“One last check of Twitter,” I said to myself laying in bed around 22:30 on Thursday night, June 15th. What could possibly be…
Oh.
And with that, I retrieved my computer and got busy, posting to probably half a dozen client LinkedIn feeds about the breaking and urgent news of the day, really of the month and year for people invested in the state of global supply chains.
By the morning, the emails were pouring in with requests from Position : Global’s clients – they needed stories and they needed them yesterday.
On that day, everything stopped and Position : Global morphed from an agency into a breaking newsroom, ingesting information from a constellation of local, national and global outlets covering the story and synthesizing them into unique pieces of content for each company. I don’t think we’ve had the need to do it since the China 301 days when double-digit duties were being imposed with a scant few days’ notice.
When stories like this happen and clients each need original content, it’s an example of what I call “being an expert at playing the same Boggle board a dozen different ways.”
Boggle, for those who may or may not remember, is a game with sixteen lettered dice that are shaken inside a container with a 4 x 4 grid and come to rest in each compartment. You then flip over a timer and see how many words you can make out of those sixteen letters. Hence the analogy.
It’s not just the story, though. Like a newsroom, reacting like this takes the entirety of an organization. It requires writing, editing, graphic design, SEO, website management and social media publishing because for each story, we had to:
- Write the story with not just the breaking news, but how it would impact our clients’ respective audiences.
- Edit it.
- Create a minimum of two custom graphics to post on client websites and on social media (primarily LinkedIn, Instagram or both).
- Create SEO meta, tags and alt-tags for all the images.
- Post on websites.
- Post on social media.
On Friday, June 16th, we did this for a dozen clients across the United States in a little under eight hours – no small feat when you consider all the moving parts that are involved.
Position : Global’s value to our clients was fully on display that day. Our customers are used to working quickly to respond to the urgent needs of clients at a moment’s notice. Their ability to quickly get news and analysis like this out, though, isn’t as quick, and it’s one of the key reasons our clients trust us as industry experts to be watching on their behalf and being in a position to react as fast – or faster – than they can to get the word out.
If trying to keep your customers informed about what is happening out there is something you’d like to be better at, don’t figure out how to do it internally – contact us to learn how a content strategy, augmented by a proactive industry partner who knows what is important to you and your audience, will set you apart from your competition.
