Michael Tulipan, a partner at MST Creative PR, a boutique company that specializes in PR, social media, and digital marketing for restaurants, wine, and food was generous with his time recently in sharing with us his thoughts on how agencies can survive during corona times.
As follows are Tulipan’s thoughts – he said “….this has been an incredibly difficult year – openings have been delayed, some indefinitely and all our events were canceled. Some of our restaurant clients have closed permanently while others pivoted to takeout/delivery/outdoor dining or closed temporarily and have not reopened yet. We pivoted our services to offer more digital marketing services including website development and logo design, as well as social media management for individuals. We also work with more wine clients and meal delivery services vs. restaurants.”
Like so many others, MST Creative PR is working from home and they said, “Technology is everyone’s friend right now.
Tulipan offers tips for working from home and how its worked for his agency:
- It’s important to maintain communications and even over-communicate so we’ve been using tools like Slack more than when we were in the office.
- Each weekday, we have a morning call together over What’s App to strategize. At the end of the day, they send us an email outlining the work they did that day and their priorities for the following day. This ensures things don’t fall through the cracks and we communicate via email, Slack, and text extensively.
- Keeping up the morale and camaraderie is extremely important, as is helping to relieve stress and pressure. To give everyone a bit of respite from daily news, we’ve added channels to Slack that are not just work or client-related – things like #justforlaugh channel where everyone can share a funny joke, meme or cartoon – anything that helps us all laugh a bit
- On Fridays, we have a virtual happy hour over Google video conferencing. This helps us stay connected and also to socialize a bit, which was very important when everyone was still staying at home. Only 1 of our employees are currently in the city and 2 others have relocated temporarily out of state.”
