Corporate Reputation : a cocktail of rational and emotion ?

February 27, 2013 1 Comment

The concept of Corporate Reputation is a core element in the strategy of directors that have understood how important its impact on their activity and success is. In few years, it has elvoved from a background idea to a tangible reality that impacts each management and communication decision.

For all that, there are only few definitions of Corporate Reputation that allow understanding the global dimension of this concept.

In this new video of our Web TV “Reputation Management Decision Makers”, Thierry Wellhoff shares with us its vision of the most valued and intangible asset of organizations : reputation is the sedimentation of :

  • Image, the emotional value associated to perception of the brand
  • Opinion, rational dimension based on experiences and facts

Armed with this evidence, how should we support the reputation of our companies?

The answer is in the coherence between all the signals we emit -that determine the perception- and our communication -that determine opinions-. Having in a same media environment the company (through its website, its production of content, social footprint) and the employees, clients, NGOs and other type of stakeholders whose share of voice in the global discussion is proportional to the interest generated by their interventions and publications, can make this balance very difficult to reach.

In practice,  analyzing beforehand the missions and values of the organization, as well as its communication fundments represent a first essential diagnostic to set up a digital strategy. The adjustment of this strategy, its execution on blogs, forums and social networks are as many points I encourage you to discover in this video.

See you soon on “Reputation Management Decision Makers“

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New journalistic practises : a high-tech job ?

December 13, 2012 Leave a comment

On Dec 10th, and as every year since its creation, SciencesPo’s School of Journalism organised a conference on the new journalistic practises (#npdj12).

Sciences Po's Conference on the new practises of Journalism in 2012

The viability of media companies was central to many of the presentations and it doesn’t take much magic to guess that the Internet is the main catalyst for it. However, some of the suggest development avenues were probably a surprise for many and very intellectually stimulating. I will try to summarise 3 broad areas :

  • Tech: If there’s one point all speakers agree on, it’s the evolution of journalism towards more diverse and advanced technologies. Whether you look at the Huffington Post and its multilingual, multi-country CMS or at Buzzfeed, its 5 full-time developers (for a total staff of 75) and its highly elaborate and internally developed Web Analytics tools, new media are all resorting to elaborate technology in order to optimise their content production.

    Mark Hansen, presented a striking example of visualisation of the propagation of New York Times articles through various social media in order to understand factors of virality. According to Hansen, journalists, better trained into data capture technologies could bring a lot to the interpretation and analysis of Big Data. The use of publicly accessible data is also at the heart of The Texas Tribune‘s brand and 60% of the site’s articles provide viewers with dynamic, customisable graphs as well as the raw data used to calculated them.

    And the one tech evolution to take notice of is mobile publishing. Contrarily to TV and other traditional channels, for which the percentage of media spend closely follows the percentage of time spent by the public, traditional newspapers and mobile media sites stand at opposite ends of the time/investment spectrum. In spite of its well documented decline, newspaper advertising still outweighs the share of attention these media receive today. Whereas ad sped on mobile is still far below what it could be in the light of the time mobile users spend consuming information on Smartphones and tablets. The inevitable game of communicating vessels budgets therefore encourages the media to publish their articles on mobile platforms a.s.a.p., notably through the use of responsive design, a web technology allowing the display of information on a page to automatically adapt to the size of the navigator / screen on which it is being viewed. At the Washington Post, two full-time jobs are dedicated to mobile publishing and that department will likely grow in the future.

  • Going visual: As noted by Michael Downing, the Web, since its origins, has been built around printed media paradigms (text pages, banner ads …) whereas the public at large is more interested in brief and interactive experiences (particularly on mobile, I would add). This probably explains why the monetization opportunities of a 5-10 paragraph article are limited (by ad rates of a few dollars/CPM) which makes the economic model of online news companies extremely fragile. In contrast, monetization of short videos is 6 to 10 times superior!

    Big Data lends itself remarkably well to the most audacious and attractive graphical representations. The rise of infographics is one illustration, but it is necessary to see beyond these to stand out.

    A man flying on a fire extinguisher in the tube

    Buzzfeed, a fast-growing pure-player online information company is championing a form of visual storytelling particularly suited to media: animated GIFs. This 25 year-old graphic format received a boost in 1995 the Netscape navigator added automatic looping to its rendering of these animated pictures. And 2012 was definitely the year of the animated GIF which, for the first time made the homepage of prestigious publications such as The Guardian and The New York Times. The media’s recent interest for the format derives from its ability to present in brief sequences the essence of an action or an event. The ever repeating images tell much more of a story than a still while at the same time presenting the facts in a much more focused and condensed manner than a whole video. Scott Lamb strongly encourages journalists to learn to create and use these files in their work.

  • The role of social media in information propagation: According to Joshua Benton, on 48% of traffic to New York Times articles originates on the site’s homepage. This proportion falls to 12% for The Atlantic and to 6% for Benton’s Nieman Lab. An increasingly large portion of the public is discovering news and other forms of content via social media. Google still reigns king of traffic providers in many cases but media organisations that are prospering online focus more on the sharing of their content online than on any other visibility factor. Page views isn’t even a metric on Buzzfeed’s analytics dashboard! Virality takes precedence over all other goals. All the more so because the site’s business model relies on this sharing not only of published articles but also of advertisements (mainly stories sponsored by large brands)!

     

    Analysing social sharing in various social media

    The most ‘liked’ content (which can range from a lolcat picture page to the analysis of a political discourse) is dissected, as are the social accounts at the origin of viral trend and all other factors playing a role in enhanced sharing. On the Huffington Post, social sharing modules occupy the right margin, using-up almost as much space as content itself.

These broad tendencies are just 3 among many others (live video, the will of large media to globalize their audience, adaptive content taking into account the visitor’s navigation history …) Lessons for the media and budding journalists are plenty, but one in particular really drives the point home for me: Stéphane Distinguin urges journalists to become decathletes rather than sprinters, by which he means to broaden the range of their abilities (photography, video shooting and editing, programming, data analysis …), and to scan the environment in search of untapped niches such as hyper-local information.

So, where does this leave PR pros? What should they take home from this day? Evidently, providing rich content (pictures, videos, slide shows …) has become essential to be notices. But I also think that they should follow closely the propagation, on social media, of their own releases and of the articles written about them, a practise that seems very seldom a priority in the industry. Obviously, this can be a chore but media monitoring is there to help.

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Why managing reputation overseas matters (and how to)

September 18, 2012 1 Comment

In our previous “Reputation Management Decision Makers” video, Alain Cayzac explained how to use the style, personality and actions of a company to strengthen its reputation.

In this episode, Michael Jaïs and Kasper Ulf Nielsen (Executive Partner with the Reputation Institute) discuss the international implications of reputation management.

Earlier this year, the Reputation Institute published the results of their Global RepTrack™ 100, a larger surveys evaluating the reputations of the world’s 100 largest companies by interviewing consumers in the 15 largest markets. This work reveals that although 50% to 95% of revenue comes from international business, only 11 out of the 100 groups under scrutiny manage to create reputation levels as favourable abroad as it is in their home land.

Exporting reputation is indeed a difficult task for most corporations because it is necessarily based on the trust that consumers in foreign countries have in these companies and those consumers often know very little of their history or values.

Kasper Ulf Nielsen therefore recommends that foreign markets never be considered simply as export markets but as new locations for reputation crafting and interaction with local communities in order to let other drivers than product quality play an important role in reputation management and financial success.

I invite you to watch the video to learn what these other drivers are and what role social media play in this strategy.

See you soon, for new episodes.

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The 3 essential aspects of lasting enterprise reputation

September 10, 2012 1 Comment

In this new episode of our “Reputation Management Decision Makers” WebTV series, Michael Jaïs interviews Alain Cayzac, Senior Advisor for GOETZ bank, in a discussion focused on crisis and reputation management.

The two men being such passionate football supporters, conversation could only begin with news of the Paris Saint-Germain ;)

But, beyond purely sports-related topics, the top club is used as an example company throughout the discussion and the various elements of reputation analysis mentioned in the video are also applied to it.

Crisis management insights

And the former President of Paris Saint-Germain has plenty to explain when it comes to crisis management, a discipline all football clubs must learn to master efficiently :

  • First of all, always know the difference between mere incidents turned into crises artificially – to defuse them – and real crises the consequences of which are dire and difficult to manage both in human and professional terms
  • For the latter : always acknowledge rather than try to avoid, show the empathy and compassion in a situation that implies real suffering from the victims, take action and communicate it efficiently.

Reputation management insights

And to answer Reputation Management, Alain Cayzac dons his co-founder of EuroRSCG jacket to draw a parallel between a person (human being) and a company, a dynamic and evolving organisation, in order to apply to the corporate world practical rules inherited from the Personal Brand model and its virtuous trinity : Being, Character and Style.

I’ll let you discover for yourself the details of this theory and the real-life examples of enterprise reputation analyses (including that of Paris Saint-Germain! ;) ) in the video itself and invite you to apply the same reasoning to your own organisation.

Is your balance perfect ?

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7 indispensable features of a PR monitoring platform

July 16, 2012 1 Comment

With the rising importance for corporations of understanding Internet conversations, monitoring platforms seem to be sprouting from nowhere every week-end. And with prices ranging from nil to 6 figures and feature sets tailored for many different use cases, it has become almost impossible to compare offerings directly.

Here are 7 essential features you’ll want to look for if your monitoring is PR and reputation management oriented.

Defining clean reading-lists

When watching out for crisis-alerts, it is a good idea to include as many significant sources as possible in your data: picking up a criticism from a small blog before a larger one amplifies it will prove invaluable to crisis management.

But if you’re monitoring competition or launching a niche product, more sources will simply mean more noise and less ability to analyze your coverage in meaningful ways (share of discussion, sentiment analysis by humans …)

Clean reading-lists are essential to media monitoring

Depending on your usage scenario, you need to be able to tailor your reading lists very accurately.

Staying flexible

  • One product today, three tomorrow.
  • Four competitors today, six tomorrow.
  • New technology, new regulations, new blogs, new buzzwords.

How easy is it for you to adapt to these changes? A monitoring plan optimized for January may look pretty outdated in July. Can you easily add or remove sources and keyphrases to your monitoring?

Mixing it up

Twitter delivers news (and rumours). Fast. Facebook provides recommendation. Good blogs are niche lighthouses. But don’t count traditional media out just yet.

While there is great value in social media monitoring, it cannot be your only source of information for PR and reputation management. According to Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer, traditional media are still, by a safe margin, the most influent source of information when it comes to trust.

Traditional media are still influent for reputation management

The ability to mix data from online and social monitoring and traditional offline clipping into a consistent feed is essential to analyse and understand along what paths news about your company circulate, which source is more influent and to be sure you are not missing out on anything important.

Blocking out the noise

What do SERPs look like for your company name, CEO, brand, products, competitors, technology (…)?

Hopefully, you own the first lines or pages of results, but beneath these are plenty of other pages unrelated to your brand and which are all likely to place news in your unfiltered monitoring feed.

For Augure, noise sources (from our point of view ;) ) are many : atmospheric metal music (yes, that exists), world of warcraft guilds, organist fan clubs, photography exhibitions, magic tricks … plus a constant slew of good and bad omens (Augure means omen, in French) in all types of activities, from business to arts. All of these use the term Augure so a simple keyword based monitoring feed would probably contain 80% of noise.

Noise hurts the efficiency of media monitoring

It’s important. Noise will lower your confidence in monitoring results and lower your focus. More importantly, it will make all analysis impossible and crisis detection very unreliable.

Your ability to add that double glazing to your monitoring windows, with far more than single word exclusions to deal with noise, is critical to the success of your monitoring goals.

Striving to qualify

What good is a list of clips and mentions to your management?

Qualified data makes efficient analysis and reporting possible. A monitoring platform that provides information such as author influence, theme, audience metrics, source type, (…) not only lets you refine your monitoring plan and reduce noise but also helps integration with your engagement platform and its reporting module.

Management usually prefer strategic insights and ROI evaluations to a bunch of URLs or paper clips. Do you qualify?

Finding your target

Most monitoring companies focus on specific areas of the world, which makes perfect sense (unfortunately, not all are perfectly clear about it).

Our focus is on France (6000 fully crawled sources), the UK and Southern Europe. Plus quite a few Spanish-speaking countries (our technology originated in Spain). Which doesn’t mean we don’t monitor the US or China, but our main focus what I just described.

Does your monitoring platform match your target ?

Whenever choosing a monitoring platform, be sure to check whether it covers your area extensively. Products from one continent may not be ideally suited for another.

Seeing beyond RSS

Most entry-level offerings – but also some more expensive and well-known platforms – rely exclusively on RSS feeds as their source of data. RSS feeds are a standardized output format from websites and blogs so tapping into them is extremely easy. In fact, you can build yourself a very similar monitoring rig using only a free RSS reader with search or filtering capabilities and cherry picking your sources.

But there are a number of problems with this approach.

First of all not all websites have RSS feeds. They’re a distinct minority but some of them are important and RSS-only will miss anything published by their website.

More often, a website will have separate sections and a specialized article might be published in a dedicated area with – or without – a dedicated RSS feed. Monitoring all the feeds from the website will result in duplicates if the article changes sections (e.g. a few hours on the homepage, then finances, then sports for an article on Football club debts).

Finally, many influent bloggers use their blogs as their sole website and make a solid proportion of their income from promoting their books, white papers, speaking bookings … in their sidebars. These prolific – and very important – authors deliberately place only a small portion, an appetizer, of their articles in their RSS feeds. If your company is mentioned in the body but not the header, RSS-only will miss the mention.

Clean crawling of websites, not using RSS, is a labour intensive job to perform and maintain. A large portion of the price difference between solutions can be attributed to this choice of sourcing technology. While free or entry-level software cannot be expected to go beyond RSS, any platform carrying a healthy monthly fee absolutely should.

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Media monitoring for profit

May 25, 2012 2 Comments

In previous instalments of this media monitoring series of posts, I described 5 steps for defining an efficient monitoring plan and 12 important goals to always keep in mind.

One of these aspects is sharing. Sharing the results of our monitoring is something we never used to do in the good old days of the press review and media analysis. A summary of these results were sent to some members of the C-Suite and the rest was for us to crunch on in the hope of building ever better campaigns.

Today, sharing is essential in many ways, as you will want to keep brand ambassadors, tweeting employees, prospects and customers as well as any number of other stakeholder types up to date with what’s fresh about your brand.

It all makes good sense for image and reputation management. But there’s one other reason for sharing that should not be overlooked and that’s data curation.

Needles in the haystacks

Our companies, our partners’ companies, our clients’ companies all evolve in an endless sea of content that continuous streams of data from every corner of the Internet make that much bigger every day.

Meaningful information is like gold in that context. Information is power. Information gives companies the ability to base decisions on facts.

gold pan

Panning for gold (creative commons image by Racy Rachel)

Sifting sands all day long in search of elusive nuggets is a task few organizations have the know-how and financial backing to perform on a regular basis. Which is why dedicated consulting firms charge hundreds or thousands of euro/pound/dollars for information that is often readily available on the web but which they serve in digested, curated and organized reports. The cost of producing work of similar quality would increase tenfold.

Putting you monitoring to use

An efficient monitoring plan will do just that for you: remove unwanted noise from a stream of data and articles. If you have set-up a good competitive and industry monitoring project, you will receive all the news that is useful for your team and your management to base strategic decision-making on. Why not share this information?

If you are an agency in the automotive industry, it is more than likely that your clients would be delighted to receive a weekly digest of the most important automobile-related news.

Curating automotive data with Augure's monitoring and webzine

Automotive curation with Webzine, Augure’s social press review (click for more information on our website)

As the traditional or only media articles, blogs, Facebook updates, Flickr images or tweets come your way loaded with keywords and other metadata, why not go even further and use this information to further refine your feed into sub-topical ones and share only the most relevant facts with the customers most likely to be interested?

And why not create another for your colleagues at Marketing to use in their newsletters? Data curation is now a major component of content marketing, as scoop.it, paper.li and many other dedicated solutions highlight. Putting your monitoring to similar use would reap the same financial and reputation rewards.

Are you extracting the most from your monitoring?

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Rooting for collaborative media monitoring

March 28, 2012 4 Comments

If you’ve read my previous posts on media monitoring, you’ll know that I rank collaborative very high in the criteria for success for this activity as well as – more generally – for PR and Reputation Management.

When one team used to deal with gaining press coverage and another with getting products in front of the public, it didn’t matter quite so much but, today, it does. When PR teams are earning and measuring clicks and marketers need to incorporate corporate reputation management in their campaigns, the overlap is simply too important to overlook and the only way of working successfully is: together.

And nowhere is this taking-down of internal silos more important than monitoring. Whether sizing-up the playing field for a product launch, extinguishing the flames of a social crisis or monitoring the impact of a campaign on reputation, the need to share information throughout the organization without hinderance is essential.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Click to view a sample Webzine

With this in mind, we’re hopping-up-and-down pleased to introduce our social webzine module, that lets any one in your company view the results of your monitoring process. Think of it as a daily press review incorporating mentions from traditional, online and social media and readable like a magazine. A cross-channel Flipboard of sorts, for PR and marketing pros.

The webzine is loaded with user-friendly features (the articles behind the links in tweets are displayed along with the tweets, for instance, and prominent stories are given greater screen real-estate) and designed to be as easy and pleasant to use as possible.

Coupled with our recently acquired cross-channel monitoring abilities, this lets you easily :

  • Define the keywords that matter to your business : brands, products, executives, competitors, industry topics …
  • Use your entire monitoring results or cherry pick the most relevant for a specific situation
  • View and share with any number of colleagues the results in a daily digest that will brighten up their computer screen at work, your tablet at home or your smartphone in the tube

We don’t often brag about our products on this blog but, seriously, we think this one’s a biggie :) So much so, in fact, that we’re handing out free trials to every one. So, if you’d like to be reading a cross-channel digest of your company’s coverage in your next train commute, just click below !

Request an Augure demo

Be seeing you!

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10 ways media monitoring will help your crisis management

March 22, 2012 2 Comments

It used to be that a corporate crisis was triggered only by major events involving top executives, global scandal or industrial accidents. The media would relay the news at best on a daily rhythm and giving company spokespersons as much coverage as the news itself. The public would get daily updates from a limited number of sources, most often TV, maybe the morning radio and a newspaper. Coverage would be very similar, providing incremental information in a linear fashion as time went by. Only the amount of coverage in a given publication or program would determine how much of the story people got to read or watch.

Contrast this now with a classic social media outbreak such as the Domino’s Pizza or United Airline broken guitar videos. Created by amateurs – employees for Domino’s Pizza and a disgruntled customer for United Airlines – these received millions of views on YouTube in only a few days, spread from friend to friend every minute and got relayed by mainstream media, sometimes without the respective companies having their say.

Both videos triggered response from the highest levels of management in spite of the original incident being fairly minor : yes, the Domino’s Pizza video was disgusting but the gravity of the facts pale in comparison to what would have been necessary to generate as much noise only 10 years ago. And the United Airlines example – and its almost 12 MILLION views – highlights the possibility for the dissatisfaction of a single customer to find a great echo with the other members of the public when the heat would previously have been kept private.

Given that the probability of positively resolving a crisis decreases in time, with simultaneously increased crisis management costs, this greater propagation speed not only means more frequent crises but also more complex and costly resolutions. An efficient monitoring process and well rehearsed response plans are the best safeguards against this phenomenon.

Here are 10 ways media monitoring will help you avoid the worst before, during and after the crunch :

  1. Knowing you natural channels. The most effective crisis management device, bar none, is a favourable terrain. Surveys show, year after year, that a company with a good reputation will be much less affected by bad news than another with a low trust capital. Pretty obvious but not always acted upon. Cross-channel media-monitoring will tell you exactly who is talking about you and where discussions are taking place. Also what media and what channels are covering you.
    2. Coverage of a crisis by media type

    Twitter rules this crisis

  2. Closing the gaps. Conversely, by monitoring your competition and industry topics, you will also find who isn’t talking about you, but should be. This lets you start conversations and begin building trust in other important corners of online and social media.
  3. Understanding propagation. If, through your monitoring, you’ve been paying attention to what the information propagation patterns are in your industry, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who starts rumours, rants and misinformed discussions. And of who amplifies news, who defends your positions or corrects errors. Not only should this provide you with plenty of ideas for engagement before a crisis, it will also help you react much more efficiently when red alert is sounding.
  4. Understanding pain points. You might be surprised with the topic that ignites a crisis. There probably was no way for Domino’s to anticipate the coup-d’éclat of their employees but, in most cases, it’s pretty easy to understand what the main pain points are for your customers (or partners, or employees …) and prepare for disaster in that direction.
  5. Detecting a problem early. If my lengthy intro tells you anything, it’s that speed is an essential ingredient for success. Frequent feed updates will give you an early start and the ability to at least establish an official presence in the discussions very early on to correct mistakes or, at worst, simply say “I don’t know, but we’re looking into it”. In the example below, catching the opportunity to speak out on the 25th is a lot better than a few days later. Real-time is better still.

    6. A sudden spike in media coverages can indicate a crisis

  6. Fostering engagement. In the first phases of a crisis, it is important to understand where the threat is strongest. The most angry and most influential relays need to be addressed very quickly. Even if you have very little to offer, identifying the greatest detractors and simply acknowledging you have heard their complaint and are doing everything to look into it, is a great help. This stops the flame wars and buys you (a little) time to prepare for the next step. Since you cannot respond to millions in a few hours, your monitoring must help you pinpoint the most important stakeholders to talk with.
  7. Planning a response. Your monitoring will then tell you what the exact complaint is and how it is being discussed in the media. What terms are being used? Who is being mentioned? What are the undesirable associations with your brand? … Share these insights quickly inside the company and prepare a response plan.
  8. Measuring progress. As you reply to angry comment and gradually feed in information, measure how the crisis topics you previously identified are rising or falling in ‘popularity’. Are opinion leaders picking up your information or are crisis related terms still gaining. Monitor constantly and adapt your strategy accordingly.
  9. Monitor side issues. If you’ve been listening carefully to your communities and to internal discussions, you’ll know what other pain-points are likely to be picked-up as extra fuel in the crisis. Are any of these flaring up ? Prepare responses for all of those that are related to the current hot-topic.
  10. Checking for secondary flares. I come from the South of France, where the summer time is a period of constant battle against forest fires. After a long day or week of extinguishing the main fire, an intense watch is set up at many peripheral point to be ready for spontaneous re-igniting. In a dried-out landscape, a single incandescent log forgotten under ashes is enough to start the fight all over again. Crisis management follows the same logic. And when the main combat phase seems over, you need to be particularly watchful for new spikes. So keep the monitoring very regular and use what you learned in the previous phases to monitor the terms most likely to mean trouble.
  11. Rebuilding trust. If all goes well, your side of the story should progressively get greater share of coverage. Measure how consistently you messages are relayed and how the tone relating to these gradually shifts to green.

Effective crisis management consists if many successive phases, including:

  • Comprehensive pre-crisis engagement to establish a favourable terrain
  • Immediate response, if only to establish a corporate presence, even if you don’t have the answers
  • Laying out of a plan and swift communications about it
  • Walking the early road to recovery by providing information on how the plan is unfolding
  • Re-building trust, which can take 4 years

In today’s instant-information and connected world, mapping cross-channel monitoring to each of these will go a long way towards dealing effectively with the worst the web can offer.

How is your company preparing for such crises ?

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Managing the cross-channel reputation of a government institution

March 13, 2012 Leave a comment

In spite of popular belief, Reputation Management is not restricted to high-profile companies that are likely to cause mass environmental destruction or disrupt the social balance of fragile and exotic communities. Corporate reputation has now become one of the most important criteria in the mind of ordinary people looking to buy everyday products and most report they would not do business with a company with a tarnished reputation.

But in fact, Reputation Management is not exclusively the sole preoccupation of businesses either. Even governmental institutions that have nothing to sell are preoccupied with creating and maintaining long-term trust with their stakeholders. Who these stakeholders are, how varied they are, what their main concerns related to and what communication channels they use most is explained in detail in this new episode of our “Reputation Management Decision Makers” Web TV series in which Augure CEO Michael Jaïs talks to Didier Venturini CTO of the Region PACA.

Multiple stakeholders and reputation drivers

What does a public procurement awards and CMMI certifications received by an IT department have to do with reputation ?

In very practical terms, they prove that the department is spending public money efficiently and wisely. More generally, they are just two of the numerous reputation drivers that are discussed in this video. And this is one of the most interesting aspects of this interview, in that it clearly describes that reputation management is not simply about pushing messages out to your Facebook page hoping that fans will gobble them up and buy products in their droves.

In the case of the regional institution Mr Venturini describes, reputation management hinges around creating a lasting relationship with multiple stakeholder types over multiple issues and multiples channels. In particular :

  • Stakeholders can be citizens of all ages, business owners, other administrations, the French government, the European government …
  • Issues addressed range from optimized public spending, quality of outreach, legal information, event promotion
  • Communication channels include mail (of the pulverized wood pulp type), email, the website, blogs, newsletters, Facebook and Twitter
  • People playing a role in reputation management are not limited to PR but include IT and other departments

Besides this important diversity, collaboration with the public is a strong focus and building lasting trust is envisioned as fostering personalized and interactive engagement with all.

My guess is that many large company are not as mature in their own internal definition of reputation management. What do you think ?

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Shaping up for Social Corporate Engagement

February 24, 2012 Leave a comment

In a previous post, I defended the idea that the use of social media by organizations to discuss corporate topics may be on the rise. Immediately after this, co-authoer Roxanne Varza described how 3 new social media platforms could be leveraged in your communications strategy.

Which is all well and fine, but we regularly hear the cries of overburdened PR and marketing managers : “how do we keep up with it all?”

Empower Me, Boss!

One of the secrets, probably the most important secret, is to learn to empower others to do so for you. The reality of social media is that your employees probably use – and know – them better than most managers in the company. Face it.

How to empower, train, guide and organize employees from various departments and business units in your organization is the topic of our soon-to-be-released white paper “Is There a PR Pilot In Your Social Plane?”, which also deals with measuring results from this engagement. If you’d like to receive this, just drop us a line on our contact form.

Get in Shape

Web Strategy expert Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter group has also conducted surveys of organizations to find out how they structure their social media teams and made some suggestions towards facing the task proactively rather than becoming a “social media help-desk”.

A chart by Altimeter Group shows how social media teams are structured in large coporatiions

Structure of the Social Media Team. (c) Altimeter Group

In Strategy: Five Steps to Achieve ‘Escape Velocity’ –and Finally Stay out of the Social Media ‘Help Desk’, he gives the following recommendations to stay ahead of the game and plan long-term rather than spend your days in a short-term reactive mode that lowers your value drastically :

  1. Be proactive. Provide business units and services with what they need before they ask.
  2. Adopt a hub and spoke structure. Do not centralise everything or you will not cope.
  3. Enable others. Relinquish control and teach. This is one of the focuses of our white paper.
  4. Deploy scalable technology. Monitoring and sharing are part of this.
  5. Deploy programs beyond marketing. Again, a central focus of our white paper.

And in Data: Composition of a corporate social media team, he gives very interesting insight into how teams are currently organised in large corporations (click above picture to access the article).

Interestingly, Altimeter predict that corporate social media strategists will work themselves out of a job (because they will have empowered other teams to operate their own programs) but that “a core team will always be required to coordinate the enterprise”. Hear! Hear!

What I personally disagree with is the concluding statement that “this will evolve into a customer experience team (or back into the CX team)”. Borrowing again from their increasingly rich repository of reports and surveys, here is a prediction of annual occurrences of social media crises.

A graph describing the rising number of annual social media crises in large organzations

Annual Social Media crises. (c) Altimeter Group.

I strongly believe that customer experience teams will react to short-term hiccups in near real-time. But with reputation management now a number 1 on fast growing companies’ top social media priorities, coordination will both be more and more important and will absolutely need to include input from the PR and reputation management team.

Again, I ask “Is there a PR Pilot in your Social Media plane?” What do you think ?

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