FreshNetworks Blog

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments with social media is that it allows anybody, from a large global consumer brand to an individual to build their personal brand online. To some extent some of the same rules apply – decide what you want to do and why you are using social media and then make sure you are using it in a way that helps you to achieve this. For individuals, of course, the most important thing is acknowledge in the first place that by using social media you are building your own brand, whether you intend it or not. The main advice is that only you can be in charge of your brand online and in social media, and so you should take control of it.

This is important – especially for job-hunters. I recorded a podcast for Guardian Careers last week talking about the importance of owning your personal brand and building your network online in social media. We also discuss:

• what a social media agency is and what it does
• why it’s best if a brand manages its own presence online (but why it usually needs expert help to do this)
• how you can network and build your connections online
• the best use of LinkedIn (and how this is different from Facebook)
• why you need to be aware that people are able to find information out about you even if you haven’t told them
• that you should take control of your own brand and use privacy settings sensibly to help you do this

Oh and you’ll also find out how I got from a degree in French and Russian at Cambridge to be where I am today.

You can listen to the podcast on the Guardian website: Careers Talk: Job hunting using social media

The podcast is also on iTunes

It’s been an interesting afternoon for Vodafone. Their VodafoneUK Twitter account has attracted a lot of attention after one Tweet in particular stood out from their usual customer service conversations online. In between the Tweets resolving network coverage and other queries one stood out. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

The official response from Vodafone (as you can see from almost every message they have sent since on Twitter) is that it was a breach of rules by an internal member of staff and that they are dealing with it internally. This is the kind of PR that any company doesn’t want, and as it was done through Twitter it will no doubt be held up by some as one of the downsides of social media and of engaging with customers online in this way.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone today. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

Managing your brand in social media

We’ve posted before about how to write your firm’s social media policy and, perhaps more importantly, what to do once your firm’s social media policy is written. The basic principal is that it is the quality of your staff and the relationships they make with customers that will make all the difference. Not the technology you use or any technological solutions you put in place. The general principal is that if you trust your staff to represent your brand in traditional media, then you should be able to trust them in social media.

Of course, Vodafone may not today be able to empathise with this and there are some differences. Notably that anybody with access to a Twitter account will be able to say something that is immediately and directly communicated to customers. This is a huge responsibility and one that people should not take lightly. But it is a responsibility that brands should give to their staff and one that is most important when building your brand online and in social media. Whilst there are many agencies out there who can help to manage your brand online for you, with the appropriate training and support (which may need to come from a specialist social media agency) the best person to represent your brand online are your own employees.

The key things here are:

1. Have a culture where social media is acceptable. Encourage your staff to use social media so that they become comfortable with it and that is becomes part of your culture. This is a big shift for many organisations and one they are often nervous of.
2. Have ongoing social media training across the business. Things change and they change quickly in social media. A firm that wants to position itself best online needs a regular and ongoing set of training and ideas and knowledge share. Try things out and share what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
3. Trust people but have a very clear policy in place. You should trust people to interact with your customers online but be aware of what they are doing. It is not one-to-one communications, nor is it always one-to-many. You are talking to one person but in a very public environment. Recognise this and have policies and processes in place for this new way of communicating. But make these policies simple and clear to understand.

And whatever happens you need to be aware of the risks and have processes for dealing with them. Social media is growing and changing rapidly and as such can be a very forgiving place if you approach things in the right way. Everybody is experimenting and will often forgive you if things go wrong and you handle them in the right way. For me this is what Vodafone got right.

What we can learn from Vodafone’s response

When things go wrong the way to respond to it can be simple. Vodafone did two things that all brands can learn from. Whilst there will be discussions, debate and probably some negativity about what was said this afternoon for sometime, fundamentally, Vodafone should not suffer too much damage, because:

1. They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.
2. They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

So lots that we can learn and lots that they got right. But no doubt a challenging day for Vodafone today.

Some more reading

• Vodafone suspends employee after obscene tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Top five Twitter gaffes (guardian.co.uk)
• Vodafone suspends employee over obscene Twitter update (telegraph.co.uk)

Trojan Horse from shutterstock

A post on the econsultancy blog this week told the story of Jason Calacanis’ iPad hoax. This is the most recent example of social media spreading lies at pace.

The viral potential of social media makes it a powerful tool for seeding and rapidly diseminating information. Sometimes that information is accurate and sometimes inaccurate. And it’s a sad indictment of human gullibility that messages originating from a seemingly respected source are too often believed first and questioned second.

There are also numerous examples which show that well-packaged information, shared on social networks, can make patently false statistics seem plausible.

Below are two videos that did the rounds last year. Thanks to good production skills, the videos appear to be professional and as a result they were believed by far too many people. The first video is pretty harmless – a riff on the Did You Know video mixed in with a little Social Media Evolution.

Did You Know 4.0

The second video is more worrying. It’s a politically motivated anti-muslim film that masquerades as balanced (it was apparently uploaded by “firendsofmuslim”). However it is highly charged and many of the key statistics are false.
Muslim Demographics

Sure, it’s the message, not the medium that is the real issue here. And social media ought to be capable of quashing the incorrect information, fallicies and hoaxes just as it lets them propagate in the first place. The online community from Snopes is a great example of social-media-driven crowdsourced fact checking.

And, I’m glad to say there were a few responses to the Muslim Demographics video that tried to set the record straight. For example, BBC Radio4’s More or Less team probed (as they always do) the claims in more detail and posted the following response to clarify inaccuracies.

Muslim Demographics: the truth

Yet there is still reason for concern. Over 11million people watched the sensationalist version and only a few thousand saw the responses. I think the makers of this video have achieved their aim. They successfully used social media marketing to spread anti-muslim feeling and distrust.

Traditional v’s Social Media
But we live in a world of dodgy dossiers. Just because social media can spread lies, does that mean we’d have been better off sticking with traditional media?

Traditional mass media does have a reputation to protect: newspapers may have built up their brand equity over decades, they face a higher risk of lawsuits and have to answer to ombudsmen, shareholders and advertiser pressure.  Compare that to an upstart video-jockey with a good idea for making a splash and you can see that there is a lot less to lose.

Like many people I will be travelling later today. Taking one of the last trains on Christmas Eve from London to the north of England. And like many people I have spent the last few days checking the weather and the news, hoping that my train will run and I will make it on time.

Christmas is a time when lots of people travel, and a time when lots of travel gets delayed, cancelled or goes wrong. That perfect storm of high volume of travellers and some of the worst weather of the year. In the UK we’ve seen a lot of travel-related issues recently: the story of the Eurostar cancellations is well documented online, flights, trains and the road is also disrupted .

We’ve posted already this week about what this means for the travel industry and in particular how to use social media as a crisis management tool. But there is another role that social media can play – as a useful, up-to-date and real-time information source for the people travelling. Official information sources can be useful for things like departure times or changes to routes, but they don’t necessarily tell you the full story and, critically, rarely give you advice on what to do.

So here are five ways you can use social media to stay on top of your travel plans this Christmas:

1. Use Twitter to find out what’s happening, now. Twitter is as much a search engine as a social media tool – one of the benefit of people sending updates and telling us what they are experiencing is that it provides a great real-time resource to find out what is happening from people who are on the ground. When your plane is not leaving and you’re not sure why, you will often find more use from a search of Twitter than the departure boards in airports. I personally find it most useful for finding out about travel around London. Whilst the Transport for London site might tell me there are ‘Minor Delays’ on the Piccadilly Line I get into work, a search of Twitter for ‘Piccadilly Line’ will tell me exactly what is happening from people at stations or on trains.
2. Use Twitter Lists to follow official updates. Sometimes you want to know the story from people on the ground, and sometimes you want to know official updates. This is where Twitter Lists come in useful – before you go on a journey, put your airline or train company, breakdown service or road agency into a Twitter List – you then have one place to go for official updates rather than many. And you can separate the official advice from the human stories from people on the ground.
3. Share and search for photo updates. Weather and travel are often very photographic – photos of people trapped queuing at St Pancras station this week waiting to board a Eurostar service convey much better than words ever could the real scale of the delays to the service. As well as updates, share photos of what is happening, show people where you are and what you are doing. Also use photos to educate yourself. Find out how busy that airport really is by looking for photos people have taken of the queues at check in.
4. Update your friends on where you are with Facebook or Twitter. Status updates have many uses but they are particularly useful when you want to tell a large group of people the same thing. If you’re delayed, trapped in snow on a road or at a station waiting for a delayed train, you want people to know you are okay or that you need help. Rather than having to contact lots of people separately, use your status on Facebook, Twitter or another service to keep people up to date on where you are, how you are and also to ask for help when you need it. Mobile internet access makes this possible and is a significant benefit for anybody needing help.
5. Use user-generated weather updates. As with updates on travel, user-generated weather updates are a great source of information of what is really happening, right now, on the ground. Perhaps the best example of this in the UK is a Twitter mash-up: #uksnow map. This uses status updates from people on Twitter who send their postcode area and a rating for how much snow their is out of ten. This data is then used to produce a map of snowfall across the UK. In real-time. From users on the ground.

Social media has changed many things about the way we can live our lives and will continue to do so. Travel and weather are two cases where users can get real benefit from using social media to do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. Whether you want to get real-time information, information from people on the ground or share your own experiences or updates to let people know what is happening. Social media can help make you better informed and better connected when travelling.

I for one know that I am monitoring activity at St Pancras station and on East Midlands Trains. Things look okay so far…

Rage Against the Machine on Facebook

Rage Against the Machine (RATM) have just had their first UK Number 1. They got it thanks to an extraordinary underground Facebook campaign, beating X-Factor winner Joe McElderry.

The successful single, Killing in the Name, was released over 15 years ago. RATM spent nothing on marketing and yet they made it to Christmas No.1. Whatever your opinions of Rage Against the Machine, Simon Cowell, Facebook or Joe Mcelderry, this has been a great show of social media might.

A week ago X-Factor Winner Joe McElderry appeared to be a shoo-in for Christmas No.1. Every year, for four years, the Winner of X-Factor has been number one at Christmas. But this year Jon Morter (@Jon_Magic), a HiFi Technician from Essex,  decided to set up a protest campaign on Facebook and promote Rage Against the Machine as a possible contender.

Why does this classify as an impressive victory for social media? Here’s a brief summary of what each single had going for it:

Joe Mcelderry and the X-Factor machine
- 13 weeks of prime time TV appearances
- 4 years of X-Factor Christmas No.1’s (i.e. a great process for getting the result)
- Professional promotion – Simon Cowell’s company has been pulling out every stop.
- A pleasant song for Christmas – ideal stocking filler for mum’s across the UK
- 3 months of press articles, morning TV chat show appearances & radio interviews
- Online and offline advertising spend
- Store sales – Joe’s got a physical single that’s on sale in all good record stores – 500,000 in HMV alone (their largest ever singles order). The RATM single has not been re-released so it is not in store.
- Playlists – Joe gets lots of radio airplay thanks to being on key playlists
- Massive discounting – Tesco are selling Joe McElderry’s single The Climb for 29p. That’s less than half the 67p you’d pay for Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine.
- Point of purchase marketing – both in store, and also on the homepages of iTunes, Amazon, Play.com and Tesco.com (the four major MP3 retailers in the UK).

Rage Against the Machine had:
- £0 marketing budget
- an offensive song that caused 138 complaints last time it was played on Radio1 (Killing in the name)
- an unofficial facebook group set up by a fan
- a “charity angle” – I don’t think the donations to Shelter have been a large driver of success, but they helped prevent the campaign being seen as bullying of Joe and raised over £65k.

This seems like an appropriate way to end 2009 – a big year for Social Media.

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in October.

1. Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences

There has been a lot of talk and discussion of Google Wave as it has spread though invites. For many people the immediate response is: “I’m here; what now?”. In our most popular post in November, Charlie looked at one example of how Google Wave can be used to add real value: as a conference back-channel. We show how at the Ecomm conference delegates were provided with Google Wave accounts. What resulted was a fantastic showcase of collaboration and crowd-sourcing.

2. How to use Twitter Lists as a free social media monitoring tool

Twitter Lists are great. They are adding real and valuable functionality to Twitter and changing the way that people can use the service. In this post we look specifically at how Twitter Lists can be used as a free social media monitoring tool. How you can use them to track promoters and detractors of your brand and know what they are saying and feeling in real time.

3. PhotoSketch or Sketch2Photo, it rocks

A great app developed by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. It allows you to turn a simple drawing into a photo. There is clearly always a big jump between a video showcase and a working proposition, but it certainly looks good so far.

4. Live TV and real-time chat: X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing

Watching TV is almost always a social experience. Whether it’s people in the room, friends on the phone, Facebook, Twitter or in forums or chat. People talk to people about what they see on TV. In this post we highlight two ways in which Live TV shows in the UK (namely X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing) are using real time chat and online communities to support their live broadcasts. We look at what they are doing and why they might be doing this.

5. Russian social network Vkontakte.ru plans global roll-out

Back in September, we posted about the success of Russian social network VKontakte (В контакте). The site serves 1.4 billion page views each day to its 42 million users, and attracts 14 million unique visitors each month. In one of the most engaged and fastest-growing social networking markets in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with. At the start of September, Vedomosti (Ведомости), the Russian business newspaper, had reported that VKontakte had registered the domain www.vk.com and plans to begin marketing the social network in twelve new markets globally before the end of 2010. One to watch next year.

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

In tomorrow’s post we will look at how to estabish the aims of your use of social media and how you can measure success.

You can read the full guide here: Getting Started in Social Media

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The original article is here, and the list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

On Sunday, lots of people were talking about Dannii, Danyl and instant X-Factor feedback. If you weren’t one of them (or if you’re not in the UK) let me quickly recap: on X-Factor, a talent / singing / reality TV programme, one of the judges, Dannii Minogue, brought up the sexuality of contestant Danyl when she was supposed to be commenting on his performance on stage. There has been a lot discussed about this and we posted about how Twitter is a great barometer and feedback mechanism in this kind of situation, how the brand that is X-Factor was able, almost immediately, to know what was being said about them and to plan how they should respond.

Like any good brand, the X-Factor on Saturday night would have benefited greatly from buzz tracking. From watching, tracking and analysing what was being said in real time. Analysing the extent to which the sentiments being expressed were positive, or negative, finding particularly dense areas of discussions and helping the brand to identify both what is being said and also where it is being said.

Buzz tracking really is a powerful tool for a brand, both because of the information it can reveal, but also because of the issues it raises that a brand needs to deal with. Tracking and monitoring what people are saying about your brand, products and services will allow you to know, in real-time, when something has happened that needs rectifying, or when something is said that you can use to amplify positive word of mouth about your brand. Knowing the extent to which your brand is being discussed positively or negatively provides a benchmark for you to monitor, and if you track it overtime you will start to see the impact of things you do and say, as a brand, on how people are discussing you.

And this information is very powerful. Both for making immediate decisions, and for planning and monitoring in the long-term. When a brand has a bad experience, and people are talking negatively about it (as happened to brand X-Factor on Saturday night), an effective buzz monitoring strategy will alert you to this shift in sentiment and allow you to identify what has caused this. You are then able to decide first if you want to respond and then how. You can then monitor the impact your response is having and amend or strengthen is as necessary. This information drastically shortens the time brands need to respond and so can have a very positive effect on your ability to resolve what is happening.

In the long-term, buzz tracking allows a brand to understand seasonal changes in it’s image in social media, and to show the impact that various on and offline activities have on these discussions. Work that we have done at FreshNetworks for brands in the travel industry, for example, shows that people tend to be more positive about travel brands at certain times of the year (typically when they are thinking of going on holiday or when they just return) and has helped to show the impact that TV advertising campaigns have had on the positive sentiment expressed about a brand online.

So buzz tracking is a powerful tool for any brand, both for what it tells you and for what it allows you to do. It is an information resource, and one that, if used correctly, can give you a real-time understanding of what is being said about your brand and how people are feeling about it. This kind of information is the ammunition any brand needs to inform its own social media strategy and how it should react on a case-by-case basis. Rather than have to wait to see how an issue plays out over a few days, brands can now get a real understanding of how people feel in real time and then respond to it.

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in September.

1. Russian social network Vkontakte.ru plans global roll-out

Our most popular post is September revealed the global expansion plans of Russian social network VKontakte (В контакте). The social network serves 1.4 billion page views each day to its 42 million users, and attracts 14 million unique visitors each month. In one of the most engaged and fastest-growing social networking markets in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with. At the start of September, Vedomosti (Ведомости), the Russian business newspaper, reported that VKontakte had registered the domain www.vk.com and plans to begin marketing the social network in twelve new markets globally before the end of 2010. One to watch.

2. How to write your firm’s social media policy

In August we looked first at why a firm needs a social media policy, and then at how to write one.  At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. And, perhaps most critically, it should encourage your employees to use social media more and not less. This post looked at five considerations we discuss with clients when developing their social media policies and guidelines that might help you if you are developing yours.

3. Thomson Holidays – how a blogger can impact your brand reputation

Andy Sharman went on holiday to Tunisia with Thompson Holidays in June this year and had, by his own account, a fairly disappointing time. Andy wrote about his experiences on his blog and within a couple of months his post had been read by over 10,000 different people and, perhaps more worryingly, was appearing above Thomson’s own sites for searches on Google for terms relating to Thomson and Tunisia. This is an example of how customers are using social media and how brands need to adapt to react. When they have complaints, a customer would traditionally enter into a private exchange with the brand. With social media, this pattern has been disrupted quite severely. Rather than a private exchange between Customer and Brand, the first few steps are public from the very beginning. From the minute the customer wants to complain their thoughts, experiences and attitudes (whether justified or not) are public knowledge. With social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one. This post looks at how brands should react online to manage their reputation, when things go right and when things go wrong.

4. What to do once your firm’s social media policy is written

Building on our posts about why a firm needs a social media policy, and how to write one, this post looks at what to do once you have written your firm’s social media policy. It should be a living document, and critically one that your employees buy into an believe in. You want use of social media to become part of your employees lives. And you want your brand to benefit from this involvement, from having employees active in social media and from having conversations about them, you and your brand. So writing a policy is just the first step. This post discussed four steps to help ensure that, once you have it written, your firm’s social media strategy stays relevant and beneficial to your organisation.

5. Social media and customer service – some examples

In September, I ran a ‘masterclass’ in social media and customer service at the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference 2009. The session looked first at the different types of social media that businesses use and the reasons for and benefits of this. The ROI that businesses can get from online customer service communities. And we then moved into some examples from customer service: some good, some bad and one just ugly. This post includes the presentation from that session and highlights examples from Zappos, Virgin Trains, Dell and United Airlines. We can all learn something from each of these.

Thomson is a well-known package tour and holiday brand in the UK and part of the global travel group TUI. They have a good reputation and brand in the UK, supported by a relatively strong High Street presence. But one traveller’s bad experience on a holiday to Tunisia has caused them and their brand problems in social media, and in their search rankings.

Andy Sharman went on holiday to Tunisia with Thompson in June this year and had, by his own account, a fairly disappointing time. After his complaints failed to receive a response that satisfied him, Andy wrote about his experiences on his blog.

Whatever the truth of what Andy was told or what happened to him in Tunisia is not important. For your brand, and your business, satisfaction is a balance of expectations and reality as seen by the customer. Andy was unhappy and he wanted to complain.

Using traditional media, this complaint would have taken a fairly standard path all of which is done in private:

1. Customer complains to Brand (by telephone or by letter)
2. Brand responds to Customer (typically by letter)
3. Customer is either delighted (and may then tell their friends and colleagues in person) or dissatisfied (and will also tell their friends and colleague, but this time a very different story)

With social media, this pattern has been disrupted quite severely. Rather than a private exchange between Customer and Brand, the first few steps are public from the very beginning. From the minute the customer wants to complain their thoughts, experiences and attitudes (whether justified or not) are public knowledge. The brand’s job is no longer to assess and respond to a single complaint, but to manage an attack on their brand reputation. It is now bigger than just customer service.

With social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one.

Andy’s blog shows exactly how serious these complaints can be. Within a couple of months his post had been read by over 10,000 different people and, perhaps more worryingly, was appearing above Thomson’s own sites for searches on Google for terms relating to Thomson and Tunisia.

Blogs, and social media more generally, are a great way for people to distribute their content. They can get it seen by a large number of people who can link to it, comment on it and reproduce it on their own sites.  Very quickly a brand has a story that is no longer private and is also no longer contained. Other people have linked to or reproduced the complaint on their own sites and forums. Some publicly and others in places that even Thompson cannot see.

So, what should brands do in this instance. Earlier this year we wrote about how to react if somebody writes about your brand online and included a great process diagram developed by the US Air Force. The process is simple and clear, showing when you should respond (and when you shouldn’t) and how you should respond if you do.

The most important thing for a brand to do is to engage in the same media that the complaint is made in. Have good buzz tracking and monitoring in place so that you pick up on potential issues early and then respond through the same media – be that by commenting on a blog, joining a forum, responding in Twitter or on Facebook. When you do respond (and if this is appropriate) you should consider  five things:

1. Be transparent about who you are and your role. Give your name and some means of contacting you
2. If you want to refute some claims in the post only do so if you can source your side of the story
3. Be timely, but make sure you give yourself enough time to get a real response together
4. Respond in a tone and manner that reflects your brand
5. Focus on those blogs that carry the most influence

Customers are using social media to turn what were once private complaints with the brand into public discussions. Brands can capitalise upon this if they respond in the same manner, in the same public forum. This is the best way to take back some control of the situation and to begin to restore your brand’s reputation online.