Business UFO in Kyiv, Ukraine?
On May, 11 residents of Kyiv city, Ukraine witnessed a very strange picture: light pillars rising from different locations in the city. What was it supposed to mean?
As it turned out later, an event company had used this creative way to show that all quarantine easing is silent about events industry under a hashtag of #stopculturalquarantine. As countries are now starting to even do some air transportation predictions, all remain quiet about when the events companies will be able to start their work.
Being an international speaker, I do feel the pain as all the business events are either postponed or cancelled.
However, I think that this is an outcry of many more businesses.
So many business owners are not sleeping at night because they either have to lay people of for quickly take their business online (not as easy as it may seem) or start long and tiresome communications with vendors or facing million other challenges.
This is the time for businesses to SPEAK UP but in a very different way than most businesses are used to.
Please, just please, stop using this official, cold and detached tone of voice, unless you are a NATO representative. At the time when we see your cats, dogs, kids and wife on a zoom call background, it is very weird to then read or hear the police-like memos that CEOs are sending out to employees or clients. The more detached CEOs and executives are trying to appear to their employees and clients now, the more harm they bring to their company HR brand and even sales predictions. No one wants a nosy leader when we are literally all in the same position now: neither CEOs, nor employees, nor even the boards comprised of Ivy League alumni really know what to do. We are all only building hypothesis as there has never been a crisis like that before, so no one really knows what will follow next.
“Be exceedingly human!”, — as John DiJulius says it.
Show the backstage of your business, show your employees.
KLM airlines did a great thing in the beginning of the lockdown when their call-center just couldn’t process the number of requests. They did a video showing their employees working from home and saying that they will surely get back to every single question but it will take some time. Et voila! We are humans, passengers’ rage calmed down and it has helped the company to process issues with higher efficiency.
Show your home office, your studio, your manufacturing processes. Just take your phone, do a video of everything that can be shown to the public (check with compliance department first :)) and post it in social media.
A friend of mine who is a travel agent for old vineyards in Florence, Italy is now filming the vineyards, their owners, telling their family stories and sharing it all with potential clients. The effect of this? Her clients can’t wait when the first flight leaves for Italy. Now, she could have done advertising, right? The effect of that? None. Because we don’t connect with ‘a company’, ‘a product’ or ‘an ad’, we connect with people, and that trend is at its highest peak now.
