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JEFF THOMAS COBB

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Domino’s Debacles Offers Latest Evidence That Brand Tracking, Being Social Matter

By Jeff Cobb Leave a Comment

The Domino’s Pizza brand took a hit earlier this week after two employees posted a prank video on YouTube showing disgusting things being done to sandwiches supposedly intended for delivery to customers. The Consumerist tracked the video to its sources at a Conover, NC franchise (ugh, my home state!) and contacted Domino’s, enabling the company to respond quickly. The video had already done it’s damage, however, and even the New York Times has now picked up the story.

I generally prefer not to use alarmist examples to suggest how important monitoring your brand or personal reputation online can be, or how helpful already being engage in the social Web can be when any sort of crisis arises. There are plenty of more positive, proactive reasons to be doing these things. Still, the Domino’s example – along with other recent examples from Motrin and Amazon – does certainly help to make the point.

It’s important to realize, too, that this is not just a big company phenomenon. To illustrate that point, here’s a story from one of my recent newsletters about a small, local company that was impacted by events on the social Web.

Watching Your Back on the Wild, Wild Web

I recently met with the president – let’s call him Bill – of a small, local auto service chain to discuss how his company might take advantage of social media to attract and retain customers. A number of ideas came up. We talked about a blog to provide ongoing service tips to customers and prospects. We also talked about leveraging Facebook to tap into some of the communities most relevant to the company. This all seemed valuable and headed in the right direction.

And then he told me about the attack.

It seems that several months back, a commenter on a popular local listserv posted a complaint about the company. Apparently, this person had received bad service at one of the stores and was disgruntled about it. The initial post led to a stream of negative responses from other listserv subscribers and then was picked up by a popular local blog that threw gas on the fire.

Bill was understandably upset by the event, but he was also fortunate in many ways. One of his employees saw the negative postings early on and the company responded by apologizing to the customer who made the original post, refunding his money, and providing data about customer satisfaction scores across its stores. (The company does a great job of collecting this data, and its satisfaction scores are very high.)

Additionally, a number of customers chimed in to defend the company’s reputation. While clearly some damage was done, the company came through it all with a lot of valuable feedback from customers and new connections to the community. On the whole, I’d say the experience was net positive, but it easily could have been otherwise.

Bill’s story prompted a number of thoughts:

First, I had not fully appreciated the extent to which even small, local organizations can be impacted by social media. Stories abound of large organizations experiencing this sort of thing, but they are no longer alone. And note that this story concerns a very tangible, offline business.  (See also Do You Sell Camel in Riyadh?)

Related to the first point, the importance of monitoring your organization’s brand online is now crystal clear. This is really no longer an optional activity. If you haven’t put all of the basics of brand tracking in place for your organization, doing so should be at the top of your “to do” list for 2009. (See 10 Tools for Monitoring Your Brand)

Tracking, though, is only one part of the equation. If you aren’t an active participant in the Web communities most relevant to you, you aren’t in much of a position to defend yourself should you ever need to do so. Bill’s company benefitted from having built great customer relationships over the years. Customers who are willing to speak up will always sound more “authentic” than organizational representatives, but nonetheless, Bill’s company – and yours – would benefit from developing its own authentic presence in relevant web communities.

Finally, it’s important to note that if you Google Bill’s company at this point, none of the negative postings come up within the first two pages of results – which is about as far as 99.9 percent of searchers are ever likely to look. Bill’s company has done a good job of optimizing its own Web site. (See Checking in on SEO Essentials for the New Year) as well as setting up profiles on a number of local directories where, to the company’s credit, many positive reviews have been posted.

While he may feel a bit beaten up by the experience, Bill and his company came through it all well. In fact, because the company was able to act quickly and many customers came to its defense, the longer term impact will probably be quite positive.

How would your organization do in a similar situation? As Bill’s case illustrates, even small organizations can’t ignore the question anymore. The best protection, of course, is to run a good business and keep your customers or members happy. But it pays to be prepared as well. I recommend  checking out the links above on brand monitoring and search engine optimization (SEO) and also, if you haven’t already, spending some time in the coming month familiarizing yourself with key online community tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – A new issue of my newsletter comes out next week. Be sure not to miss it – subscribe today!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: brand, reputation

10 Tools for Monitoring Your Brand

By Jeff Cobb 3 Comments

Whether you are tuned into them or not, chances are your organization is a part of conversations out there on the Web. And unless you are living under a rock somewhere, the same is probably true of you personally. Tuning into the conversations – and participating – can be a great way to understand the needs of members, customers, and prospects. And it can also help you meet problems head on when they arise.

So how do you listen in? Here are some tools to help you out.

Hand Tools

Google Alerts
Setting up Google Alerts for your organization’s name as well as any key products or people (like, for example, your CEO) is really the minimum you should be doing. It won’t cover everything, but if you are currently not tracking your brand online at all, it’s a great first step. By default Alerts is set to “Comprehensive” which means it will search across Web sites, blogs, major news outlets and Google groups. You can choose to have search results for any term you enter sent to an e-mail address of your choice.  Any updates to the search results will then be e-mailed to you at the frequency you specify.

Better yet, you can choose to have the results delivered to RSS – which leads to the next part of this post.

… Well, not quite yet. Before we get to RSS, you might also considering supplementing your Google Alerts with a few saved searches at Addict-o-matic. With just these two quick tools, you will have a pretty impressive view of your presence (or not) on the Web…

But if you want to take things further:

Power Tools

Personally, I prefer picking and choosing among multiple tracking tools and pulling them together into a “dashboard” by using an RSS reader. If you aren’t yet making use of an RSS feed reader, brand monitoring is a great reason to start. Not really sure what RSS is? Check out this great tutorial, RSS in Plain English, from Commoncraft.    And if you need a reader, I recommend Google Reader along with this brief tutorial on how to get started.

Once you are ready, try these:

Google Alerts
Yep, same Google Alerts as above, but you can choose to receive it by RSS feed instead of e-mail. Or, if you prefer, grab Google News or Google Blog Search or any of the other parts of Google Alerts as separate RSS feeds.

Technorati
Technorati catches a fair amount of flack these days, but it is still a pretty good tool for picking up on buzz in the blogosphere. Similar to Google News, you put in a search term, hit return, and mentions of you across the social Web appear starting with the most recent. Hit the subscribe button and you can keep track of new mentions in your RSS reader.

backtype
Keeping up with blog posts alone may not be enough when it comes to staying on top of conversations about you in the blogosphere. And subscribing to the comments of every possible blog out there that posts about you is not realistic. Tools like backtype do the work of tracking comments for you. You can search for comments containing particular keywords and, of course, subscribe to your search results with RSS (or by e-mail).

BlogPulse Conversation Tracker
BlogPulse is a fascinating tool that helps you track conversations from the “seed” that started them. Sometimes relatively unknown bloggers might mention your organization or keywords relevant to your organization in a post, but instead of the post languishing in obscurity, it gets linked to by a much more popular blogger and the conversation explodes from there. Blogosphere helps you track the whole cycle. To get a feel for it, take a look at the following searches – one on the term “crowsdsourcing” and another on the URL for my other blog, Mission to Learn.

  • Crowdsourcing
  • Mission to Learn

As with the other Google and Technorati, you can subscribe to a feed for the search or even to specific conversations that the search uncovers.

BoardTracker
Blogs are all the rage, but good ol’ discussion boards still generate plenty of conversation out there on the World Wild Web. Boardtracker helps you find the ones that are about you. Just put in your search terms and hit enter. You can add the search results to your RSS reader (seeing a theme here?!) to keep track of updates and new conversations, and it you sign up for a a free account, there are a number of other tools you can use to track boards.

Twitter Search
From a brand standpoint, Twitter is becoming as important as Google. It’s the place where your customers and members can say all sorts of things about you – good or bad – 140 characters or less. As brands like Motrin know all too well, it can be powerful force. “Listening” to Twitter is much the same as listening to Google. Simple go to Twitter search, enter your search terms, and subscribe to the RSS feed for the search results. There are also various services, like Twilert, that will send search result and updates to you by e-mail.

Facebook Lexicon
Facebook has grown tremendously in popularity, but listening in to the conversations there can still be a bit of a challenge. One tool to take a look at, though, is Lexicon (Facebook account required). A search on Lexicon will give you insight into how often particular keywords are mentioned on “walls” within Facebook. While you can’t tell who has been mentioning you, the next version (currently accessible in beta) will also provide some demographic data, association with other words or phrases, and the positive vs. negative “sentiment” surrounding a particular word or phrase.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Social Mention. Similar to Addict-O-Matic, Social Mention aggregates what’s being said about you across a number of different media sources and even assigns a “social rank” to you.  As with all the others, you can grab your saved search by RSS feed.

If you pull all of the above feeds into a single folder labeled “Monitoring,” or something along those lines, you’ll have a great way of keeping track of the majority of what’s being said about you out on the Web.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – Looking for other great tips and resources? Follow me on Twitter.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: brand, listening, monitor brand, reputation

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