How can you protect your company’s reputation and brand in the various social media environments?
You can’t. Companies wish they could, but they can’t. But you never really had control of your brand in the first place. You don’t really own your brand image; that’s in the minds of your customers, and you can’t control the minds of your customers.
If someone has a bad experience buying your pet food, that’s it. That’s their perception. The customer owns the brand, and then other influences can move them away from that perception.
As a company, you can’t control if someone blogs about bad service. But what you can control is having better products and service. The way you can make sure that no one blogs about a bad experience is to make sure that no one has one. If you have better customer relations and better customer communications, no one has a reason to go on a blog and say something bad about you.
One of the smartest things you can do is monitor what people are saying about you and about your competitors. What are their likes and dislikes about every area of interest around your brand, your competitors, your products and services, and your customer relations? Monitoring those conversations can be as good as any market research that you would spend millions of dollars for.
Is it better to manage your social media in-house or to outsource it?
It depends on your company’s talent, expertise and knowledge. If your company can benefit from social media — and every company can — and you don’t have the internal talent to do it, or the budget to hire internally, rather than spend $300,000 to manage it, you could outsource it for $100,000.
Should you encourage your employees to push out your company’s message via social media?
I would not want my employees just randomly out there representing my brand if that’s not part of their job. You want your social media effort to be strategic and coordinated.
If your marketing department understands social media, you should work that into your marketing plan and have your marketing people researching the competition, going into user groups and getting involved in discussions about your company, your brand, your products and services to advance your communication strategy.
Social media is not going away. It’s a whole new world, and as a company or a brand, you’d better get up to speed fast or you’re not going to be here in five years.
Tim Gibbons is president and CEO of Level2 Communications Inc. and provides Tampa Bay WorkForce Alliance with Web site and blog maintenance. Reach him at (813) 956-8950 or [email protected].
