I was one among the 86 million viewers who watched the #Kony2012 YouTube video last week and until that had no clue about the “Invisible Children.” Just imagine what could happen if Joseph Kony were a product or a brand and the 86 million viewers were customers and prospects talking negatively about your brand online? Oh boy! that’s every PR and Marketing manager’s nightmare. The bigger question you should be asking is, “Am I prepared to respond to a crisis that’s spiralling out of control, thanks to Twitter and Facebook?”

You will be surprised how many companies still don’t have a social media monitoring system and have no clue what people are saying about their brand online. If you don’t know what your current online sentiment is, how are you going to come up with messaging especially during a crisis that neutralises your brand sentiment? This “frog in the well” attitude doesn’t help at all when your brand is being attacked on social channels. CRT/tanaka counsels it clients to first do a brand sentiment audit before engaging online and repeat the audit every six months to gauge if your PR and marketing efforts are actually helping you build a positive sentiment. If you are a brand that has recently been through a crisis or is subjected to frequently mitigating crisis due to the nature of your business, then a brand sentiment audit post crisis is a MUST.

If you have the budget and/or resources, do invest in gauging your online brand sentiment. At CRT/tanaka we do a comprehensive audit for our clients that is a combination of a Google Search Visibility Scan (where do you stand on SEO; what kind of search results/mentions is your brand receiving), Google Blog Search (what kind of blog mentions are you receiving; are they positive/neutral/negative), Radian-6 analysis of total online mentions (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Online Forums) and also Twitter and Facebook sentiment analysis. The brand sentiment audit guides our overall social media strategy and helps us smoothen the speed bumps we may encounter in future crisis situations.  

Key steps you should have established in-house to handle crisis online:

i) Implement a social media policy and socialize it within the enterprise. The last thing you want is different people within your organization tweeting or commenting on blog posts with different versions of your crisis.

ii) Establish a formal social media monitoring process: Allocate atleast ONE person on your team who is responsible for alerting you on any negative chatter that has the potential to go viral so you can qucikly proactively respond and nip it in the bud. With listening tools like Radian 6, you can receive real-time alerts on your brand mentions during a crisis. This helps you to effectively manage a crisis and respond in to customer concerns in a timely manner and also predict the course of possible negative mentions online. A social media monitoring process gives you the intelligence you need to protent and manage your brand’s reputation online so if you don’t have one, start today.

Train a Social SWAT team that understands 140 characters: Gone are the days when you had the luxury to call a press conference or wait until Monday morning because for some reason, most crises hit on a Friday late afternoon. Social media has forced organizations to respond in real-time during a crisis and companies are expected to offer round the clock updates on a multitude of social channels, not just an official press release. This 24/7 new media landscape demands that your organization have a well trained team of crisis ninjas who understand tone/messaging/crisis reponse in 140 characters. So identify your Social SWAT team members and train them to be your brand saviors online.

I have the greatest honor of sitting on a panel with the queen of social metrics and measurement, Katie Paine at PR News Measurement Conference in Washington D.C. on April 18th. We will be talking more about sentiment audit, online reputation during and after a crisis. Please join us if you are in the area. More details on the panel on “How to Measure Your Brand’s Reputation During and After a Crisis” available at http://www.prnewsonline.com/conferences/measurement_conf2012.html#1030

If you have questions/comments about how to monitor or measure brand sentiment or handling crisis on social channels, drop me note. I would love to hear from you.

I am so honored to have Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Director, Network Solutions, a CRT/tanaka client guest post with me today. Shashi is very well known in the DC region as a community evangelist for Network Solutions and was recently recognized as Washington’s Top-100 Tech Titans. He never ceases to amaze me with his knowledge of social media tools and applications, an innate sense of humor and willingness to help the Network Solutions community, all key ingredients for a good brand evangelist. Thank you Shashi!

This post is intended to help you create and maintain a strong online presence so when someone Googles your name, you appear to walk the social media talk. If done right, you could become a successful personal brand but please note that our philosophy on personal branding is to leverage it for community building NOT to turn into a narcissist that likes to tute his/her own horn 24/7 on social networks. We have a lot of those already. So let’s get started:

1) Setting up a Twitter account:

• Search for your friends in your contact list and connect with them
• Send an email to friends and colleagues that you have joined Twitter
• Set up a Twitter search for your keywords that are important to you that you may be looking for in Google ( example: Your name, company name, products, competitor)
• Check  and reply to mentions of @yourTwitter id
• Reply to DMs
• Share articles that interest you, good news about you, an event that  inspired you
• Retweet your network’s interesting tweets

2) Update and complete your LinkedIn profile:

• Connect to friends and colleagues
• Identify professional LinkedIn groups to join and participate in

3) Take Your Online Connections Offline to Increase Brand Exposure

• Attend local grass roots events
• Volunteer to conduct workshops and speak on topics you are skilled at
• Seek opportunities to attend and speak at events

4) Thought leadership through Content:

• Talk about the latest trends in your perspective preferably non- political and takes a view of how news and events affect common man
• Talk about good news and events of yourself and events of your close network
• Talk about your interests
• Announce your speaking events other announcements
• Invite guest posters or interview them using email questions

The above steps might seem a little daunting and time consuming but YOU can do it. If you want to see the results of what a robust online image looks like, just Google up Shashi Bellamkonda and you will see what I am talking about. I want to thank Shashi once again for sharing some great tips on how to walk the social talk. Now let’s get you there!

As I continue to convince the C-Suite at client companies to trust in social media, I find that it’s an easier sell when the company is struggling to fight a negative image online. Online sentiment is the cumulative effect of reviews, ratings, recommendations and in certain cases rants given by your customers, employees and sometimes just a casual passerby on the internet.  As Alex Wright from the New York Times rightly describes it, “for many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.”  The blog posts, tweets and Facebook updates being shared about a particular brand or company act as bricks and mortar for a company’s online reputation and also affect your SEO rankings to a large extent.  Have you asked yourself the following questions recently?

• How does your company look online?
• What are people saying about your brand or services online?
• What is your overall online sentiment? Positive, Neutral or Negative.
• How do you stack up against your competition in terms of online sentiment?
• What is the most dominant online perception your target audience has about you?

If you don’t have answers to the questions above, here are three simple steps to start managing your online reputation.

1. Monitor by Setting up Social Alerts: This may sound basic, I am still surprised at how many of my marketing and PR peers still haven’t taken the time to set up Google news and blog alerts for their own company, products as well as their competition. You can also set up Tweet alerts using Tweet Beep http://tweetbeep.com/. Monitoring and listening into how you are being referenced online is the very first step in online reputation management. Another good return on your marketing investment is to conduct a quarterly online reputation audit. CRT/tanaka does an extensive social media audit for its clients before venturing into any sort of strategic engagement online. Social media engagement without listening in and feeling the pulse of your community online is like shooting in the dark. So take half an hour to set up your basic alerts and start listening.

2. Analyze Your Social Reviews to Improve Your Business: This is a natural progression to the first step which is monitoring. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis format works well for online reputation as well. It is a good practice to regroup every quarter and analyze key themes, identify key concerns being expressed online or key contributors to positive feedback. Maria Ogneva from Biz360 blogs about the value of sentiment analysis to improve business efficiency on Mashable. To give you an e.g. we have a client that gets repeatedly mentioned for its higher price over its competitor’s products. So part of our recommendation from the daily monitoring was to take that feedback and present it to the Product Marketing folks. For another client, we discovered that their consumers were finding it difficult to navigate through their website and were tweeting about their difficulty in finding information that affects their buying. In my personal experience I have seen that companies that take their monitoring to the analysis stage are also the ones that benefit by delivering what their customers want versus what the company thinks they want.

3. Engage based on Online Sentiment: Now that you understand where your company stands in the eyes of the online user, start engaging with the blogger or the customer that complained about your service on Twitter. A simple comment saying, “Thank you for your feedback. We are working on resolving this issue” can do wonders in terms of transforming a negative sentiment to at the least a neutral sentiment. Of course comments need to be followed by action. One of CRT/tanaka’s clients that is in the web hosting space came to us with a very high negative online sentiment back in June 2008 and besides more strategic social media engagement efforts, a simple listen and comment strategy helped tremendously to change the company’s image online to a more favorable one. By diligently commenting back on blogs posts and responding to tweets, we started seeing an increase in mentions that recognized our efforts to listen and act on customer feedback.

You may still not believe in social media or its power to influence buying behavior but I hope you start paying attention to who is saying what about your brand online. All those tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts about your product are painting a picture online so let’s ensure it’s a picture that fulfills your business goals. Tell us what you are doing to keep an eye out on the World Wide Web to proactively manage your online image.

Image Courtesy: http://www.connecticity.nl/blog/

It’s about time Twitter started monetizing. In my opinion yesterday’s official announcement to draw money from ads is not such a bad thing for companies already engaged on Twitter.

I have repeatedly said this and will say it again, while Twitter is considered the ultimate viral machine to get your message out faster and is very successful especially in cause-related campaigns, case in point, Haiti fund raising; it has also become the first stop for customers to post their complaints and grievances. I see how companies like @WellsFargo, @ComcastCares and @Netsolcares handle customer complaints on Twitter and kudos to them for taking customer service to a whole new level with 140 characters.  Having said that, when you do a simple Twitter search on specific products/services, chances are you see a stream of “I am having an issue with this,” or “I am tired of waiting on the phone with company X’s tech support.” Think about a prospect looking at a stream of negative tweets? Yeah, you guessed it, chances are they are now considering my competition.

With promoted tweets, companies can now join a conversation when it turns negative. Let me explain. Right now without the ads, businesses have no effective way to neutralize negative tweets. Traditionally businesses that do engage actively on Twitter respond one-on-one to negative tweets, and when an issue becomes a crisis they’ll write a blog response. Both these tactics can easily get lost in the Twitter stream. Quoting Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, “Companies will be able to increase awareness in that instance when the iron is most malleable.”

The biggest benefit of the Twitter ads in my mind is that now you have an opportunity to better manage your company’s image online. When someone does a search on a keyword that you bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results along with all the not so positive tweets. See examples of Starbucks and Bravo’s Twitter ads here. I am sure these socially engaged brands must see some value in Twitter ads! What about you?

Image Courtesy: Lori Gama (http://lorigama.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/did-you-know-youre-naked-your-online-reputation-is-showing/)