount of output.

  1. Amplify your network

Creating a podcast cohort is a really meaningful way to amplify your networks, especially when you’re not necessarily doing as much in-person face time on stages and panels. For us, creating a podcast cohort has resulted in a minimum of five times our regular traffic. Then there’s the mastermind side of it, as some of the guests on the panel form relationships and end up working together. It’s also a way to collate information, bringing together different perspectives or expertise so that your audience doesn’t have to sift through five or six podcasts from different specialists to get the information they want. 

  1. Up the entertainment quotient

Just like The View brought women together, a podcast cohort brings people together, often to discuss serious topics, but also to bring some fun and levity to the show. We’re big fans of the entertainment quotient and it’s why we use metaphors like ‘what Barbara Walters did for daytime TV back in the 90s, we want try to do for podcasting in 2021’. And it’s easier to people to get (and resonate with).

  1. Get better together 

‘We are better together’ is a value that came from the pandemic, it became a hashtag and people use it to tell their stories. But when it comes to podcasts, it means that if you use a cohort or a panel you can feed off each other, amplify each other and just create better content than you might flying solo.

If you’re even a little bit intrigued by the above, 🎧listen to the episode for more🎧.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

How to find a much-needed, crisis-proof activist voice

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Remember 2020 blew in? With its false change-of-decade hope and flashiness. In March, 2020 the SaaS 90-day return policy jokes and memes were rife.

The ‘global toilet paper crisis of 2020’ rolled out (We like our puns around here. We deal with darkness with humour). In the form of ‘the Corona’. (Cue the day drinking jokes).

There was a mass exodus from traditional workspaces to online working.

Suddenly virtual work was an everybody thing.

Those that had strong online community or engagement found it drop. 

Those that didn’t, and scraped together a smattering of the stuff, heard crickets.

The clutter pile was deep and hard to wade through. Even for the experts.

Then May 2020 rolled around. A sad and shocking kind of viral video seized the world’s attention. The police killing of George Floyd.

In a collective gasp of horror the world unified in an ‘enough is enough,’ anti-racism movement that we believe is going to actually change things.

One Tuesday in June. And over a 100 days of working virtually showed all of us  marketers and communicators one thing:

Who had the smart, emotionally intelligent marketing flywheels, and who had the sad boring, tone deaf sales funnels. As unprepared marketing teams tried hard to shove more MQLs (minimum qualified leads) down a structure people DID NOT  want to go down. Just so they (the marketers) could keep their jobs.

It’s hard work. Who really can blame those marketers for barely having a minute to look up and see what’s going on around them in the world.

What many marketers missed was this:

Times have changed a whole lot. News is swift, and judgment is swifter.

And it’s no longer possible to say ‘oh, that conversation has nothing to do with me’ and stay silent. The reason? The information we possess at the end of our fingertips, a higher state of collective consciousness, and the genuine possibility of change.

The week of Blackout Tuesday, in honour of the BLM movement, we saw one influencer voice after another get it wrong, and then come up with self indulgent apologies, which really did not serve their audiences. 

Everyone from mayors and politicians to influencers to business voices and large brands messed up their “crisis messaging.” Some were being really quiet; conspicuously quiet for the times. Or they were taking a misstep and then being defensive about walking it back. 

As we were asked over and over for crisis and reputation management advice, we started to think, ‘what is the compass for getting it right, no matter what the crisis at hand?’

Answer: build an authentic activist voice.

Not just your company.

You. Whether employee or shareholder.

And if you lack one as a company or it hasn’t quite filtered down from the PPTs to the people out there talking on behalf of the brand, read on.

First, find the hill you would die on

Then prepare yourself for some uncomfortable vulnerability. Because you can’t be courageous (and this shit takes courage, friends!) without also being vulnerable. 

Sound counter intuitive? It’s not. By putting yourself out there, you’re opening yourself up to all kinds of potential abuse! 😆Sounds fun, right?? No, but seriously. 

V💥U💥L💥N💥E💥R💥A💥B💥I💥L💥I💥T💥Y 💥

Refer to Brenee Brown’s body of work on the subject. It’s immense. And necessary reading/listening in our opinion.

You’re about to get deeply authentic about a subject that means A LOT to the world (and hopefully you, if you choose to say something). You’re about to say “Hey, look, folks. Here’s what I know. Here’s what I believe in. Here’s what I think is broken. And here’s how I think I can fix it!” 

And yes ‘I’ is powerful in this case. It often needs to be one individual, even in large organizations. One ‘subject matter specialist’ on the hill you picked. (There could be multiple hills, of course. But start your work, or improvement on one hill. Got it? Good.)

Most of all HAVE SOME BALLS. The last thing you want to do is be afraid to shake the joint up. But DON’T BE A DICK (see the difference?)

Find your sweet spot on the scale of kind to clever. We often see people set things up cleverly but they lose their audience because they are not being empathetic to the realness of the people to whom they are speaking.

Right, so, take what you know – what you’re best at and one thousand percent believe in – and drill down into that. Start mapping out how you’ll break through the clutter. And the noise. Because folks it is MOFO noisy out there! 

Then use your body of work as proof. 

Second, recenter to your values

While highly cliched, the idea of values is the reason why brands like Nike keeps coming up repeatedly in the news. They really, really, REALLY subscribe to a set of values. (At least in their communication.)

Values are not in a statement hidden in a dusty powerpoint somewhere. Hopefully your values are  something your brand, however big or small, is living and breathing in the way you operate.

That spirit of values becomes the radar that guides you as you decide your brand’s alignment with the state of the world.

And if your company’s values have nothing beyond commercial words, then rethink that. Now’s the time. People align with brands that believe in the things they believe in. 

And ask what your brand voice will be, post pandemic? 

Are you brave and on the frontlines? 

Are you reflective and thoughtful?

Brand voice is one of those jargon’y terms, an often overused, clichéd  sounding idea. 

All it’s about is this: Determine stand for, and how you will articulate that, across all your communication channels.

And it doesn’t have to be absolute. 

Things evolve.

So finding that brand voice is worth spending time on.

Third, make it more than ad-hoc; make it infrastructure

If you step out and make a few statements, write a few posts, make a few videos on a crisis related subject, I’m just going to say it, nobody will care. Worse you’ll get caught up in the ‘cancel culture’ and people will troll or take you out of their consideration set.

Given that the time to say nothing is over in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, when you say something, you want it to have context, be ‘on-brand’ and have follow through.

For us, that’s been our podcast. The fact that that piece of infrastructure existed allowed us the ability to use something with an established base. We looked at our strategy, took a few calls about how this ‘new normal’ is going nowhere, and invited in voices to comment on various aspects of life in 2020, relating it to our key messaging for ourselves.

For other people, it’s been a video series, or a Live social property, a webinar variant of some type.

Just not one-offs.

Because one-offs are reactive.

And everything about building an activist is proactive.

Peace

Susan

Think Before You Speak: Crisis communication 101

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So. Here we are again, taking the wind out of our own sails re: our celebrations around hitting the FIFTY EPISODE milestone with the 4 AM Report.

And rightly so!!

With the protests against police brutality happening in the U.S., and around the world, we put the brakes on that shizz, and instead want to talk about crisis communications.

Earlier in the week, we published what we jokingly called “Episode 49.5” – well, today it’s the 4 AM Report episode 49 and three-quarters! 😂

Our point? We’ll get to episode 50, eventually. But now is NOT the time for back patting!

And YO! All you brands out there should be on this same page.

This episode started from a place of having seen one influencer voice after another get it WRONG. And then come up with self-indulgent apologies – which do not serve their audiences.

Talk Crap, then Walk it Back = WRONG

Everyone from mayors, politicians, influencers, business voices, sports stars (we see you Drew Brees, walking your crap-talk back), and large brands have walked on shaky ground this past week.

They’re either being conspicuously quiet or they’re taking a miss-step and then trying to be defensive.

And the mea culpa apologies don’t cut it.

Look, we’re all human, we all put our foot in our mouths from time to time – but b*tch, please. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past week and a half, you shouldn’t have to be walking your talk back – you shouldn’t be talking that crap in the first place!

So, that prompted a discussion that raised a question:

Is there a CRISIS 101 FRAMEWORK?

Crisis Communications 101

We decided if to create our own – and share it with you, because people are hurting, and the last thing anyone of us wants to do is add weight to that pain.

We broke it down into 5 areas. And here’s just a bit of what we talked about.

Acknowledge What’s Happening

“Acknowledge the problem, whatever crisis we’re in – acknowledge that something’s different or out of sync or atypical, if you will. The opposite of acknowledging is if you just continued with your promotions and your planned automation, as usual, there’s no acknowledging already, people are going to say, or see, that you’re in a totally different dimension than everyone else right now. And already, that’s not a good thing. A whole bunch of digital people out there, the big voices, have started picking on people who are doing that already: “Listen, tone deaf human, at the very least shut down your automation funnel!”

Be Agile – Like, “Switch Gears in an Hour” Agile!

“Nobody wants you to be fixing the world’s problems. They just want to know that you’re not that one unaware dumb ass in the room, right? And be humble about it – you don’t have to publish a blog post and tell everyone about it. You just have to reach out to a few people who are likely to resonate with that messaging. Make a few calls, write a private email to your client list to test [your messaging] out. Then call on your team! Once you trigger that crisis button, everyone

needs to get as agile as possible. What is true today is changing tomorrow. Reaching out to your team, making sure you’re all on the same page. And again, even with what you’re putting on social, if you have an expert [in tone on staff] to rely on check if you’re not sure. The number of large names that we’ve been seeing, who are getting into trouble, people are calling them out because of tone, or they’ve had to make a public apology. This is the time to reach out to your teams, guys.”

Hope for the Best, But PLAN for the Worst!

“It’s called scenario planning. It’s the idea of ‘If This, Then That.’ Work out the three possible things that could happen if I stay silent? Or, what happens if I make a specific statement that applies to me? What happens if I say something that is against the grain? Like really work it out, spend time on it – people pay good dollars for this kind of thing? And really focus on the worst case! Once you are prepared for the worst case, things go a little bit easier, right? Especially because in the climate we’re now we want the brands that we like and follow and are aligned with, we want to align ourselves with brands that do take stances on things that we value. We want to know that where I buy whatever is adamantly against what’s happening right now in the United States and is as outraged as everyone else. But again, it’s how that’s communicated. And when you do take a stance, you are opening yourself up for a lot of praise, but also potentially a shit ton of criticism and backlash. And that just the price you got to pay, to play!”

The only way to seriously prevent long lasting damage from “taking a stand” is to really play out those scenarios. Don’t wing it. And don’t ‘speak’ before you think.

There’s so much more on this subject in the episode – catch the whole thing here. I hope you’ll have a listen.

And while you’re there – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

The only kind of intelligence that counts now is emotional

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Ah, we continue to social distance.

The gap between our expectations and reality, as far as this COVID thing goes, is the requisite 2 meters, some might say.

In this time, one of the biggest changes I’ve made to how we do business is this:

(And yes we continue to do business. If you’re saying that’s not possible or has been cut way down, and you have transferable skills to the interwebs, you’re wrong 🙂 And you need to do this.)

Pick up the phone.

Here’s who I am. Someone who likes to hide behind my screen. There are very few things in my world that can’t be achieved from behind a screen.

But EVEN with that generally outlier view to life as a 40-something, I’m finding this shut down hard.

Nobody ever likes to be FORCED to do something.

And that suspension of life and liberty is a tempting little place of loss in which we react much like we do in times of grief. At the end of March, the Harvard Business Review published an eloquent piece titled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief“.

In a creepily foreshadowing-ey move, 2 years ago, we at c+p digital came up with a change management model for communicating in times of (generalized) crisis.

In this moment, the name we gave that model, which we trademarked by the way, seems deeply tone deaf. (Its #FlipIt2TenX – named for it’s massive ability to convert 10 times as much as your current CTA conversions. Obscure. Weird. But fucking effective. Like a lot of what we do.)

But that’s not the point.

The point is while we probably will not use that name for a while, the model is this.

All change (and crisis) brings resistance.

Your mind likely reacts with fear because it perceives the change as a loss of life and liberty in its current form, in some way.

So it reacts like it does when it’s grieving.

Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance!

That’s how we think all crisis (or change) communication works. And we put our time and actual dollars into developing that thinking.

Emotionally intelligent thinking.

Then a year ago, we started a podcast. A digital marketing firm that came to the party a decade too late, or so we thought. So we had to bring something special.

The something special was a hook.

We called it The 4 am Report, and we asked marketers and entrepreneurs, ‘what keeps you up at night?’ Dude, is that ever a loaded question right now.

And we’ve lived up to that emotionally intelligent responsibility as well.

Why?

A deep understanding of headspace.
That comes from years of mental health issues that were never understood.
From being dismissed, on multiple levels.
From knowing quite clearly what we didn’t want, even if we had no clear clue
what we did want.

When you start with the acceptance, emotionally intelligent communication gets very easy. (That’s what our change management framework was all about.)

And then demographics and psychographics start to MEAN something.

Here’s Will’s example. So you say your audience avatar is a 40 year old mom of 3. She’s obviously employed and had a particular kind of life up until very recently.

NOW that’s completely changed.
That same lady is homeschooling her 3 kids.
Failing on multiple deadlines.
Trying to cook and clean and second guess whether delivery is entirely safe.
And probably discovering she doesn’t like her partner very much as a person 😉

That’s a whole other person.

Does your marketing get that?

Probably not.

Figure out how to make it happen. Emotionally intelligent communication is all that matters in this moment.