Marketing Rapid Response Process

Summary

In the event of industry changes, competitive moves, news about the company, security breaches/vulnerabilities, and other opportunities to add value and support our customers, we will sometimes need to respond rapidly. In order to effectively respond, Sourcegraph marketing (especially Comms, Social Media and Community) needs to monitor news and trends and the marketing team needs to partner cross-functionally to create and publish responses quickly. Additionally, Sourcegraph marketing needs to support the company with content, data and soundbytes for social, blog posts, customer resources, sales assets, etc.

Process

Everyone at Sourcegraph can help monitor for and escalate rapid response opportunities. If a rapid response opportunity arises, please alert Amie Rotherham (Director of Global Comms) via Slack or text message. If outside of working hours, prioritize text message (cell numbers are in Slack profiles). Rapid response collaboration will happen in a new channel specific to the scenario that will be created by the marketing team. The Director of Global Comms will propose a recommendation on how to best proceed with an external company message and recruit the right people to accomplish the plan (this becomes the #1 priority for each person on the rapid response team, unless it’s physically impossible or their manager provides a replacement). A template for a rapid response can be found here (add link)

The CEO will address the rapid response alert within 1 HOUR (10am ET - 9pm ET). Urgency will be assessed and will be determined to be 3 HOURS (ASAP) or 24 HOURS turnaround, and the action plan will be scoped accordingly, with a bias toward releasing an update and/or response as soon as possible and iterating as more news becomes available. Any disagreements on urgency or action will be escalated immediately to the CEO for a final decision. While each response will be a custom plan, the rapid response team may include the following people (as appropriate) to help execute on the agreed upon plan:

  • Product Marketing/Product Managers responsible for technical and product content and industry expertise and context (will pull in Eng and Security as needed)
  • Demand Gen/Social responsible for writing/editing and publishing
  • Content platform team responsible for any non-blog web page changes needed
  • Community responsible for monitoring and responding in public channels

Owners

  • Communications & Social: Amie Rotherham
  • PMM: Andy Schumeister (and specific PMM depending on situation)
  • Product: Quinn Slack
  • Community: Justin Dorfman
  • Content Platform: Elzanne Wentzel
  • Customer Engineering: Aimee Menne
  • Legal: Tammy Zhu

If this is a P0 situation, Quinn Slack, Beyang Liu and the executive team will also be looped in immediately for visibility and support.

Please have the author of the statement/blog post comment with their approval before publishing, even if you have received approval in another, non-public channel.