Vancouver-based Vitrium Systems announced the launch of a new, online service that allows marketers to embed a registration form into PDF’s. The new system, dubbed PDFSalesLeads, allows marketers to take advantage of the portability of electronic sales literature while providing an interactive form inside the document that will allow the reader to provide the contact information required to carry the sales process to the next step.

During a sneak peak of the new service, Vitrium’s Manager of Marketing and Communications, Randa Codron, explained how PDFSalesLeads provided a solution to the dilema of making prospects register to download PDF’s online or giving digital documents away without any idea of who’s reading them. “PDFSalesLeads allows users to complete their registration information inside the PDF while they are engaged with the content,” she explained. “You can set the form up to appear on any specific page, so the reader has a chance to decide whether the information your providing is something they want more information about.”

Furthermore, the technology stays with the document, so PDF’s that are passed from one user to another also pass along the interactive registration form. All registrations are collected in real time back at the PDFSalesLeads web site and can be integrated into SalesForce.com.

View an online demo.

This is a handy break-through for small and mid-sized marketers who want to expand their reach via the Internet but can’t spend a lot of wasted time sorting through irrelevant leads or trying to follow up on bogus registration information. At just $49 per month, the service is affordable.

The possibilities of this technology appear to go beyond simple registration. During our conference call, I asked if there were plans for creating other interactive forms that could be imbedded into PDF’s. While Randa couldn’t be specific, it does sound like PDFSalesLeads may be just the first of a number of utilitarian products to roll out of Vitrium’s R&D team.

We’ll be watching for more developments from Vancouver in the future.

Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post by a contributing writer to the Brand Central Station Blog.  Mary Ann Johnson is a member of Team Position2, experts in search and social media marketing and sent us this post on behalf of the team.  You can learn more about Position2 by visiting their web site.

by Team Position2

Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

Listen: It is very important to “listen” to what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry as a whole. People and their opinions influence your customers. Watch out for any complaints against you or your competitors, as it is the best opportunity to showcase your customer service to them and show that you care and value customers.
Potential customers also look for others opinions before they make the purchase decision.

Participate: It not about just listening, you need to get engaged and converse with people. If you respond timely to any of the questions it reassures the faith in your brand among the people. Even if your brand is not talked about its essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Make a plan and start conversation at relevant places and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Respond: When you are monitoring the conversations you know the happenings and can implement relevant responses. A proper response goes a long way in spreading the good about your brand in these times of the ripple effect like Twitter.

Tools: There are many paid and free tools to keep a tab on the conversations. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Backtype.

There are paid tools, which help in monitoring and analyzing the brand such as radian6, Collective intellect, TechrigySM2 to name a few.

About Position2
Position2 is a leading Search & Social Media Marketing firm that delivers continuous growth for its customers through its proprietary “Surround & Intent Marketing” methodology. The company’s adaptive technology solutions are customizable to customers’ evolving marketing needs. It delivers integrated Search & Social Media Marketing solutions that engages prospects at multiple touch-points in the online environment. For more details, Please visit http://www.position2.com

So much time is spent talking about audience engagement; and as marketers we often use the word “audience” to mean “customer.”  So much time and effort is spent trying to identify appropriate prospects and then doing what it takes to capture their attention, we often forget an audience who, if engaged, can generate a significant increase in the bottom line performance of almost any company.  Who are these people?

Your employees.

So often overlooked and very often ignored – most employees in most companies often feel disassociated from their employer’s balance sheet.  Sales and production goals are (very often) dictated and abstract, received without any kind of context to the work-a-day world in which most employees operate.

That’s why internal communications programs can do more than just improve morale.  Properly designed and implemented, they can work wonders when it comes to  improving operational performance.

To create the kind of marketing R.O.I. we’re talking about, managers need to think about profitability over top-line sales.  Improvements in operational efficiency can yield better margins (meaning more profit) on the same or lower sales.  Increased awareness of product and service offerings can lead to increased sales to existing customers (through the cross-selling of services) leading to both sales gains and profitability gains through reduced ramp-up times.

Internal communications programs that get employees on board when it comes to spotting new business opportunities can also result in bumps in top-line sales gains, too – although of all the employee-directed campaigns, this appears to be the most difficult to implement.

I would be interested in hearing your success stories (and your disasters) for future stories here at Brand Central Station.

I highly recommend checking out this blog if you’re trying to figure out Twitter and micro-blogging in general.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

The desire to seek something better is a natural human desire.  After all, who doesn’t want something better?  But humans are also naturally reluctant to change.  It’s the constant alure of something better pulling against the security of something we know that creates tension in the workplace (and, often in our personal lives as well).

Nowhere is that tension felt more than in the sometimes tempermental relationship between client and agency.

The way things used to be, it cost a lot to find an Agency of Record (AOR), especially if you measured cost in time, frustration and lost opportunities in addition to money.  Clients were historically reluctant to make a change, finding it easier to stick with “the devil they knew” rather than the one they didn’t.

But with the advent of agency directories like the Ad Agency Red Book and then agency search consultants, clients found a much deeper pool of potential candidates and a willing group of hired guns to vet them.

To be sure there were (and still are) problems with this system.  The cost of hiring a search consultant was prohibitively expensive meaning only clients with larger budgets could rationalize the expense.  Directories were good at providing basic contact information but not particularly reliable in allowing clients to do an objective “apples-to-apples” comparison of one agency against another.

Then along comes the internet and the ability to process significant data points almost instantly.  In the ad agency search and selection game, this technology manifested itself in the form of www.agencyfinder.com.

Now, just one disclaimer, I’ve worked with AgencyFinder before.  My agency has received work from AgencyFinder and I’ve run agency reviews through AgencyFinder as a consultant.  But Chuck Meyst and his crew have developed a fair and objective methodology and a rich database on agencies based in North America (and now the UK, too).  And the price is right for clients who decide to search (or the search consultants they hire to do the search).

It’s free.

Yep.  Clients search the database for free because the agencies who are listed there pay a fee every year to maintain a listing and participate in the searches conducted by the service.  Every agency pays the same fee no matter how big or small it is, so there are no “favorites” in the system.  Every agency also has to complete a long and detailed agency survey that helps clients pinpoint exactly the right service or experience they need.

And because the service is free, clients of all shapes and sizes use it. This past year, that was nearly 800 searches for agencies. Not every account went to a big agency – because not every account is a big account.

But enough about AgencyFinder.  Whether you use that service or another, as a client there are five things you need to do in order to make sure your search for a new marketing agency is efficient, fair and productive:

1. Make sure you have taken the time, up front, to clearly identify what your agency will need to accomplish in order to be successful.  Any agency worth their salt will want to know what they’re up against.  As you’ve seen in our piece on client briefs falling more than a little short, many clients don’t do this kind of thing very well.  If this happens with an existing agency, it may slow down a project or create redundant expenses.  If a client is unprepared going into an agency review (or selection process) the results could be disasterous.  Imagine NEVER being on the same page with your agency … yikes.
2. Identify the best agencies that do what you need to have done in the industry sectors in which you operate.  Starting there, broaden your candidate list out to agencies with similar experiences and/or capabilities.  Certainly, this is where a service like AgencyFinder has a tremendous advantage over something like an agency directory.  Just remember, developing your candidate list of potential agencies is significantly more involved than just typing a search term into Google and seeing what comes up.
3. Have some idea of what you’re willing to invest into your marketing program once the agency is hired.  It doesn’t have to be a firm number, but trust me – you’ll lose the good agencies if you can’t tell them what you’re prepared to spend if they come up with the great ideas and show an ability to work effeciently.  Telling an agency you don’t have a budget or you don’t know what your budget is; is the same as telling the agency you’re not serious about finding a new agency.
4. Have a schedule for your review in place, publish it and then stick with it.  Today, a full-on agency review shouldn’t take more than 8 weeks; 12 at the outside.  And at the pace of today’s economy, losing a quarter because you’re reviewing agencies can spell disaster.  Be prepared to move quickly, make decisions and get the job done.  As critical as the time is to you, it’s doubly critical to the agencies who will be participating in the review.
5. Finally, make sure you spend time with agency you DON’T select to thank them and tell them why you picked the agency you did.  As a search consultant, I can tell you this is the hardest part of the job – but it’s the part that has yielded the biggest dividends for me.  The agency’s appreciate the show of respect and, more importantly, they try to improve.  It raises everyone’s game and the profession, as a whole, is better off for it.

Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, I suppose a well-run review greens all the pastures in the future.

Thinking about switching agencies and want to learn more about how to conduct a review, feel free to email me and we can arrange an obligation-free phone consultation.

(Editor’s Note: This is one of my favorite blog posts – not just for the comments it generated but for the way it addressed a re-occuring theme: that, somehow, PR is dead and Social Media killed it.  C’mon people.  Get over it.)

I’m going to try and infuse something that’s been missing from this whole “Social Media is killing PR” meme that seems to be sweeping through the Blogosphere/Twitterverse lately. 

A little common sense.

This maelstrom has been whipped up, primarily, by PR’s and journalists/bloggers working in the technology space.  And the echo is practically deafening.

While there have been plenty of valid points raised about the nature of public relations, the profession’s current and future place in the enterprise, the role of blogging and other Web 2.0 apps in brand building, sales and CRM – I’ve come to one major conclusion:

Social media “experts” need to get over themselves and PR people need to stop looking over their shoulder to see who’s trying to do them in.

First, a little history
Thanks to Al Krueger and this post on his Comet Branding blog.  Al was actively pimping his online radio show via Twitter yesterday (listen to it here) by sending out about a dozen tweets to his followers (I’m one of them) including a re-tweet of a pimp from some other Twitterhead shilling the podcast.  While I’m not crazy about Al’s method, I was curious, so I checked out the podcast and an earlier post and podcast, from September, on the same subject (you’ll find the post here and the podcast here).

Al did a good job of linking to several posts by bloggers (Scoble, Calacanis, Ruebel and Arrington) and a journalist (ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio) raising questions about the value provided by PR people who either don’t know how to pitch a story or, worse still, don’t know how to take “no” for an answer.  Look, it’s not vinyl siding sales folks, it’s public relations – show some discretion and restraint.

How “death” looks to the PR profession
All of these bloggers, journalists, PR folks and social media experts seemed to agree that the profession has some serious issues that need to be addressed.  The conversations on the podcasts seemed to sum up this way:

1. PR – as a “brand” – is going through a crisis of identity.  No one seems to know what it means, anymore.
2. The practice of pitching stories can’t continue today the way it was done years ago as a result of social media effectively removing the PR person as the filter between the journalist and the story.
3. Social media requires its own kind of “professional” in order to be effectively used on behalf of a company or brand.
4. There needs to be more professional education and standards in the PR profession that will help re-establish its credibility.
5. PR pros are often in a “no-win” situation when it comes to dealing with journalists who don’t need them nearly as much as they need the journalists.
6. Start-up companies with a dynamic CEO probably don’t need a PR person’s help.

Now a big part of the problem with this entire discussion is that most of the offending PR folks, complaining journalists and put-out bloggers deal in the tech industry.  This is an industry that adopts technologies (like social media) early and falls in and out of love with digital solutions in a never-ending quest to find the “next big thing.”  It’s not the real world.  It’s the echo-chamber of the tech world.

That’s why I was glad to see level-headed analysis from bloggers in the space like Jeremy Pepper get back to the basics of PR, discuss the value of social media as a tool for media relations and offer some basic rules for its use.

The report of PR’s death is an exaggeration (with apologies to Mark Twain)
Let’s take a look at each of these mortal symptoms and evaluate them in a little more detail. 

But before we do, it’s important to make one significant distinction between this screed and many (if not most) of the others you’ll read online: my perspective is that of a person who works with clients almost entirely outside of the technology space.  That’s where most of the people in this world live and work today and it’s to those businesses this blog (and this post) is directed.

First, PR’s identity crisis.  It’s nothing new.  If you’ve worked with PR people in the past you know the good ones are always a little paranoid – always worried about what other people think and if they’re doing everything they can to ensure a positive outcome.  That’s good. That’s what you want in a PR person.  Unfortunately, that trait also leads to a perpetual, professional self-esteem issue that’s maddening.

It’s this constant self-questioning of PR’s value as a discipline that leads the profession into episodes of mental masturbation over “advertising equivalency values” for story placements or obssesive arts and crafts projects that result in massive, three-ring binders full of clips.  I attended a presentation once where a senior PR person said “all we do is generate oceans of ink for our clients.” 

Yuk.

PR is more than that.  PR is about helping clients get their “story” right so it accurately conveys the essential qualities of their brand in a meaningful and engaging way.  And that story has to be told to several “publics” (hence the name Public Relations) which include employees, customers, shareholders, communities and other groups of vital interest to the client in addition to the press.

Second, the process of pitching stories has got to change.  I don’t disagree with that at all.  But the focus shouldn’t be on the pitching process (the number of calls made or the tools used) but rather on the quality and relevance of the story itself.  Not only are PR pro’s often guilty of being lazy and not finding the best angle to present to a reporter, blogger or editor – those same journalists are often unable or unwilling to consider well-crafted stories from brands they’ve never heard of or PR’s they don’t know.

If there’s a reason to take a closer look at the impact of social media, this is it.  Social media can put a journalist in direct contact with a source and eliminate the PR “filter” – there’s no arguing that.  But that same media channel can put the brand in direct contact with the consumer and eliminate the need for the journalist.

It’s already happening.  They’re called “bloggers” – maybe you’ve heard of them.

Many bloggers wear dual hats of journalistic hack and PR flack.  The debate of exactly who or what social media is killing should probably be expanded.

This gets me to the third point about the need for a social media “expert” or “professional” to effectively use the channel.  I don’t get this.  It seems that “social media” by its very definition should be usable by “society” – right?  Having to hire a social media expert seems a bit like having to hire a professional cocktail party gadfly to flit about telling people what needs to be told.

But who decides what needs to be told?  That’s where the value in the profesional relationship is, isn’t it.  Whether that’s the domain of a public relations professional, a marketing consultant, a wise dutch uncle or your consigliere – that’s a call made by the business, not by some professional standards board or association.

Which leads into our next item – and PR folks are famous for this – when all else fails, make a call for more professional standards training and pseudo-academic credentials.  Whether it’s an IABC credential or certification from PRSA, the only thing that establishes credibility is performance.  CPA, JD, MD, PhD after a name may mean something to some people.  But when your accountant, lawyer, doctor or professor screw up, you find another one and make the change.  Your opinion of that one “bad apple” doesn’t spoil the reputation of the entire profession.  Unless, of course, he’s a lawyer.

The fifth point is part of the age-old pity party PR folks throw for themselves when it comes to their relationship with journalists.  Social media (or its absence) won’t change that.  If PR folks do their real job (not just pitch stories willy-nilly), they’ll quickly realize their value with their client exists before they ever pick up a phone or send an e-mail to a journalist.  That self-confidence (and a well-crafted pitch) make the roller coaster ride of rejection and eventual acceptance by journalists easier to take.

PR flacks are going to get told “no” a lot.  They’ll get lied to frequently.  They won’t get their messages returned and they’ll occassionally get a scolding.  Deal with it.  It’s the job.

And finally, some companies don’t need a PR person or firm to help them.  A lot more think they don’t need a PR person or firm to help them.  Whether they’re right or wrong, it doesn’t matter.  You see, they’re the client and it’s their money and their problem.

PR people should work with clients who want to work with them.  This doesn’t mean these clients will understand what PR is, how it works for their business or what a PR person does.  But if the interest is there, that’s something you can work with.

And it won’t kill you.

It’s not “greenwashing” per se - but more than a few people are skeptical of catalog and direct mailers when they say they’re concerned about the environment and want to cut the wasted circulation out of their marketing efforts.

As far as I’m concerned, if they save a little “green” (money) and a few trees in the process, I’m all for it.

Randy Erdahl, co-founder and president of Minnesota-based Decision Inteligence recently shared some ideas on how to cut the waste out of your mailing lists with Target Marketing magazine (one of the best, pure-marketing magazines around, in my opinion):

1. Use e-mail activity history to identify candidates for fewer catalogs. Identify customers who show a preference to shop without catalogs by looking at e-mail histories. These customers are prime candidates to test contacting through e-mail more and catalogs less, saving money on paper and postage, and at the same time, adding value to those customers by making it more relevant.

2. Set up a contact optimization stream test that can compete against the current circulation decision-making methodology. “Stream tests are excellent ways to learn if these new contact strategies work,” Erdahl said. Design a stream test to measure how well the results are. This approach measures over time the impact your new strategies have on the results and helps you determine if your test contact process (channels, frequency, etc.) is the right move. Stream tests quantify the results for you, said Erdahl, and determine how you should move forward.

3. Use ZIP code or other geographic level filters to screen prospect lists. “You should know what ZIP codes or other geographic areas are vast wastelands for your business, and you shouldn’t be mailing into them and [should be] suppressing them right up front in your prospecting efforts,” said Erdahl.  “And find out where your hot spots are.”

4. Update catalog-sales-per-mailing models. You need multiple, detailed statistical predictive models in this day and age. If you use RFM, run, don’t walk, exclaimed Erdahl. If you don’t build separate models for customer segments, jog! And if you aren’t using different models for different catalogs, walk fast! The more detailed models you have, the better off you’ll be in eliminating wasted mailings.

There is also a webinar you can go to (on demand) that explores these issues and strategies in more detail.

My business partner and I are working to save a client from his current web site.  The site he has now looks okay.  It should.  It was designed by an award-winning, graphic designer who knows a lot about designing attractive brochures, annual reports and the like. But she doesn’t know Jack about designing a web site.

Or should I say Jakob. 

Jakob Nielsen, that is.  For those of you who don’t recognize the name, Jakob Nielsen is the “guru” of web page usability as a concept in the design and management of web sites.  And while I’m not a big fan of the look of his web site on the subject, it does put his theories into practice in a clear and obvious way.  Which is, I suppose, the point of web usability in the first place.

You can boil Nielsen’s work on web page usability down into ten basic rules (you can find them on Nielsen’s site here).  Web designer Theresa Neil provides a listing and a series of very useful examples of these ten basic rules in practice:

1. Visibility of system status (FEEDBACK)

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.  (Examples include BaseCamp from 37 Signals, Picnik and Tick.)

2. Match between system and the real world (METAPHOR)

The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order. (Examples from iTunes and Mindomo.)

3. User control and freedom (NAVIGATION)

Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Supports undo and redo and a clear way to navigate. (Examples from CollabFinder, Wufoo, Pages and Balsamiq.)

4. Consistency and standards (CONSISTENCY)

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions. (Examples from GMail and Microsoft Office.)

5. Error prevention (PREVENTION)

Even better than good error messages is a careful design, which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. (Examples from Yammer, Wef form Design, Google Auto and Wikipedia.)

6. Recognition rather than recall (MEMORY)

Minimize the user’s memory load. Make objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate. (Examples include Quanta IDE and Keynote.)

7. Flexibility and efficiency of use (EFFICIENCY)

Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions. (Examples include Omni Focus and Numbers.)

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design (DESIGN)

Dialogues should not contain information, which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility. Visual layout should respect the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. (Examples include Kontain and Harvest.)

9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (RECOVERY)

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution. (Examples include Digg, among others.)

10. Help and documentation (Help)

Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large. (Examples include Picnik, GoodBarry, Zennos and BaseCamp.)

You can view her entire article on her blog.

Adobe’s Mark Asher also provides some basic rules to follow when designing a web site:

As you approach Website design, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Can my users get to their desired information in two clicks?
2. Are my visuals distracting or useful?
3. What technologies are appropriate and not overkill?
4. Do my users know where they are within the Website at all times?
5. Can users get back to the front/home page with one click?
6. Is my content accessible to disabled users?

This list is simple enough, but many Websites continue to violate these basic rules–and frustrate users in the process. Remember, your competitor’s Website is only one click away, so removing these barriers above will aid in keeping users (and their dollars) at your site.

Remember the key takeaway from all this advice: No matter how nice your site looks, if it’s hard to use, you’ll lose your visitors.  Design the look and feel with the clear intent to make it a simple, elegant and intuitive process to visit and transact business there.

We’ll save the content relevance lesson for another day …

Have a great weekend.

Nobody ever likes to think about what they’ll do when things go wrong.  As corporate marketers, a big piece of your job is to make sure things go right.  So, what are you doing to make sure a crisis doesn’t permanently derail your company?

Crisis PR gurus, Deon Binneman and Ned Barnett addressed this in a recen exchange on the PRMindshare Forum.  Deon is from Johannesburg, South Africa has been in the “Reputation Management” business for years and specializes in helping businesses deal with problems tht get out of hand.  (Check out Deon’s blog.)  Ned lives in Las Vegas and has spent years helping clients in healthcare and technology deal with the unexpected.  (Check out Ned’s web site.)

What it boils down to is this – dealing with the unexpected can be expensive and most companies can not afford to have people on staff 24/7 to do it.  Instead, the smart money is spent on planning ad creating a rapid response team that can implement that plan when needed.

According to Deon and Ned, here are some of the organizational and cost factors to keep in mind:

1. The first phase is a comprehensive site evaluation; an in-depth discovery session sometimes lasting as much as a couple of days.

2. Following the audit and interviews, an outside PR pro will develop a crisis plan – either general or specific, based on the identified needs of the client.

3. A key step in comprehensive crisis planning involves the outside consultant returning to the client’s location to present the plan and walk it through the approval process.

4. While a good bit of the plan can be implemented with internal first responders, most PR consultants will als be involved in helping their client implement the plan – this is a widely variable action as different clients have different needs, resources, etc. 

5. Once the plan is in place, most PR consultants will receive a small monthly retainer to be “on call” and to keep up with the changing needs. Depending on the size of the retainer, some consultants will make a site visit once a year, twice a year or quarterly to assess the environment and submit updates to the plan as needed.

6. The bulk of the retainer is to pay the consultant (or consultancy) to stay up-to-speed so if a crisis breaks, the consultant drops everything and rushes in to help manage the crisis.

7. Keep this in mnd: when a crisis breaks, most consultants operate on an hourly basis.  A typical arrangement is for a consultantto charge 1.5x the normal hourly for week-days and 2x normal hourly for weekends and holidays.  If you can negotiate it, it’s better to pay for crisis management time on a day rate rather than by the hour (crisis situations can rack up a lot of hours in a hurry). 

8. Be sure the PR consultant commits to managing a crisis situation on-site – “remote” crisis management has limits.

So, what constitutes a “crisis”?  It’s not all exploding buildings and earthquakes as Bissett Matheson Communication’s Duncan Matheson points out: “People involved in crisis management spend too much time focusing on the potential exploding type crisis, when statistics tracked over well more than a decade now show that exploding crisis have become very much the exception.”

“The much more common type of crisis is the building crisis – the one management should have seen coming, but because of action or inaction, mismanaged.  This is the more common type (and) is potentially just as devistating.” Duncan points to the most recent report from the Institute for Crisis Management as a reference for building (or smouldering) crisis.

The key take-away here:  Be prepared and work with an objective consultant (or team) who can help you spot the building crisis – not just attempt to expect the unexpected.

Do me a favor, would you?  Give it a few minutes and post a list of one to five “building” crisis in your organization.  I think we’ll be surprized to find that most of them fit within five to ten general categories. I’ll update this post based on the response to this and other requests posted to the discussion boards/forums I follow. 

Thanks in advance.