America's Best Business Practices

In the past few weeks, we have had two very well received articles about brand and branding: Branding Is The Key to Differentiation and The Difference Between Brand and Branding. Now we would like to take it a step further and discuss how to monitor and protect your brand and branding.

So I teamed up with Phyllis Zimbler Miller, founder of the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program, instructor for Teach Me to Use Twitter Now, blogger, and National Internet Business Examiner at examiner.com, to share her thoughts with our readers.

The old nursery rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” may have been true in the days before the Internet.  But it is certainly not true now.

With the speed of light a very good brand can be shattered.  Several notorious cases are recounted in the book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss.

On the other hand, immediately fixing a problem can actually earn you more loyalty and lead to a lifetime customer/client than doing everything right.

Let’s look at some ways to monitor your reputation online, where there is the greatest risk to your brand being shattered at lightning speed. Then we’ll look at why problems can present unique positive brand-building opportunities.

One of the best ways to monitor your brand is to use Google Alerts for your company name, your name, your product name, and any other words that people might use in regards to you, your company and your products/services.

NOTE: If you use a phrase and put it in quotations (i.e. “America’s Best Business Practices”) it will only alert you when that exact phrase is used. If you do not put it in quotes, it will alert you to any combination of the words (i.e. business practices best used in America’s heartland, etc.).

Be sure you or someone in your small business monitors Google Alerts several times a day.  If you are mentioned in a negative context, immediately jump on the Internet and see how quickly and how well you can do damage control.

Whether you are active on Twitter or not you must assign someone in your small business to be active and to use tweetbeep.com or another Twitter monitoring application.  Twitter is very transparent – and if someone who has thousands of followers tweets something unfavorable about you, you want to know this ASAP so you can jump on damage control.

If you leave a comment on a blog post (presumably you’re leaving the URL back to your company website), make sure you indicate that you want to get the email notifications of the future comments on that blog post.  The reason for this is that you want to know if someone, in commenting on your comment, says something negative about you, your company, or your products/services.

This same philosophy goes for any online promotional opportunity in which you participate.  If you post articles on article directories and someone leaves a comment on your article, you want to make sure you are notified so that you can follow up immediately if needed.

(In any of the above cases, if something positive is said, you should also jump on that opportunity to make the most of your exposure and leverage the positive press, endorsement, tweet, or comment.)

Now let’s look at the opportunity presented by negative press.

Let’s imagine that you make widgets (the old-fashioned kind) and that someone has tweeted this remark:

The widget by [your company name] is lousy.  The thing broke the first time I used it and customer service said there are no returns.

Then let’s imagine that you receive notice of this comment through tweetbeep.com alerts to your email or to the email of whoever in your company is on Twitter.  You are especially incensed because customer service is tasked with taking back a broken widget without question.  But, you’ll speak to customer service later.  Your first priority is damage control.

So you – or the person in your company on Twitter – tweets this response:

@[username of person who tweeted the comment] Please email me at [your own email address] so that I can immediately send you a free replacement widget.

Wow!  You achieve immediate brand equity with the person who tweeted – plus anyone else following this exchange – for stepping in yourself to fix the problem.  This then becomes a memorable event related to you, your company, and its products/services. In fact, much more so than if the widget had worked in the first place and the buyer hadn’t had to contact the maker of the widget.

Of course, the next step is to be more proactive – to solicit comments and problems BEFORE they happen.  So you might tweet:

We’ve just introduced our newest widget version.  We’d love feedback at [email address].

Some companies may choose to take this even further, soliciting advice for what the next product introduction should be:

We’re working on the next generation of our widgets.  Are there any features you’d particularly like to see included?  Suggestions emailed to [email address].

Now you’re getting a reputation as someone who cares both about maintaining your good name and about having a brand that is responsive to consumer wants/needs. This will create more goodwill to fall back on in case your customer service department slips up again – or something else happens that you couldn’t control beforehand.

If you can ride in to the rescue within a reasonable amount of time (hours, not days) after a negative mention of you, your company, or your product, you can usually turn the negative into a positive if you understand how to do this. Can you see why it’s so important to have a brand monitoring system in place to make sure you can quickly make lemonade out of lemons?

If you would like to contact Phyllis Zimbler Miller, you can do so at pzmiller@millermosaicllc.com or through LinkedIn.

After Phyllis and I discussed this article I went to tweetbeep.com and signed up to monitor mentions of me and this blog. Now, I have used Google Alerts for years and found it very useful. However, not being on Twitter, I was unaware of TweetBeep Alerts. So I thought I would try it. I was astonished by the amount of chatter about the posts on this blog! Thank goodness it was all good. As I refine my monitoring process using tools like Google and TweetBeep, I suspect I will find more of which I am unaware. This revelation motivated me to sign up for a Twitter account. Please bear with me as I learn how to use Twitter. Look for my thoughts on this in a future post.

Those who enjoyed this article, also enjoyed:
Branding Is The Key to Differentiation
The Difference Between Brand and Branding

If you would like to contact me, you can do so by emailing me at mike.clough@bestbizpractices.org or visiting my LinkedIn page.