Your Firm’s Reputation – an Important Reason to Pursue Social Media
http://flickr.com/kirinqueen/
The only way to be successful at online reputation management (ORM), is to routinely monitor what is being posted on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc. about your firm and personnel, and then to respond. Benefits of responding to negative comments include pushing those comments into search engine obscurity with your own more creditable content (which you can probably get to rank higher in search) or heading off any real problems that need to be addressed within your firm.
ORM In Action
Customer complaints can quickly damage a company’s reputation. A recent case study, featuring the American Automobile Association (AAA), showed how a service orientated firm should respond. Triple A started tracking social media mentions of their company and executives using a paid monitoring service. This greater awareness of public opinion turned out to be an opportunity to be proactive, rather than reactive, or worse still, completely unaware. With this information, AAA gained the ability to quickly redirect complaints to customer care channels and to fix problems as they were alerted to them, such as broken web links, avoiding the possibility of bad publicity going viral and snowballing online.
At a social media seminar last year, Debbie Curtis-Magley, PR Manager of UPS, shared her experiences with handling an attack via social media, which came not from a customer, but from a competitor—Federal Express. There was proposed legislation regarding labor law that Fed Ex tried to spin as UPS requesting a government ‘bailout,’ which was not true.
Fed Ex launched their attack on UPS with persuasive videos and misleading language using multiple social media channels. It quickly became a hot topic with bloggers and forums and was covered by respected media outlets such as the New York Times. Something like this can happen to any company.
Are You Prepared?
One of Debbie’s main points was that UPS’ success in defusing this story was only possible because UPS already had an established social media presence. In this case, it was on Twitter, giving UPS the authority and trust within that social media community to be heard. If, they had attempted to set up an account on day two during this social media flak, in her opinion, they would have failed.
The final take-away from Debbie’s thoughtful presentation were her five tips on Social Media Defense:
- Start monitoring social media now.
- Build your online voice now. If you wait until your reputation is attacked, it will be too late.
- Empower and train your staff about best practices (such as always identifying yourself as a company representative when using social media). Have a plan, in place, on how to engage people online.
- Understand when to respond and when not to respond (not every post requires engagement, monitoring content will help educate/guide you as to when it’s necessary). Note that AAA, in the earlier case study, only responds to 100 to 200 social media comments out of 8,500 a month.
- A PR crisis can be an opportunity to prove the value of social media within your company.
You don’t need to allocate a lot of resources. Debbie’s team was basically herself and one employee, but you should set up a social media program to acknowledge the reality that you can not control what people may say about your firm or your employees online. You need to be aware and be able to respond. The best defense, as they say in football, is a good offense.
