Social Media Reputation Management

In today's recession stricken market and unpredictable trading conditions, consumer trust is at an all-time low. Their confidence in brands is being chipped away every time a company fails to live up to customer expectations or standards. Companies can no longer rely on monitoring their offline resources and media history - more and more businesses are pushing time and money into monitoring social media sites in order to ensure they maintain a positive online reputation.

In the online world, brands share their results with customers, competitors, bloggers, and users who with one review or blog can bring down the whole perception of quality for future online and offline customers.  This produces an environment where actively managing, monitoring and repairing your online brand is crucial. Brands should be aware of guidelines in each of these areas to help it stay ahead of its competitors and avoid or repair negativity online.

Research Your Reputation

Researching your online reputation and finding out what is being said about you and where is vital to understanding how much work you have to put into to repairing negativities or boosting positives. Make reputation research a regular occurrence and create an inventory of your findings for future reference as the web is constantly changing along with your audience

Don't Try Too Hard to Impress Users

You can plaster flashy design, interactive bells and impressive whistles on your sites, blogs and social media pages, but if there's nothing of substance then you will have unimpressed users leaving and potentially saying bad things about their experience to their online contacts in a public forum.

Don't Treat Your Audience Like Statistics

Your audience may be spending their time complaining, reviewing, tweeting, commenting or posting but if treated like statistics then they will be unimpressed with your attitude towards your customers. There are many people out there that will take an interest in your business. Don't limit your brand's focus to a selected group or segment of "important people" thereby forgetting the growing audience - any one of whom could become one of those "important people" in the future.

Know Your Outlets

Know the places where your brand is appearing, whether its an obscure forum, purposefully set up social media site or personal blog. After all, how can you mange or repair your reputation if you don't know who's talking about you and where they go to do it? Remember, however, that it's not just the blogs you must look out for - some of the most negative comments come from the comments sections of blogs. If you're looking to defend your brand then these comments are the ones to take time to answer.

Give Your Brand Personality and a Face

Companies don't have conversations, people do. Remember that these feeds and sites are portals for your customers/clients to communicate about you and with you, a person - not a faceless corporation or business. Oscar Wilde said, "Being yourself is far easier than putting on a front." You are more likely to receive positive comments or repair negative comments by having a person take an interest in what customers are saying (through social media or blogs) because people can relate to a person who is speaking with them directly and answering their feedback than they can with an enquiry for or an email address.

Acknowledge the Good as well as the Bad

Remember reputation is made up of both negative and positive comments, reviews and feedback. Monitoring and acknowledging the positive is just as important. If you are already known on the web or offline then you need to remember that your customers helped you get there. Engage with users and customers leaving positive comments and attempt to build a community amongst your customers because those happy customers could be your strongest defence against negative comments when they happen.

Think before You Tweet

Twitter is a great way to give your brand personality and seem more 'human'; but for companies using it there is a thin line between good and bad. Remember tweets are automatically set to 'public access' so your foul ups are seen by all. Learn before doing and avoid the following:

• Don't "hard sell" through tweets
• Don't spam people or harvest email addresses for spamming
• Don't tweet about mediocre or old industry content
• Don't use ALL CAPS
• Don't spell things rong
• Don't over tweet
• And lastly, don't tweet while intoxicated

Finally, if you've learnt nothing from this post, at least take a page out of the 'book of real world' and treat online relationships similar to real-life relationships. Think of those traits in your staff or favoured people in your life (e.g., honesty, respect, confidence, uniqueness, informative and worth) then apply them to your online brand personality.