Best Practices for Reputation Management in a Crisis

Ok, so the proverbial cow-flap has hit the golden fan. Page 1 of Google-unpersonalized now sports damning rhetoric about you for searches related to brand and product categories. It could cost tens of millions in reputation damage. Take a deep breath, gather wits, drink some decaf’ and ride into town, let’s get started defending your brand.

First here’s a word about fancy reputation monitoring tools. We love em’. However know that they’re potentially awesome and ruinous all at the same time. It’s just too easy to feel safe when paying 7K a year for a catch-all tool.

The coverage doesn’t mean anything if one doesn’t monitor the appropriate grid of keyword threats. Automated aggregation while essential, sometimes empowers under-trained users to be more efficient mechanisms to miss critical buzz. To be fair, sometimes specialized filtering available on high-end tools catches some “finds” from amidst the noise which otherwise might have been missed. We don’t mean to minimize the importance of advanced monitoring tools.

The method prescribed herein is essential, at minimum as a free check-sum to paid tools. The keyword grid concept is critical no matter how one monitors. No matter the monitoring method, ultimately we only trust humans to filter inbound alert feeds so we’d never give this “hand” method up. Since fancy tools for the most part depend on the same sources as free alerts, often we receive notifications faster.

Ok, there’s quick work to be done. Here’s 8 crucial steps we suggest clients take immediately when reputation management disaster triage is called for:

1-Define Filtered KW Monitoring Grid
Even if you’ve already got a comprehensive monitoring grid overall, it’s important to set up segmented alerts which filter from day-to-day brand buzz noise. We assume that someone is already monitoring alerts along the lines of ["brand sucks"] ["hate brand"], etc…

The starting point for any reputation defense is knowing what keyword searches to monitor and defend. Look for basic associations. Say the matter at hand is an FDA recall of chocolates which concerns your brand. Assume that there is 1 common misspelling of your brand and 2 of chocolate. In reality there are several other common misspellings for chocolate.

We’re looking for filtered trigger-phrases. The specialized keyword monitoring grid might look like for a chocolate recall scenario: ["brand recall"] ["brandMisspelling recall"] ["brand FDA"] ["brandMisspelling FDA"]

["brand chocolate"] ["brandMisspelling chocolate"] ["brand chocolates"] ["brandMisspelling chocolates"] ["chocolate recall" ["chocolates recall"]

["brand chocolat"] ["brandMisspelling chocolat"] ["brand chocolats"] ["brandMisspelling chocolats"] ["chocolat recall" ["chocolats recall"]

["brand chocolate"] ["brandMisspelling chocolate"] ["brand chocolates"] ["brandMisspelling chocolates"] ["chocolate recall" ["chocolates recall"].

["brand choclate"] ["brandMisspelling choclate"] ["brand choclates"] ["brandMisspelling choclates"] ["choclates recall" ["choclates recall"].

Since keyword associations are a big part of SEO, your in-house or agency SEO company can help you formulate the grid. Also use these keywords to set up fancy tools.

2-Set Up Nearly Real-time Alerts By Email
Start with Google.com/alerts and set up your monitoring grid. Put each keyword praise in quotation marks, which means that all words in comprising the keyphrase must be present on a page’s ranking attributes. Choose “As they happen” and “comprehensive,” which means alerts come nearly real-time across all verticals (blogs, news, images, etc…) Google indexes.

For Twitter aimClear uses the paid version of TweetBeep, which offers a 15 minute email alerts when any keywords are tweeted. There is no need to use quotes because the setup admin has recall great match type options (All of these words, Any of these words, None of these words, None of these words) There’s also other sweet demographic targeting features for nearly real-time Twitter alerts.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums and other walled gardens present different and difficult challenges. Such communities only allow selective content nodes of their sites to index in Google. This means you can incur lots of damage amongst hundreds of millions of users–and never see it in Google.

We suggest a daily hand-monitoring protocol in each walled garden community, where an actual user has a look at whatever internal SERPs, chatter and other bad talk can occur amongst users. Specific methods vary. Some communities can successfully be scraped and reduced to a feed by a bot after feigned login. Be careful not to violate any terms of service.

3-Setup Real-Time Alerts
For Twitter use TweetDeck, which is real-time after a minimal amount of transient API delays. After all the Twitter API at this writing is free, which means they don’t offer any quality of service guarantee.

With real-time alerts comes the need for real-time monitoring. During the teeth of any crises, where a 15 minute TweetBeep alert by email just wont do, have a smart marketing employee watch TweetDeck for main associations. For other walled garden communities, have a user logged in and watching.

4-Take Inventory of Web Assets
Reputation management is all about Universal SERPs that are friendly. You’ll want to leverage (potentially re-optimize) all available assets you control or own including YouTube videos, images wherever they are posted, blogs, feeds accepted into GoogleNews, sites, pages, social media profiles like Digg & Twitter, existing walled garden profiles, .pdfs, anything online you control or own. Organize them for your search team to evaluate and utilize.

5- Take Inventory of Other Digital Assets

Got any print-only owner’s manuals, white papers, spreadsheets, docs or technical specifications? How about videos from the last sales convention? Perhaps there is an offline archive of this year’s press releases. Ask “Is there any offline content whatsoever which could be leveraged in the SERPs online?” Organize them for your search team to evaluate and utilize.

6-Implement Daily SERPs Hand Monitoring
Create a daily SERPs Hand monitoring worksheet and watch it at least 2X a day. It does not take long to cycle though the filtered keyword grid. don’t forget to search unpersonalized so the SERPs you see don’t reflect your personal preferences.

Watch for threatening content, including any opportunistic PPC predators like ambulance chasing attorneys or competitors attempting to capitalize on misfortune. Though some news results might hurt, some or most of them will drop off in time. Watch for permanent artifacts like NY Times, Washington Post or FDA.gov, content likely to remain after the event is over.

7- Start Daily Buzz & Content Log
Any new content should be reviewed and logged. Watch for and flag misinformation, predatory content network ads and bad editorial content. Walled garden content goes here as does a summary of Tweets, bloggers and threatening users.

8- Define Stakeholders Who Gets Notified Under What Circumstances
Many projects have multiple in-house and consultant agencies which include PR, legal, marketing, C-level executives, advertising, etc…Each party is charged with protecting a certain aspect of the mother ship’s well being. Create a list of clearly defined boundaries for who gets called at 3AM on Thursday morning, who can wait until the next work day, what reports are weekly and every applicable in-between. This is best accomplished by a council meeting of stakeholders.

Forewarned is Forearmed

There is every kind of crackpot on the Internet, real loonies. Also bad things happen to great companies. It’s best to have your defense in place before the crises hits, a social media security system if you will.

When push comes to shove and you’re exposed, take these 8 steps as a starting place to empower your search and social teams. The 9th crucial priority is “response and management,” an entirely different animal than monitoring. The way a each individual company responds to PR danger is highly personal to the entity at risk. Take a deep breath, don’t panic and set gird your loins for best brand defense.

Related Articles:

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/twitter-best-practices.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-twitter-arrest.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/dell-is-monetizing-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-asks-twitter-to-stay-online-because.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-links-311-call-center-to.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/norway-central-bank-to-twitter-interest.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/hedge-funds-betting-twitter-will-give.html

Source:

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/07/13/reputation-management-crises-8-crucial-priorities/

Tags:

Tweets, press, bloggers, keywords, seo, Twitter, aimClear, TweetBeep, Google alerts, SERP’s, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums, walled gardens, Global Best Practice Technology, TweetBeep alert, TweetDeck, Web Assets, Universal SERPs, YouTube, blogs, feeds, GoogleNews, sites, pages, social media profiles, Digg, Digital Assets,

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The Future of Facebook Usernames

A small number of super-geeky obsessives are abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

Source: http://dashes.com/anil/2009/06/the-future-of-facebook-usernames.html

Tags: Facebook, usernames, Linkedin, Mashable, Myspace, Bebo, AIM, Techmeme, Global IT News, Mark Zuckerberg, Iphone, FUD, Kanye West, Twitter, Flikr, Openid, Digg,

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