Turn Negative Comments into Positive Results — It's All About Revenue. As a part of my internship at Eloqua I’ve been monitoring, analyzing and participating in social media outlets, and I’ve catalogued any useful lessons I’ve learned.
One pearl of wisdom, which I feel should be shared with anyone working in social media is the importance of actually embracing criticism (disagreeable comments, complaints, unflattering tweets, or any other forms of undesirable shared content). Although it may seem counterintuitive, there’s much more to gain in addressing – and preserving the negative than there is in covering it up. In a previous blog post, Joe Chernov shared 5 Ways to Turn Critics into Advocates, which outlined – as the title suggested – how to turn critics into supporters.
Joe, however, focused on the person; my discovery centers on the content. Generally, marketers tend to remove – or request the removal of – unfavorable posts once they provide a remedy (often through the backchannel). When this is done right, the incident rarely intensifies. 2. 3. The 1 percent solution: Managing online controversy. October 29, 2010 Social media makes it easy for outraged consumers to broadcast their dissatisfaction around the world — sometimes in minutes.
There are many examples. For instance, this past April, environmentalists overwhelmed Nestlé’s official Facebook page with posted messages claiming the Swiss food conglomerate’s use of palm oil in KitKat candy bars is damaging Indonesia’s rain forest. It can be overwhelming to imagine managing an online controversy when you see social media causing this much havoc. The good news: Among all visitors to social media sites, only about 1 percent contribute any content (such as text, photos, audio or video), according to Chicago-based consultant Jackie Huba.
The bad news: Despite their small numbers, “One Percenters” can wield enormous influence when they are outraged by your company’s behavior. Take the FOUR Step approachThe best way to manage an online controversy is to detect it and manage it before the crisis becomes unmanageable. Blog searches. P.R. Missteps Fueled Fiascos at BP, Toyota and Goldman. , celebrated for engineering cars so utterly reliable that they seemed boring, endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant , which once packaged itself as an environmental visionary, now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst in American history. And the Wall Street icon , an elite player in the white-collar-and-suspenders set, found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges. “These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubenstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the . “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.” Mr. Seven Reasons Your Company Needs To Prepare For Crises. Does your company have a communications plan for when it gets hit by a crisis? Chances are, you don’t. Time and time again I’ve seen organizations plow ahead with communications programs that focus on generating proactive results, but do little to prepare for the flip side.
In the last few days we’ve seen another example of activism in social media, as Facebook users slammed Nestle for its environmental and business practices in the developing world. It’s yet another demonstration of the fact that if your organization is doing something that could be seen to be unethical, people now have a voice with which to respond. If you’re not yet convinced of the need to prepare for an event such as this, consider the following: 1. It’s inevitable. 2. In Nestle’s case, their own property got hijacked. 3. It’s too late to plan for a crisis when the crisis is already happening. 4. 5. Slacktivism is a term most people hadn’t heard of a year or two ago. 6. 7. (Image: Shutterstock) Digital Crisis Management - a primer by John Bell. April 28, 2009 by Olivier Blanchard photo by Roby DiGiovine Solid piece by John Bell over at Digital Influence on the relatively new and ever evolving PR discipline of digital crisis management this week.
This is pretty timely as I keep running into PR departments and firms just now starting to get comfortable with the notion: It’s almost a joke amongst communication pros. The first step isn’t the YouTube video response. Bingo. 1. How to Weather a Twitterstorm - Advertising Age - Digital.