31 Jan Protect your brand on social networks
Posted at 09:05h
in Social Media
By Alisa Gilbert
In today's digital world, truth and rumors travel at lightning speed. People around the globe can potentially learn of some breaking news via social media networks much quicker than the traditional media outlets meant to deliver that same breaking news. This can be a great boon for business owners and entrepreneurs, especially if their product or services go viral; however, it can also lead to a 'flash-in-the-pan' effect that can spell disaster for certain companies that fail to manage their brand online, especially if the cause of that flash is not an exciting product-launch, but instead is a much-maligned advertisement or appalling man-made disaster.
Perhaps the greatest recent example of poor brand management during a flash-in-the-pan crisis is how BP reacted immediately following the Gulf of Mexico disaster. And by immediately, I mean sluggishly. As Jeff Rutherford and others in the blogosphere have pointed out, it took BP seven days to respond to the crisis on Twitter. In that time, an anonymous joker established a fake Twitter account in BP's name. You simply have to compare the two Twitter pages to understand how greatly this affected BP's brand. The fake account had double the followers as the legitimate BP account. Yikes!
What can you do to avoid losing the branding battle over social networks? Surely you're not playing in such a high-stakes game as BP, but at the very least you can still put in place some strategies that BP should have done. Learn from their mistakes; don't repeat them. Here's how: