Taking Responsibility for Managing your Online Brand
People are talking about you and your business. Do you know what they are saying?
In the past, people used to talk about you and your business either person to person, over the phone or perhaps in letters. If you really had a problem you may have hit the TV news. With the boom in social media, people still have the same conversations – but now they are taking place in forums, blogs, social networking sites, online video sites and wikis.
This is both a brilliant thing and a real challenge. In the past the spread of the information about your business was limited by the number of people who were watching or reading at that particular time. "Yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping" was a popular saying suggesting that you didn't have too much to worry about if something bad was said about you or your business as people would forget.
With the boom in the net and social media, people are having exactly the same conversations BUT the internet never forgets. One negative comment out in the ether sticks around longer than gum on a shoe.
And given the millions of people who use the net – one comment attracts another comment which attracts another comment. Pretty soon you have a whole bunch of negative stuff just hanging around waiting for people to discover when they search for your product or service.
The other challenge is social media ranks the pants off much traditional media. This means, comments on Facebook or Twitter for example appear higher in search engine rankings than un-optimised websites.
Imagine – when someone looks up your business or service on Google and when they hit the search button the first few lines of results are all negative comments. What would they do?
One of the fascinating things about human nature is gossip is fascinating to many people.
People love to hear the dirt on other human beings, so of course they will check out a few of the comments to see what is being said. How likely are they to buy after reading these comments? (This is why the headline "Don't buy XYZ until you have read this review" works really well at attracting people to read the content).
Of course the reverse is also true – imagine if all the social media comments said great things about you and your business. How fantastic would that be for your sales?
So what do you need to do to manage your online brand? The first thing is to understand that social media is now a fact of every businesses life. You can't run away from it – you need to learn to live with it and work with it. You need to take responsibility for managing your brand – both offline and online.
Here's a few tips to make this easier:
Start with a few simple alerts
Set up a Google Alerthttp://www.google.com/alerts for your name, your company, and key employee's names. This is free to set up and will email you when your name is used around the net.
Set up a Twitter Search for the same information. There's lots of ways to do this- I personally have these set up into my Tweetdeck (a very useful tool to manage all my Twitter information).
Work out your response
If the comment is positive, a thank you note is appropriate. Just a quick "Thanks – glad you liked it" goes a long way.
If the comment is negative – first stop and breathe. The temptation will be to leap in and race off an answer. Unlike when you get an angry customer at the counter, you have time to make sure you give the best possible response to resolve the situation – so stop and plan your response.
If you get a negative comment you have six options:
1. "Flame the troll" (online speak is so wonderfully colourful). This means you take great delight in getting into a slanging match with the negative person. This is not a good look for a business – so avoid this one at all costs.
2. Remove the comment. If the comment is out and out defamatory or a lie, you can ask the site owner to remove the offending comment/picture/post. This rarely works and depending on the site can leave you open to additional comments about your bully boy tactics.
3. Ignore it. An OK strategy if the website is a very low ranking one and appears on page four million on the search engines when someone looks for your company.
4. Deal with it. Find a way that you can deal with it in a positive way. Post your own response expressing concern and apologising. Make an offer for the person to contact you so you can refund or do whatever is needed to make it right. Thank them for sharing this information so you can make sure it won't happen again.
5. Learn from it. You can post a link to the comment on your own company blog or website and invite comments from other customers on how you can do better next time and if anyone else has had the same experience. Great free market research!
6.Drown it is positive reviews. Find ways to encourage happy customers to also place their reviews or comments. Some clever strategies include You Tube contests involving video clips using your product, adding in a review us section to your website, link to positive reviews on other sites, ask for reviews in your newsletter.
Make sure you do this regularly. Dealing with feedback both positive and negative is an integral part of doing business – it is not an add-on. Build it into your everyday processes and you will soon create a positive and strong online brand presence.
HR Tip of the Week - Designate Roles to Monitor your Online Brand
Monitoring your brand in the media and online requires someone to be accountable for actively doing this for you and your company as part of their job description.
If it is left to everyone - no-one will regularly do it. Let your team know whose role it is in case they discover things that the nominated team member may not be aware of.
For larger companies, whole teams can be dedicated to finding comments about your company and managing your response. These teams need a combination of great technological savvy as well as fantastic customer relations abilities.
You can outsource aspects of this through hiring media monitoring or social media monitoring companies if your budget is large enough or if you are in crisis mode.
Whatever you decide, make sure you have very clear and written guidelines to assist your team know what is an acceptable response, and when they may be crossing the line into unethical or inappropriate behaviour.
These roles require close contact with a member of your senior executive team to help ensure they stay on track and to also ensure management are aware of issues and trends as they arise.
As we are on the topic of protecting your online brand I thought I would share with you another of the tools I couldn't live without - DL Guard.
What DL Guard does is manage the safe delivery of my e-books. Why?
Well I found there were a few problems with my original system of a few years back. People who could read code could skip buying my product from Paypal and just skip straight to the download page.
I was tipped off when I checked my Google Analytics page and found my download page was being accessed by lots of sites in India and South Africa - and funnily enough no sales were made in that day. My previous work was being stolen right from under my nose!
Then I heard from a colleague that Google had actually indexed their PDF e-book and it was turning up in the search engines - no one had to buy it!
I did a LOT of research (those of you who know me, know that this usually means many late nights checking out the pro's and con's of each product), before I finally settled on DL Guard.
What it does it make your e-product download safe, secure and increases your control over the whole process.
It has a whole stack of other features I haven't yet used including membership site capacity and shopping carts for multiple purchases. These are on my development drawing board for later on this year.
And ... I couldn't be happier! I have had it installed for about a year now and have found it to be absolutely brilliant. It was easy to install and integrated easily with my autoresponders and Paypal/Clickbank.
It has worked like clockwork in terms of managing my downloads and is something I wouldn't think of doing without in my my business.
If your business delivers any form of e-product including e-books, MP3 recordings, videos or white papers - then you need to protect your information. For me personally, DL Guard was the best option.
In this post I look at some of the recent cases where managers have taken action over people placing inappropriate or ill-considered comments on social media.
I also look at some of the ethical issues that social media brings to managers - and how these issues are not yet on the radar of most businesses.
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Legal stuff: This newsletter is intended to provide you with general guidelines for your business. You should seek specific advice for your situation rather than relying only on this newsletter
Earnings disclaimer. Some of the content may include advertorial information, which means I may receive financial compensation for the products I recommend. But - unless I know and trust the product, I will not recommend it.
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One of the fascinating things about human nature is gossip is fascinating to many people. 
Monitoring your brand in the media and online requires someone to be accountable for actively doing this for you and your company as part of their job description. 
