What Others Think of You Matters: Manage and Boost Your Corporate Reputation Using Social Media

Podcasts. Blogs. Virtual Worlds. YouTube. Facebook. MySpace. Flickr. Second Life. These make up the new face of the Internet. And they drive your reputation. So, how can you use them to both track and enhance your corporate reputation?

Today’s media landscape is evolving, stretching far beyond traditional radio, television, and print, and the days of managing your company’s reputation with a mere press release are history. Now your customers are the ones doing the talking, thereby defining your reputation.Consumer-generated media—also known as social media—has taken over, and if you don’t take control, it will control you.

Anything and everything is news. Blogs make anyone a commentator; camera phones make everyone paparazzi, says Kirk Stewart, executive vice president, APCO Worldwide, a public affairs and strategic communication firm in New York.

“With technology, nothing is local. Everything can be everywhere in a matter of minutes,” he says.

Additionally, new media and old media work in tandem these days, says Robert Pearson, vice president, corporate communications, Dell Inc. “They feed off each other. What’s mentioned in a blog becomes a media story and vice versa.”

Bottom line: Bad news about your company travels fast. The best way to reign in the critics? Create your own social media strategy.

Setting the Scene
Consumer-generated media is powerful and pervasive. Chances are, your customers, clients, employees, and prospective employees engage in it to some extent. Just how much of an impact is it making? According to Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, a New York–based web 2.0 Internet marketing communications agency that specializes in social media marketing:
• social media is highly prominent in search engine results;
• if you Google a product, a good portion of the top 10 results are from actual consumers;
• people believe other consumers are the best source of information about products;
• 77 percent of adult Internet users think blogs are a good way to get information about a company or product;
• 39 percent of adult Internet users report reading blogs;
• 120,000 blogs are created per day;
• Technorati—an Internet search engine for searching blogs—tracks more than 70 million blogs;
• 45 percent of adult Internet users have created content online;
• 54 percent of adult Internet users have watched video online;
• YouTube gets 34 million visitors permonth; and
• the average amount of time spent on YouTube is 28 minutes.

“This is where reputations are being formed,” Key says. “Consumers are the best and most trusted advertisers.”

How you conduct your business is much more important today because everyone can know what you do and how you do it, says APCO’s Stewart. As a result, transparency is required, adds Sarah Skerik, vice president, distribution services, PR Newswire.

“Transparency is not an option. It’s more about how you manage it,” says Christine Johnson, director, global client management, Shaker Recruitment Advertising Communications. “If you embrace technology, transparency will happen. The company will look more trustworthy.”

To be completely transparent, be authentic, says Skerik. Tell the truth, apologize if necessary, and own the company action if you’ve done something wrong. You’ll be found out anyway, she advises. And don’t mask your company’s voice by a third party—for example, avoid ghost bloggers. Tell your story yourself.

That’s what Microsoft did. It wanted to prove to the  world that it wasn’t the stuffy place its critics made it out to be. So, five employees started the company’s Channel 9 blog to show what really went on in the company, says Johnson.

“You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation, and perception is reality.” Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Creating Your Social Media Strategy

Find Your first step begins with a reputation audit, says Evan Kraus, senior vice president, APCO online. Before you can really implement a course of action, you need to find out what your reputation is—in other words, what consumers are saying about you.

You can find this out by searching Technorati or BlogPulse (a search engine for blogs that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere) for your company’s name, and see what relevant blog posts come up. Also search Facebook and MySapce for the same thing. Even Googling your company’s name will provide valuable information. About 95 percent of all interaction on the Internet starts with a search engine, and top results
are often blogs and conversation content, says Bonin Bough, executive vice president, social, interactive and emerging media, WeberShandwick Worldwide.

Conduct similar searches for your competitors, advises PR Newswire’s Skerik. Then chart the posts for 90 days, both for your company and its competitors, instructs Dell’s Pearson.

Listen Once you’ve charted the postings about your company, it’s time to listen to what your influencers are saying and gauge your relevance. Two types of content exist: above the waterline and below the waterline, says
Converseon’s Key. The top 20 to 30 search engine results are what’s considered above the waterline and it’s usually where people stop reading. You need to understand the conversation below the waterline.

Web analytics software, such as BuzzLogic and Conversation Miner, are designed to map conversations below the waterline and work by scouring more than 70 million blogs and over 90 million newsgroups, social networks, podcasts, question and answer venues, reviews, social media, and other forms of consumer-generated media. They measure metrics that include shared voice, topic detection, sentiment around the topic, and the
influence of the writer (i.e. how often he or she is quoted). You can also use additional software to measure and analyze other metrics. They include: SiteMeter—tracks traffic on a given site; TruthLaidBear—tracks audience
size; Google Blog Search Beta (keyword: “link to”)—shows who is linking to the blog.

Then select and read the conversations, comments, and blogs with the most substantial readerships.

• Determine the source of conversation. Where is most conversation occurring—blog? Newsgroup?
• Really understand what’s being said. Pay attention to the language they use to talk about your product, service, or industry, and take the tone into account (i.e., is it enthusiastic, accusatory, serious, informational?). “Good opportunities rely on listening, not talking. Your audience is in control,” says Skerik.
• Find themes. For example, do most conversations revolve around specific topics, such as customer service, regulatory issues, or text messaging between mothers and children?
• Look for authority and influence. You can measure the authority of a conversation by the number of links, social media penetration, and visibility of venue within most important search engine results, says Converseon’s Key. Also look at the capacity for viral communication and outside links. Placement on a small blog can still get a large audience and extend
the life of your story.
• Look for relevant content. A blog can have “authority” but it may be off-topic. Does the writer have a shallow or deep understanding of your brand?
• Use the blogroll. This is a list of links to other blogs the blogger respects, and usually appears to the side of the blog. Bloggers will often write about things posted on these blogs. Looking at the blogroll gives insight into a community.
• Look for conversation leaders, and understand who’s leading the conversation. Who are the most frequent and visible “voices”? What are they talking about and what is their sentiment?
• Measure polarity of what’s being said. Score the entries as positive, negative, neutral, ormixed. Then map the conversation leaders as allies,
opponents, or neutral.

“You can’t manage your reputation if you don’t know what it is and what  drives it.” Kirk Stewart, Executive Vice President, APCO Worldwide

If you collect this kind of data regarding conversations over a 30 to 60 day period, you will start to see trends, says Key. Ask: Is sentiment changing? What topics are emerging, and which are becoming less popular? Then you can form benchmarks and determine by what percentage you want to increase positive sentiment.

Plan Now that you have the information, what do you do with it? Make the data actionable, says Key. “Define your strategy. It’s different for every company,” he says.

Think about your current challenges, the messages you need to convey, and your key audience. Also decide what opportunities are at hand—do you want to position your company as a thought leader? How might you achieve
that role? Do you want to develop a relationship with a particularly influential website or blogger?

If your company is facing a torrent of criticism or dissatisfaction, you need to address that first, says Dell’s Pearson. “Then you can do the fun stuff, such
as using collaborative environments.”

Next, establish a production process for your content, whether it be editorial, video, or audio. Set up editorial calendars and technical workflows in advance. And before you write the content, develop themes and storyboarding concepts that will suit your audience.

Key also recommends making sure you have the correct infrastructure to support the platforms you wish to use. Consider your portal strategies, hosting issues, and social media applications.

Additionally, don’t forget to train the people who will be proving the new media content. For example, teach the do’s and don’ts of blog writing, blogging ethos, how blogging is different from mainstream media, editorial
independence versus corporate objectives, and dealing with criticism.

Finally, make sure the compliance department is on board, especially since lawyers are often afraid of social media, says Key. And ask them to develop a blog policy.

Engage Now it’s time to formally launch your initiative for the public. The ways you can get involved are endless. Engage with the communities that are most active and influential, and place content in places people visit most. Here are some examples of what others are doing:

Tell your story on a blog. Dell uses 10 languages to tell its story on the Direct2Dell blog, which serves as the company’s “wire service.” Since becoming transparent on the Internet, beginning in August 2006, negative sentiment has dropped from 48 percent to 23 percent, according to Dell’s Pearson. He says that using multiple tongues has helped. “About 10 languages reach about 95 percent of the world’s population. If you want to
be truly global, you need to be online in all 10 languages,” says Pearson.

“If you don’t express yourself…others will.” Dr. Charles J. Fombrun, CEO
and Founder, Reputation Institute

Become part of the dialog. Encourage ideas, feedback, input, and conversation, says Pearson. After Dell launched its Ideastorm page for collecting suggestions from users/customers, it received 10,000 ideas in 6 months, and new products were introduced rapidly as a result. “The crowd is smarter than us,” says Pearson. “How do you take the ideas and institutionalize them throughout the company? Make your customer
walk your hallways with you.”

Another company that interacts with its customers is Mars North America. As part of its “My M&Ms” launch to print personalized messages on M&Ms candies, it erected a life-sized, inflatable M&M that looked like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, says WeberShandwick Worldwide’s Bough. Then it ran a photo contest where regular people and food bloggers took pictures of the M&M and e-mailed them to a designated page in Facebook.

Companies are also using Facebook and MySpace to converse with the Gen Y talent market, says Johnson. Ernst & Young, the consulting and accounting firm, has even recruited on Facebook, adds Shaker Recruitment’s Johnson.

Use your “e-idols.” Some of today’s new “celebrities” are everyday people who get thousands of hits on social media sites such as YouTube, says Bough. “They could be potential spokespeople for your brand,” he says.

When WeberShandwick was looking for a way to get new media coverage for client KFC, it searched the KFC logo and found video of a man who draws images using his hands and condiments. KFC made a video of
him drawing a KFC logo with teriyaki sauce and put it on YouTube. “The guy already had a fan base, so he got KFC extra hits,” says Bough.

 Enter virtual worlds. Use a simulated social networking community to communicate with others. Real estate company IHG launched hotel space on Second Life and rented out meeting rooms. On one occasion, it held a panel discussion that attracted speakers from Kraft, Coca-Cola, and other large companies, says Bough. Other organizations, including IBM, Manpower, GE, Accenture, Sodexho, US Cellular, and Shell have used Second Life for recruitment activities, adds Shaker Recruitment’s Johnson.

Monitor After you’ve launched your platform, repeat the audit and conversation mining processes to see if your reputation has changed and what the sentiment is. Continue to monitor this on an ongoing basis.

One Caveat
Asking your customers and clients to interact with your brand can be edgy and fun, but enter the arena with your eyes open. Consumer-generated media is less controlled, says Converseon’s Key, so remember there are risks involved in using it. “User-generated content can be your worst nightmare,” adds PR Newswire’s Skerik.

Here are three examples of user-generated content gone bad:

• American Apparel opened a store in Second Life, and users formed the Second Life Liberation Army to eject the retailer. They felt it was contributing to the overcommercialization of the site.
• Chevrolet decided to let customers post homemade video ads onYouTube to promote its Tahoe vehicle. But instead of touting how great the vehicles are as Chevy had hoped, users created negative ads about how SUVs contribute to global warming and guzzle gasoline.
• Two brothers had problems with their iPod batteries. They wrote to Apple several times and even to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, but got no help, says Converseon’s Key. So, they made a movie about how unhelpful Apple was and posted it on YouTube. “It became one of the top movies, which was bad news for Apple,” he says.