Social media is changing business. Twitter enables anyone to broadcast anything to millions of people in an instant. The short 140 character updates seem casual, yet the impact of one message can have significant and sometimes drastic implications. Known brands such as Ketchum, JetBlue, Southwest and Domino’s have all learned first-hand the effect Twitter can have on their reputations.
With more than 25 million users on Twitter according to TechCrunch, some of your employees, customers and partners are tweeting and chances are that your brand, company name or competitors are being mentioned. Do you know what is being said and how it’s impacting your brand?
So what can you do to protect your reputation, brand and image? In addition to securing your brand or company’s preferred Twitter handle immediately, below are some steps you can take now.
Here are a few initial tips:
1. Be an Active Listener. At minimum ensure someone (or multiple people depending on the size of your company) within your organization is monitoring Twitter and other social media to know what is being said about your brand, company and competitors. This can be done tactically via existing advance search capabilities or tools such as TweetBeep. For more strategic listening platforms check out Forrester’s recently published The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 which can be downloaded for free from Visible Technologies home page http://www.visibletechnologies.com/ .
2. Become a Twitterbug. If you are not using the medium – start. You cannot understand it if you have not tried it. Forrester’s George Colony has a good post on this, “How can CEOs understand social technologies?” There are numerous articles and resources online providing a Twitter 101. Once signed up, I found TweetDeck to be extremely easy to use and easier to use .
3. Educate your Employees. Just as spokespeople receive media training, your employees (who now all have the potential to be informal spokespeople) need to be informed on your company’s business objectives, key messages and target audiences. They also need to receive coaching on the impact their seemingly causal posts can have and the perceptions of those updates can create. A Ketchum employee realized the impact of his tweets when an update jeopardized his company’s relationship with key client FedEx.
4. Update your Crisis Communications Plan. With the pace of communications today, executive management does not have days to discuss how to respond in the face of a crisis. Failure to respond or address a crisis within hours can make it impossible for a company to contain the issue, and as we saw with Domino’s, can significantly damage reputations. Having an established communications plan that outlines how the company will address potential crises will enable a company to react in a timely manner.
5. Build Your Following Now. Don’t wait for a crisis to begin using Twitter. Establish a loyal base of people who care about your company or organization today. Then, as Paul Goodrich, Madrona Venture Group, explained at the Perkins Madrona Twitter Conference, when a crisis happens, you can have them help you respond. Loyal followers may even deflect the issue without a corporate response.
Twitter is still relatively new. I believe we will continue to see changes, and more tools that help businesses leverage this medium and analyze trends and information shared via Twitter. However, it is becoming mainstream and companies cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and wait for Twitter to mature. Evaluate the strategies your company is employing to achieve its business objectives and determine how Twitter and other social media can help execute those strategies.
To ensure you are being thoughtful in approaching this medium, solicit input from your legal counsel in addition to PR and marketing experts. For more information please contact us at [email protected]