Here are five ways you could use Social Business practices to manage your online reputation, especially at a time of crisis:

1. The “whole company” approach to
online reputation management
Why Social Business is critical to managing
your brand’s reputation online
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2. #AskBG – How not to do it
160 #AskBG negative
mentions a minute
11500 mentions within
three hours
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3. 5 ways Social Business can help you manage your
reputation online
Embed a listening culture
Adopt a multi-department strategy
Have a crisis management plan in place
Use social technology to workflow and manage customer comments
Encourage your c-level executives to speak on behalf of your the company
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4. Embed a listening culture
!
!
!
We’ve all heard about the importance of
listening via social media. But how many
businesses have embedded a listening
culture throughout the organisation?
Social Business is about more than just
listening tools. It’s about activating your
entire organisation to connect more
meaningfully and impactfully with
consumers. And the first port of call should
be to give key employees (if not all
employees) direct access to a live feed of
customer comments through social media.
If you cant set this up on everyone’s PC or
mobile device, how about a tweetwall on a
plasma screen in your canteen? It gives
your employees a finger on the pulse of
what customers are actually saying about
your brand and products which in turn
makes them more connected to your end
consumer.
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5. Adopt a multi-department strategy
! If British Gas had a multidepartment social media
strategy, then it is likely that this
issue would never have arisen –
they would have chosen a
different day for their Twitter
Q&A.
! Successful management of
social media requires more than
just marketing or PR being
involved.
! You need to connect sales,
customer service, product
planning and development to
truly leverage the benefits whilst
also be well prepared to mitigate
the risks.
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6. Have a crisis management plan in place
How do you start connecting your
departments? One way is by proactively planning for a crisis scenario by
having a crisis management plan in
place. This should include:
1. A definition of different levels of social
media crisis. In your industry what
constitutes a high enough volume of
mentions to be cause for concern?
2. Threshold alerts which alert stakeholders
from multiple departments when volume
or sentiment of mentions reach a certain
critical point. This can be set up via your
listening tool in the form of email alerts.
3. A plan for how to manage an escalation in
the situation from an amber warning, which
may simply require ongoing monitoring to a
red alert, which requires a more proactive
response.
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7. Use social technology to workflow and manage
customer comments
! You can use a variety of tools to enable
you to connect stakeholders across
departments (and geographical
locations) to instantaneously activate an
appropriate and pre-defined response to
an escalating online crisis situation.
! Engagement tools like Spredfast have a
workflow functionality which means you
can delegate a task to the most
appropriate person in your business to
deal with a consumer question or query.
! You can also make specific and relevant
online content available via the tool to
enable your nominated respondent to
action the request in a simple fashion.
They can even post to your social media
channels via the tool.
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8. Encourage your c-level executives to speak on behalf
of your company
! If a crisis escalates to become a ‘red alert’
you will want to have prepared your
senior management team for their role
in your company response.
! It is always powerful to see a fast and ‘intouch’ response from a senior business
leader to an evolving crisis. It shows a
company who is in touch with what is
happening in the consumer base and is
able to respond sensitively and with
agility.
! So whether it’s a video message posted
on YouTube or a Tweet from their
personal Twitter account, a response
from your CEO will inevitably go a long
way to dampening the heat from an
online crisis.
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9. 5 ways BLOOM can help you manage your online
reputation
Design you a tailored crisis management strategy to meet your specific needs
Identify your online influencers and advocates
Train your employees to manage a crisis on your behalf
Implement listening and engagement tools
Produce online content for pro-active crisis management
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10. Contact Annabel Wetton for more
information
Annabel@bloomworldwide.com
01273 666 888
@bloomworldwide
www.bloomworldwide.com
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