I recently spoke about corporate reputation defense with a reporter for a pharmaceutical trade publication called MedAdNews. The article is finally on the publication’s website, and it provides some interesting insight into the challenges corporations face in protecting their reputations online. This issue is applicable to businesses of all sorts, not just pharmaceutical companies.

I remain deeply skeptical about most reputation defense services. One obvious problem is that many of these services claim to undo negative publicity after the fact. In a world where Google has essentially become an on-demand private detective for the masses, that’s an approach that simply won’t work. It can take months to counteract negative information that turns up on the first page of Google search results. In some cases, it simply won’t be possible to counteract negative search results.

Companies that care about their reputation need to be proactive about creating a positive search profile and strong consumer relations well in advance of any bad news. In a world of blogs and social networks that means participating online and actively engaging consumers in a transparent and authentic manner.

If this sounds time consuming, it can be. Not only that, chances are this new approach will require a skill set that might not fit neatly into existing job descriptions or departmental structures.

However, the payoff is clearly worth the effort. Companies that succeed in building goodwill with consumers and strong organic search results will be well positioned to weather any attack on their reputation in the future.

If you’d like to talk about building an effective social media strategy with an eye towards defending your corporate reputation online, give us a call.

• How To Protect Your Reputation Online
• The Thin Web Line

If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to work Twitter into your online brand and reputation monitoring efforts. While you’re at it, you may want to think about actually using Twitter as a way of engaging your customers.

Not so long ago Twitter seemed like it might be a passing fad. Recently, the service has matured to become a nearly indispensable social media tool. With Twitter’s regular outages (mostly) a thing of the past, usage is skyrocketing. As a result, the service is branching out beyond alpha-geeks and into the general population. More and more regular people are embracing Twitter as a way of communicating with friends and expressing their opinions to the masses. Frequently, those opinions involve complaints of some sort — some of those complaints may even be about your brand.

A few companies are starting to realize the value of monitoring Twitter. When TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington tweeted about his frustration with his Comcast internet service, a company executive contacted him within 20 minutes attempting to resolve the problem. Comcast apparently tracks Twitter as part of a comprehensive effort to monitor the social media space.

(Read more of Twitter and Your Brand)

As the importance of the monolithic corporate website wanes, blogs and social networks have emerged as critical tools allowing businesses of all sizes to connect with consumers in a more direct and meaningful way.

The best companies will use these tools as an opportunity to engage consumers in a dialog while respecting the social media ecosystem.

However, simply setting up a blog and sending your employees to dive into the deep end of the social media pool isn’t enough. Without a firm understanding of how social media works, the results can be lukewarm, at best, and disastrous, at worst.

Just how bad can a corporate social media campaign be? The following case study analyzes the unfortunate social media campaign of the DuroSport corporation. If you’re involved in planning social media strategy for your company, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to learn from DuroSport’s many mistakes.
(Read more of Worst Practices in Social Media Marketing)

Do you have a clue what your customers are saying about your company online? Do you follow the leading consumer blogs that discuss products and services in your industry? Have you given any thought to the sort of damage a disgruntled employee or unethical competitor might inflict on your company with an angry blog post?

Do you have an online reputation management strategy?

Unfortunately, for many businesses online reputation management is an afterthought. It’s only after something major goes wrong that businesses begin thinking about the issue, and by then it can be too late.

A recent New York Times article (via Pronet Advertising) documents some of the pitfalls that can occur when angry customers take their grievances to the web.

So, what’s a business to do? Here’s a checklist you can use to start developing your own online reputation management program:

(Read more of How To Protect Your Reputation Online)

It’s no secret that news cycles are shrinking. They have been ever since the advent of 24 hour cable news. The Internet only serves to shrink news cycles further. At some point in the near future the Onion’s 24 second news cycle won’t seem quite so funny.

Traditional media outlets have been struggling to adapt their formats in a world where their audience already knows the news. Meanwhile, communications professionals of all varieties are trying new strategies for disseminating their messages to audiences facing information overload.

While media organizations have been focused on competing in a world of increasing competition and decreasing audience attention span, a complex social media ecosystem has emerged to present us with an entirely new type of news cycle — the viral news cycle.

Blogs, social news aggregators, podcasts, and web video have proven to be a highly effective platform for propagating news, in a manner that couldn’t be more different from traditional media. While traditional news cycles offer a top down dissemination of information, viral news cycles have emerged as the result of news audiences sharing and filtering news directly with their peers.

In many respects, the viral news cycle exists in an entirely different dimension from the traditional news cycle. Traditional news cycles are linear, viral news cycles are jagged and unpredictable as stories work their way through a complex mesh of social media nodes.

(Read more of The Viral News Cycle)