Reputation management with social media
Anyone with enough time in the day to get everything done please raise your hand. If you’re like me, chances are both hands are at your side saying to yourself “yeah, right”. With more and more “things to do” cropping up every day, but still only having 24 hours to work with, it’s a challenge to sort out all of the tasks that need to get accomplished on a daily basis.
Personally, I think the advent of the Internet and e-mail has been a wonderful thing… to a certain extent. Certainly the amount of information that is now available at your fingertips is amazing and we can quickly find answers to questions that would have taken days (or even weeks) to research the “old” way. However, the evolution of the web to “2.0” has proven to be a challenge to many individuals as they try to decide if they take on more “to do” tasks and try and work blogging or some other social networking into their daily routine.
While many organizations may think they can remain on the sidelines and not participate (hoping that keeping out of the ring will ensure they don’t get into the fight), the reality is that customers and the general public IS embracing the social networking world and there’s no sign of it slowing down.
The risk to a business that decides to adopt the ostrich’s strategy of burying their head in the sand in hope that it will all go away may find themselves in trouble by not being aware of what’s going on (and what’s being said about them in the social realm). Take Kryptonite, as an example (and I’m not talking about the material that immobilizes Superman, I’m talking about the bicycle lock company)…
As a cyclist, the name Kryptonite historically instilled confidence and security, as I thought of them as the manufacturers of some of the best bicycle locks in the industry. However, that was until I saw this video that shows how you can pick one of their locks with the open end of a stick pen! Talk about brand management and damage control! What if your company had a weakness such as this aired on YouTube for the rest of the world to see. Keeping in mind that nobody is perfect, are there things that your organization would not want distributed on the Internet (remember Domino’s Pizza)? Do you know what your employees are doing or what the general public is saying about you these days?
Before the Internet and the ease (and immediacy) of the Internet and web 2.0 tools like free blogs, message boards, Facebook walls and Twitter posts bad news may have still spread, but it took a lot longer and gave a business time to put damage control efforts in place. However, today something like this can make to the other side of the globe in a matter of minutes and is just one of the many reasons why businesses should at least attempt to “plug in” and monitor what’s going on, even if it’s only for brand and reputation management purposes.
So, are you sitting on the sidelines and hoping this all passes you by or are you interested in taking a proactive look at what’s going on and at least getting in the game? The answer to that question may be more important than you think.
P.S. What you may not realize is that before the Kryptonite video appeared on YouTube (and exposed the “pen” weakness), this vulnerability was exposed in 1992 in the UK and the BBC even covered the issue, but the news didn’t surface until a dozen years later.