If you are Tiger Woods or Jesse James and you’ve just had an affair, that bad publicity will probably only mildly tarnish your image but on the flip side it highlights that badboy image. If you are a former Disney starlet looking to drop your good girl image let a few sexting incidents or nude pictures taken on your cell phone leak and the hubbub is actually good for business.
Most businesses don’t operate in the same realm as Hollywood hotties. Negative publicity can be bad for business, so monitoring your brand becomes crucial. And the easiest way to monitor your brand is on the Internet. At the very least you should be doing a Google search of your name and business name. Set up Google Alerts to let you know when your name has been mentioned in cyberspace. You can also go over to Social Mention Alerts and do the same. If you aren’t participating in social networks (first of all shame on you) then you should at least be monitoring them.
You can search for your name on Twitter via keyword or hashtag.
Backtype.com and Cocomment.com can help you keep track of comments that mention your brand on blogs.
Yahoo!Pipes will email you alerts about what you are interested in.
Sites like Boardtracker.com and Boardreader.com will keep you informed of comments about your brand left on message boards.
Google Sidewiki is a toolbar that allows web surfers to leave comments that are attached to your website and can be seen by anyone else with a Google Sidewiki toolbar when they visit your site.
If you are tracking comments and you find something damaging is being spread about your brand how do you manage it?
Try to address any negative comments by engaging the person who made the post. You want to make that person feel like their complaint is being addressed and other readers to see that you are addressing it, but you don’t want to start an ongoing finger-pointing war or you risk damaging your brand further. If the comments are serious consider addressing the issue offline.
If there are many negative comments it can be useful. Analyze the comments to see if there is a common thread. Maybe there is a failure in your customer service department. Or maybe a defect in one of your products. Finding that commonality and fixing the problem you can then go back and publicize the fact that your customers spoke and you listened.
Heading off bad publicity can help you keep customers loyal and all it takes is a little monitoring and prompt attention to diffuse negative matters.
2 responses to “Is there such a thing as bad publicity?”
Yep, reputation is everything, and especially in the web era where you’re the brand and the business.
One thing that’s absolutely vital is thinking about every comment you ever make. The internet remembers everything, and if you put out negative stuff, it will come back to you. For better or worse, you have to be absolutely transparent with everything you do. I’ve never used backtype, but I will thanks to your post 😉
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