A Droid vs. a Carrier Pigeon?

A BlackBerry, an iPhone, a Droid.

A smoke signal, a carrier pigeon, and a good, old-fashioned land line.

There are times that I would opt for the way things used to be in a nano second. Last week was one of those weeks. We were hit with a major technology disaster and in the words of the owner of our outsourced IT firm, “this is simply the worst hardware failure I have seen in twenty years. This I have never seen. This is like the 100-year flood – the one you don’t really plan for. We plan by having spare firewalls, spare hubs, spare servers, spare hard drives, documentation, MS Support, and backups – but never have I seen catastrophic failure of hard drives like this.”

For a small business, we invest in the tools and technology necessary for our team members to have the ability to work 24x7, should a client need arise. For good or bad, our agency has evolved into a state where we sleep next to our smartphones, Tweet from events, manage a crisis from a soccer field and respond to emails at a rapid pace before leaving the next parking lot. We aren’t unlike many other creative agencies. As a team, we rely heavily on email, cell phones, SharePoint and our disgruntled server, appropriately named “LaMonna”. When it all failed, we quickly remembered that technology is both a blessing and a curse.

While I wouldn’t wish this exercise upon any small business, we did learn a few valuable lessons. When it all goes quiet on the technology front, it's amazing the space it creates for the rest of the world to keep moving.

GroundFloor Media Gives Back - Announces Get Giving

If you know anything about GroundFloor Media, you know how passionate each of the staff members is about the organizations we support, either by volunteering as mentors, serving on boards, or making regular donations of goods or money. Last weekend, a handful of GFM team members got together in support of the Youth Opportunity Foundation’s annual Big Bowl event to benefit Colorado Youth at Risk and Byrne Urban Scholars. While there is little concern about any of us running off to join the Professional Bowlers Association, a good time was had by all and team spirit was running high – particularly with our very own Jim Licko whose bowling team won their fourth straight Spirit Award by dressing up as the members of music group Devo. Nice…

Even in these uncertain economic times, participants and supporters of the Big Bowl event dug deep and raised more than $16,000 (compared to just over $10,000 in 2009) to benefit the deserving youth from Colorado Youth at Risk and Byrne Urban Scholars. Youth Opportunity Foundation founder Tom Kimball drove the importance of the event and giving back home when he reminded all attendees that while we were cheering on bowlers in the grand finale “horse race,” enjoying drinks, food and good times, young people across Denver might not be so lucky – enduring the pressure of gangs, challenging home situations and struggling to help their families make ends meet.

Community giving and involvement is at the cornerstone of GroundFloor Media’s beliefs, and inspired by the events we attend and organizations we serve, the staff recently launched the Get Giving program. Through this new effort, each month we’ll select a new nonprofit organization that’s close to our hearts and collect needed items and donations for the organization in a collection box at the front of our office. Friends, family, colleagues, clients and vendors are welcome to donate items on the designated organization’s wish list – which will be prominently posted with the collection box each month.

In April, a generous basket of items was collected for Platte Forum, an organization for which Amanda Brannum sits on the board. This month, we’re collecting items for SafeHouse Denver, which recently welcomed Ramonna Tooley to its board. If you are interested in joining the GroundFloor Media team to Get Giving in the coming months, please contact us at getgiving@groundfloormedia.com and we’ll be happy to relay the latest Get Giving beneficiary and provide you with a wish list for that organization. By way of an example, SafeHouse Denver is requesting items as varied as mascara or dishwasher detergent to paper plates and coloring books – all of which would greatly benefit its residents. Thanks, in advance, for joining us in staying motivated to give back to the community that gives us so much!

Colorado’s Brightest Social Media Minds Talk Crisis At Boulder Chamber’s Annual Social Media Workshop

Last Friday GroundFloor Media was thrilled to once again serve as one of the main sponsors of the annual Boulder Chamber social media event. The panel and subsequent breakout sessions brought together many of the brightest social media minds in order to educate and counsel local business professionals on the latest evolution in the emerging media landscape. Building upon the “101” lessons of the Boulder Chamber’s 2009 social media event, topics at this year’s event ranged from how to build a social media strategy and best practices in corporate blogging, to getting started with SEO and geotagging for retail businesses.

The event was a true testament to how far social media has evolved in the past year. It was also evident just how important it has become for businesses to not only focus on unique content creation, but also plan for the day when a direct or industry-related crisis may threaten to tarnish a previously unblemished reputation.

Whether you’re just getting started in social media or have been entrenched in it for awhile, we wanted to share some of our favorite crisis and issues management planning tips based on the insightful real-world input of the event’s panel discussion.

Have a Crisis Plan—Large or small, comprehensive or merely top-line, it is imperative that a business of any size put pen to paper to create a social media crisis plan. For example, who will blog, tweet and post on behalf of your organization when a crisis hits? Is the person who mans the social media channels during a crisis the same person who is involved in social media on a day-to-day level? Derek Olson, vice president of Foraker, likened social media crisis training to that of a first responder—countless hours go into prepping emergency personnel and that same approach should not be overlooked when it comes to preparing those who will handle social media triage for your brand.

Listen Before Reacting—The crisis/issues management panelists all agreed that a vital planning step is to decide how you will monitor the Web for either a quick-spreading or slow-building crisis, and encouraged attendees to use a combination of free and paid tools depending on budget to listen and track buzz. The favorite monitoring tools among the group included Google Alerts, TweetScan, Radian 6 and Meltwater Buzz. A primary reason to listen and analyze what is being said before jumping in is to make sure you will be responding to the right issues. For example, it is probably not worth the time or resources it requires to respond to a few rogue forum comments. However, if an influential person on Twitter begins retweeting a damaging story or recurring theme and you determine the issue has significant “legs” based on the people who are pushing out the story, it is most likely in your best interest to put your response plan into action.

Trust and Transparency is Vital—Daily Camera Executive Editor Kevin Kaufman did not mince words when asked about businesses responding to a crisis. It became clear that during times of strife, journalists tend to believe that PR consultants and company executives are speaking in carefully crafted talking points and statements. So, how do you ensure accurate, positive messaging about your brand or service is being shared during a crisis without being perceived as canned and rehearsed? While the president is conducting interviews with traditional media outlets, Kaufman and the other panelists agreed that you should activate your already engaged social media “community” to talk candidly about their experiences with your company. In addition, CBS4 assignment editor Misty Montano shared a first-person account of how fast the newsroom is moving to stay one step ahead of its competition during a crisis. She encouraged businesses to use all of their online resources to keep updated information flowing during a crisis, and stressed that smart companies post information—often in the form of a press release—to the company website during a situation so the media has access to the latest (and most accurate) details.

Even if you do not have a social media crisis plan in place today, spending just a few minutes thinking about a plan of attack is a step in the right direction. If you are curious on how your company stacks up, answer the poll question below to find out where you fall on the planning scale.

- Alexis