Guarding Your Brand
A White Paper on Social Media Monitoring
Executive Summary
The term Social Media can easily refer to a form of “media” wherein anyone can easily access it, add their own thoughts and express their own opinions on a wide range of topics. Popular forms of Social Media include blogs, vlogs, podcasts and forums.
Social Media has been successfully exhausted as a new form of strategic marketing considering its wide reach, especially on consumers as well as a higher probability of repeat frequency on product/service recognition.
The insistent use though of Social Media to drive Brand Recognition has its downfalls as improper and inconsistent management of these sites can do the opposite effect on any company.
As such, taking control and the properly handling of Social Media sites through a highly efficient Social Media Management Service is the highly recommendable as it is a very significant factor in ensuring that any brand’s integrity is constantly guarded.
Introduction – Social Media
Background
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly
accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. There are also various technologies utilized like blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.
Social Media and Brand Management
Social media can do a lot to humanize a brand – increase the effectiveness of customer service and create brand evangelists. The use of Social Media is parallel with proper Brand Management. In context, Brand Management practically involves managing the tangible and intangible aspects of a brand. In the case of Social Media, it has something to do with the over-all customer experience, the intangibles – the
communication between the company through the different Social Media sites associated with the company and its customers.
For product, service and corporate brands, the intangibles are the same and refer to the emotional connec-tions derived as a result of experience, identity, communication and people. Intangibles are therefore man-aged via the manipulation or proper management of identity, communication and people skills.
Any company or corporation should know that Brand Management is a piece of cake. Customers would want to be heard and their needs recognized. They will let anyone know how they were treated – may it be their family members, friends, work mates, or random people – through the many Social Media sites they can make use of through the advent of both blogging and micro-blogging, may it be in written or audio or video forms.
Social Media Damage – Risking your company image
Social Media Damage, in principle, occurs when a company who associates itself to any of the many existing Social Media sites available in the internet fails to maintain the integrity of their brand by not properly managing these Social Media sites.
To properly explain this, the following real-life scenario is a perfect example of how a company can suffer from Social Media Damage:
• Contrast between @TimeWarnerCares vs. @comcastcares
@TimeWarnerCares opened a Twitter account, which has 563 followers - some of whom might actually be brand evangelists. @TimeWarnerCares didn't bother to follow anyone, so they have no way to know who wants to talk with them.
Who is Tweeting for the company? There's no way to know because there's no bio, no photo, no link to a website, and there has not been one Tweet since someone from the company had the idea to "try social media"
In contrast, @comcastcares where Frank Eliason ably represents Comcast, has entered almost 36,000 Tweets. He gets back to people quickly and effectively, and has helped the brand recover from an earlier YouTube disaster of a video that has been viewed 1,373,851 times since 2006.
Using above example of @TimeWarnerCares zero Twitter interaction, customers who tweet their inquiries or requests or send Direct Messages to TimeWarner expect an immediate reply. And since it seems that no one from Time Warner is monitoring this social media site associated to the company, the following Social Media Damage has been created:
Time Warner Cable Sucks has 753 members in Facebook.
Boycott Time Warner has 124 Facebook members
Time Warner Sucks has 244 members
At the Final "Cross Continental Panel" of the Future of Influence Conference Brad Howarth reported on comments by network research director Channel 9, Steve Weaver.
Weaver spoke about how the 9 Network had not been performing well, and this was being compounded by discussions within blogging circles. "Once you lose that credibility, you then get pinpointed for it," Weaver says.
Those comments are perhaps being referred to the News’ editing issue, as reported on www.Mumbrella.com.au: Plane disaster censored from Nine News because of Qantas link.
“The Nine Network this morning censored its 5am news bulletin to avoid mentioning last night’s Air France disaster because the programme is funded by Qantas.”
Over 50 comments were generally on the tack that this type of editing wasn’t going to enhance the credibility of News 9.
• Domino's: How One YouTube Video Can Ruin a Brand
In terms of its social media presence, Domino's Pizza gets a lot of things right. It has a YouTube Channel, a Twitter account, and both a Facebook and MySpace profile. But a revolting video featuring two of its employees from a North Carolina franchise defiling food products for delivery was uploaded in Youtube. Since the video first appeared, Domino's has quickly stepped up its social media presence in order to regain some positive momentum.
The video, which, among other things, features an employee who farts and sneezes on a sandwich, was viewed over 500,000 times. For now, the video has been taken down from Youtube.
In response to this uproar, Domino's decided to release its own video on YouTube, which features Domino's president Patrick Doyle.
Domino's is also actively using the company's official Twitter account to reach out to customers who are talking about the company.
Bruce Horovitz, in USA Today, describes some of the lessons that other companies can learn from from this controversy. Among other things, he recommends that companies should actively monitor Twitter and other social media channels, so that companies can respond quickly when problems appear.
Social Media Damage – Taking Action
One December morning last year, Scott Monty, Ford's head of social media, saw Twitter messages alerting him to online comments criticizing Ford for allegedly trying to shut a fan Web site, TheRangerStation.com. The dispute prompted about 1,000 email complaints to Ford overnight.
He posted messages on his Twitter page, and Ford's, saying he was looking into the matter, adding frequent updates. Within hours, he reported that Ford's lawyers believed the site was selling counterfeit goods with Ford's logo. He persuaded Ford's lawyers to withdraw the shut-down request if the site would halt the sales. By the end of the day, he Tweeted that the dispute had been resolved.
PepsiCo intensified its social-media efforts November of last year after employees saw critical Twitter posts
about an ad in a German trade magazine for a diet cola, which depicted a calorie killing itself. A popular commentator, whose sister had committed suicide, asked, "How could Pepsi do this?" A Pepsi spokesman quickly posted an apology on his personal Twitter page. So did Bonin Bough, who is Pepsi's global director of digital and social media. Mr. Bough, who was hired for the job in September, says the incident prompted
Pepsi to create a corporate Twitter profile; in May it launched The Juice, part of the networking site
BlogHer.com.
Last fall, Coke's software spotted a Twitter post from a frustrated consumer who couldn't redeem a prize
from the MyCoke rewards program. The consumer's profile boasted more than 10,000 followers. Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s head of social media, quickly posted an apology on the consumer's Twitter profile and
offered to help resolve the situation. The consumer got his prize and later changed his Twitter avatar to a photo of himself holding a Coke bottle.
Why do companies risk associating their Brand to Social Media sites in the first place?
The advent of Social Media Sites has created a whole new era of
brand marketing. May it be a big corporation with offices scattered
all throughout the globe or a small business operating from a home
office, Social Media Marketing through Social Media sites has offered
an opportunity for these businesses to expose their Brands.
This info graph should demonstrate the extent of reach businesses have to both prospective clients and consumers through Social Media:
Why should companies avail Social Media monitoring services?
Companies who risk using Social Media sites should ensure the integrity of their Brand name by ensuring that any form of feedback, may it be negative or positive, posted online should be properly monitored. The internet is 24/7 and so brand monitoring has to be
constant. The online firestorm that is created due Brand mention on
The following facts are essential on understanding the extent of Social Media influence:
- There is a growing group of highly desirable consumers using social media to research companies: 25- 55-years-old, college-educated, earning $100,000+ –a very powerful group in terms of buying behavior. [Dr. Ganim Nora Barnes, Society for New Communications Research]
- According to a recent study from the Society for New Communications Research:
6 out of 10 survey respondents indicated they use social network sites to vent about poor customer expe
-riences.
6 out of 10 online consumers make decisions based on company reputation and opinions shared on social media sites, review boards and forums.
8 out of 10 surveyed consumers regard the quality of customer care as a major influence in their decision to conduct business with a company.
- When Google auto populates the search query field with “[Your
Company Name] Sucks” and you find your organic rankings are buried under a stack of blogs, real-time tweets and a variety of websites
colorfully lambasting the credibility
of your company, it’s time to have a carefully monitored social media site.
Both Google and Bing now integrate Twitter into their search results. Google boldly showcases real time tweets at the top of the search page, meaning companies could very well find negative Twitter listings outranking your domain page.
The need to take Brand Management to a whole new level
"We're getting to a point if you're not responding, you're not being seen as an authentic type of brand," ~ Adam Brown, Head of Social Media for Coca-Cola
Existing management should by now be aware of the staggering impact Social Media has in terms on
Brand Management. Companies that actively monitor their brands and customer relations will be better positioned to understand consumer sentiment, or even avoid an online firestorm that can eventually lead to a PR crisis.
