10 ways media monitoring will help your crisis management

March 22, 2012 by 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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Shaping up for Social Corporate Engagement

February 24, 2012 by 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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12 important goals for a monitoring plan

January 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

While monitoring – particularly of the social subspecies – is on everyone’s lips today, it is often considered in only one of two contexts:

  • Customer feedback: by monitoring all customer expression channels (social media, phone, email …) and applying heavy technological machinery to face the daunting task of analysing the huge volumes implied, a summary of pain points can be extracted in order to alter the very structure of internal services and support
  • online PR measurement: since media production and consumption has shifted online in the past few years, paper clippings are no longer sufficient to evaluate the success of PR campaigns and online monitoring is used to complete the picture

While both are very valid uses, I’d like to point out a few more. Not because of a sudden crave for encyclopedic endeavours, however pleasant that may be, but because recent evolutions in the social and media landscape dictate profound changes in the way companies and organizations engage with their publics and monitoring is the single most important tool to navigate these often complex waters.

How the Web was won

This is a chart we use on our website to explain the four phases of engagement that must be considered in any communications campaign: Listen, Map, Engage, Measure …

Listen, Map, Engage, Measure. 4 steps in agile campaign management

4 phases of Engagement in a web 2.0 environment


… and back again.

That “back again” is the essential part! While in the past you could plan, execute and measure, the web 2.0 has changed all this and mobile is only making it more complex. The minute a message leaves your company (very often, way before that …) it is amplified, distorted and relayed at various speeds and frequencies depending on media, channels and communities. As previously mentioned on this blog, this new environment requires your PR and communications to learn from Agile and Extreme programming methodologies in order to adapt. Monitoring is essential to plan ahead and gain rapid feedback from all possible channels.

Who you engage, how, and what you measure to keep the boat pointing in the right direction are important aspects of your monitoring plan. The real takeaway is that monitoring is behind all four of these phases.

12 essential goals

OK, I lied. I don’t have 12. 12 sounded like a great number. Large enough to pull the crowds and not so large that I would scare anyone away. But the fact is that the number varies on your own campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Consider all the aspects of your campaign then choose the most relevant from the list below and add your own!!

So, here we go, in no particular order.

Preparing a product launch

Chances are your new product will appeal to many audiences: users who want to know when and how and how much; journalists, who want to know what to write, whether it’s worth their time (unless you’re Apple); bloggers, who want to be the first to spread the news and gain influence and credit (and traffic); resellers, who want to know whether you have addressed past product criticism, whether the rumors about a feature are true …

All of these audiences and expectations need to be identified and addressed for a successful launch. For a recent and compelling example, see how Nokia launched their Lumia 800 after years of struggling in the smartphone market.

Counting on my fingers, that’s at least 4, right there !

Preparing your entry on social media

With Facebook rocketing towards the billionth member mark, not a day goes by without 20 messages turning up in my mail box enticing me to join the party and triple my company’s revenue on social media. Yet the reality is more sobering, and for every success story, ten companies are realizing the emperor really is naked.

The withheld truth is that social media is not a one-size-fits-all marketing venue. Set foot on the wrong network with the wrong approach, and that free community will suddenly look very costly.

Here are a few things you can measure before pressing the GO button:

  • Find out where your prospects/customers are. There’s no point in painting your house blue for Facebook if you should be thinking of Linkedin instead
  • Find out what the hot discussion topics are. Listen before you talk. Identify areas where you can add value
  • Understand the internal gearing of the community. Who pioneers the news, who relays it, who is vocal but not listened to, who is really influential …
  • Understand critical engagement points. What are the positive topics? What are the negative? What ideas are associated to your brand or products? Are there any false rumors going round …

+4 !

Finding your reputation drivers

As they do every year, Edelman have just published the latest edition of their worldwide Trust Barometer, analysing reputation drivers throughout the world. While I used to be (and still am) a huge fan of that enormous survey, I do have to admit that the granularity somehow doesn’t cut it anymore.

Reputation drivers must be measured on the community level to be acted upon and will be different for every company. Measure what blogs are saying about you and compare that to online media and traditional media. While the main stories will be the same, the finer points of view won’t.

Now, let me count … that’s plenty more.

Optimizing your channels

You have successfully engaged with multiple social media communities, you have a regular newsletter shipping, strong relationships with journalists and bloggers …

You have a corporate message to get across.

Measuring the efficiency of media kits across channels

In which channel is it being best received (open-rates, click-through rates) and relayed (retweets, +1, LIKEs …)? Which format suits which channel best? Answers to these questions are key to optimizing your 1 to many engagement.

Media monitoring

Cheating again! I mentioned that in my introduction.

Yes, but, should you stop monitoring TV and newspapers just because of your online feed? Maybe, maybe not? Which are your strongest lead generators? Where are your opponents being most listened to? What is your competition doing? What is your share of voice on the various channels? All this must be plainly visible from a single vantage point. You can then eliminate what is not providing actionable information.

I’ve stopped counting, by now. I need my fingers to type this.

Public affairs, CSR and stakeholder engagement

Who are the best stakeholders to meet for a specific campaign? Influence is one thing to consider. The more influential the person, the greater the amplification of your message.

But that’s not all. Obviously, you’ll want to know what she’s been talking/writing/filming about recently. Anything about you, or your competition? Are there topics you’re not likely to agree about?

But that’s still not all. What been said/written/filmed about her? influential or not, the reactions she triggers might not be the ones you are looking for? What is her own image within your target audience? …

Bottom line, I promise

There are many more uses and goals, whether you’re a public sector corporation, an agency looking after you client’s visibility, a global company or a niche SMB.

But I hope by now my message is clear : monitoring is no longer (only) a question of plugging a clipping provider’s data stream into an application and counting mentions. As more and more departments and employees are becoming a part of your relations with the outside world, many more sources of information for planning and feedback should be integrated into and shared as a convenient and consistent whole to steer the whole organization towards its top line goal.

Sharing the results of monitoring

Sharing the results of monitoring

Offline media, online media, social media, one to one engagement, events, surveys … all are sources of precious information that need to be considered as monitoring and integrated into your daily tools and processes.

If you have any specific monitoring goals in mind I haven’t mentioned here, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

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5 must-have steps in every monitoring plan

January 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Monitoring is an essential part of any PR and reputation management campaign management, but is often considered from the sole point of view of extracting information from the Internet, whereas a successful plan involves and requires many other steps.

In my previous post, I described monitoring as trying to a listen to a conversation happening 20 feet away in a crowded bar. This is the information extraction part often referred to, but what good is it if the conversation stays in your head as a string a words, not communicated to anyone or analyzed or used to take action ?

Here are 5 steps that define a useful media monitoring plan from the definition phase to the decisional aspects.

 

Defining entities

Cutting through the billions of conversations going on each day implies restricting both the subjects you’re interested in as accurately as possible and limiting the sources to the most useful ones. defining entities is the first part.

Most competitive monitoring plans will focus on brand names, products or services and company executives. That in itself can be quite a hurdle. I monitor the news for Augure (which means “omen” in French) and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes in from World of Warcraft, ancient mysteries forums, church organ players and death metalheads if I’m not careful in my keyword selection. Oh my … ;)

WOW Augure !

Once you have defined your keywords and potential namesakes or other pitfalls, advanced monitoring platforms use semantic analysis to extract the correct information using context in the article. This filters out most if not all of the noise without missing important data.

Defining sources

Where does your audience hang out? Are your stakeholders most vocal on Facebook or in blogs? Is offline coverage important to your success?

Listening to the social world

Listening to a social world

The natural temptation, in order not to miss anything important is to monitor the whole universe. And this leads to numbers games about the number of sources being monitored. But that’s meaningless and dangerous:

  • First because as soon as you have the technology to monitor a blogging platform such as wordpress, you can monitor over 50 million sources. Hook-on to Facebook and that’s 700 million, no 800, no 900 no … Numbers are meaningless. Far more important is to identify those that are influential in your industry, extract clean information from them (no adverts, no spam) and be able to add more as and when necessary.
  • Secondly because you will not be able to digest the result of too large a reading list. My photography-minded friend and Augure Product Manager Caroline set up one of our feeds to monitor the news about a new camera on social media. Like her, I doubt that you will enjoy seeing thousands of messages pile up every hour (unless what you want is a statistical dashboard), even on-topic ones ;) So be specific about what you need to include. By default, we suggest packs to our customers and it is always easy to build from that.

Homogeneizing

Forum messages and offline have very different structures. Mixing offline sources with online media requires some technical work in order to present readable and interpretable results. As a simple example: in your monitoring results, would you rather see tweets with shortened links or the article hiding behind the link ?

Analyzing

What is your goal with that monitoring? Are you interested in the share of blog coverage of a product you have just launched or is real-time sentiment analysis of a developing crisis more important to you?

Publication click-through statistics

Too often, analytics are an afterthought of monitoring plans. But defining the dashboard you need prior to anything else is important to determine what information your monitoring and/or qualification software/teams need to provide you with? Tone, volume, size, images, number of views, ranking, influence levels … ?

Sharing and collaborating

As social networks have changed public relations forever, companies have had to adapt by becoming more social themselves. Stakeholder engagement is no longer the exclusive responsibility of a few staff members in the PR team and more and more employees are becoming brand ambassadors after being trained and receiving proper engagement guidelines.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Media Monitoring On The Go

As will be discussed in the final installment of this series, monitoring is essential for successful engagement and its results should be share with anyone taking part in discussions on behalf of the organization.

Depending on the recipient, sharing may take the form of an analytic report, a webzine to read in the tube or a formal press review and reputation dashboard. Whatever the form taken, sharing is an essential and often overlooked part of success.

Now that you have the 5 steps in hand, how do you use your monitoring to enhance your social engagement ?

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Raising the bar for online monitoring

January 13, 2012 by 2 Comments

Picture yourself at the pub after work with that cool pint in one hand and your mates all around you discussing the day’s events: That incredible piece of fielding by Kiwi 12th man Bevan Small, the dreaded copying machine that’s down again, the new memo from IT and how idiotic it is to have made Greedo shoot first in the Blu-Ray edition in spite of fan protest.

Tables all around are the same and the whole room is alive with the hum of multiple conversations and points of view on various topics, everyone joining in regardless of background or expertise.

The hum of simultaneous conversations

But you’ve hooked onto a specific exchange going on a few meters away about a specific case you’re working on. After struggling several minutes to piece together the few words you have been able to isolate from the background drone, you realize your eavesdropping led you on to a different subject that you initially thought and you jump back in to your pal’s discussion with a hasty”… of course Han shot first! There’s no way Greedo could have missed at that range otherwise. Lucas is a self-righteous twerp!”.

From digital data to engagement information

Monitoring online and social media can be a very similar experience to this. The bar analogy isn’t just for fun, because social media engagement recommendations start exactly like this : “imagine yourself in a bar full of conversations. Listen to the conversations, add meaningful comments whenever possible. Provide information and entertainment and make a name for yourself in the community”.

Augure's anline and social monitoring dashboard

And, as I will describe in part 3 of this series, monitoring is not only for reporting, but a tremendous help to guide your engagement:

  • Who is discussing your brand and who is having the greatest influence in the conversation ?
  • How is your engagement campaign doing ? Which are the most responsive media and which terms are getting the most amplification ?
  • What is the global impact of engagement on the company’s top line and reputation ?

So, where do you start ?

The augure webzine displaying monitoring results for the iPhone 4s

Augure's webzine displaying monitoring results for "Apple"


Going from the millions of digital voices found in blogs, comments, Facebook, online media, Twitter and forums to a clean and useable output that resembles the picture above implies a series of challenges that are described in the next post:

  • Define who you want to listen to. In the bar, you cannot choose to eliminate a table or add others. In social monitoring project, you can.
  • Define what you want to listen for. Sir Isaac Newton’s view of an apple isn’t the same as Steve Jobs’ was. Trust me, we know. We have clients with fruit names and we are called Augure (which means omen, in French). So we know a lot about disambiguation.
  • Define what you want to measure. Are you launching a product and interested in share of discussion or is sentiment relative to a recent crisis more prominent in your mind ?

I will go deeper into these aspects in the next two posts. Stay tuned !

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Helping your Facebook fans help you – with engagement

December 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

2011 has been a big year for Facebook. New features were launched to make the world’s largest social network an indispensable tool for companies and to monetize its continent sized fan base via new forms of engagement and advertising. A few weeks ago, I asked whether the new Timeline, which appears to be still rolling out slowly, would help PR Pros or not.

More recently, I argued that using social media exclusively as a short-term branding tool was dangerous for corporate reputation management, that engagement is key to long-term social media success and that PR should always be involved in defining the organisation’s social media strategy.

Facebook F8 presented new features for PR and marketing

In this post, I’d like to examine some of the other news from Facebook to determine whether and how these may impact PR and reputation management.

What makes your fans tick ?

Among the slew of new features announced at Facebook’s F8 conference last September are new buttons that go beyond the LIKE action. This is Facebook’s first step towards making fans share more and in more varied ways. VIEWING, SHARING and others are being made possible, and content publishers are even able to create their own button through apps to suit their own publications.

More significantly, and far more controversially, Facebook introduced the Ticker on the right hand side of the page, to show you what your friends are doing, who they are friending, what cafe they are checking into and what brands or products they are liking.

The facebook ticker

The ticker was met with almost universal criticism. From users, who claim it simply provides too much information into their friends’ lives. And from many many experts denouncing privacy scares.

Since the introduction that feature, many articles have been written to explain how to protect yourself from it and even how to remove it altogether (thanks to a Google Chrome extension, how surprising ;) ).

But Ticker is amajor component of Facebook’s business plan, along with Top stories and Sponsored Stories.

Beyond the obvious personal branding/reputation associated to ticker, its significance is due to the fact that it now integrates Sponsored stories in its feed. Sponsored stories are adverts in which the text is not written by the advertiser but is extracted from a fan’s update or action: Eric LIKEs the latest news from your company and all of Eric’s friends will see an advert for your news containing his “this is really interesting” update. This is significant because, according to Facebook, sponsored stories have much more impact than conventional advertising.

Top Stories, the final element in Facebook’s engagement trilogy, may be even more important to PR and reputation management professionals. Indeed, while the news feed on your Facebook page has always been presented in chronological order, top stories can be pushed up to the top of your feed is enough of your friends have liked it or commented on it. I already mentioned EdgeRank – Facebook’s feed filtering algorithm, that determines what friend and brand updates you actually see in your newsfeed – in 5 reasons not to count Fans on Facebook. The algorithm strengthens the visibility of brands you engage with and reduces it for others. Top stories push this idea one big step forward.

Finding engaging content to publish

Obviously, producing and publishing engaging content on Facebook is key to starting engagement. How do you know what your fans like best ?

Smart Insights recently published an interesting infographic describing the basic types of sharers in the UK and what content they like to share best.

But this is generic and the best way to understand what your community wants is to … listen to discussions. Listening will give you insight in major issues, major likes and dominant speakers. But I’ll tell you much, much more about this in my next post ! Stay tuned :)

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Listen there! Is your PR EXTREME enough?

November 25, 2011 by 3 Comments

A while ago, I introduced the notion of Agile communications on this blog. That post described how agile programming methodologies could be transposed to public relations in order to enable tracking rapid shifts in public perception while keeping the long-term communications plan in mind.

Resident guru Jean-Charles recently pointed me to Extreme Programming, a popular agile process with similar goals and based on fundamental core values such as respect (for your team members, your client, your management), courage (to say NO! to a dangerous project or unreasonable roadmaps, or reporting delays …) or communication (constant sharing of knowledge to ensure every member of the team improves quickly).

Pair programming is a core practice of XP and should be used in public relations

Pair programming, an agile principle

Quoting from the book:

Extreme Programming is successful because it stresses customer satisfaction. Instead of delivering everything you could possibly want on some date far in the future this process delivers the software you need as you need it. Extreme Programming empowers your developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.

Sounds familiar?

Becoming EXTREME with your PR

So why, exactly, am I inflicting this techy digression upon you?

Because the best ideas in one discipline often come from other disciplines and this one is really worth applying to PR and reputation management. You see, XP, as it is refered to by the cool people in the know, has the following goal:

Extreme Programming emphasizes teamwork [...] The team self-organizes around the problem to solve it as efficiently as possible [...] With this foundation Extreme Programmers are able to respond to changing requirements and technology

And I’d like to describe two of XP’s values that support this goal and should be in the minds of every PR pro: simplicity and, most of all, feedback.

KISS

Keep it simple. In this context, that means delivering the minimum work that will, with certainty, provide most value to the customer. It’s not about being lazy, it’s about being nimble. Delivering sure values in short spurts to follow trends more closely and not waste effort on long-term projects whose necessity might wane well before completion.

Take this blog, for instance. I have in mind what Augure wants to communicate about in the long-term, what image it wants to project and what expertise I want to share. I could write a 600 page book to describe all that but it would take a year to publish and many of today’s news and topics of interest would be long past their sell-by date. Besides who would read it when you can get info on a specific topic in just 500 words ? Blogging is more EXTREME than writing books ;)

Most of all, simplicity in PR is about reaching out to the outside world and listening carefully to what is being said NOW and deciding how to react quickly and efficiently, with the bigger plan in mind. Which brings me to feedback.

Positive feedback

If you’re a UltraFi nut like me, that title will send shivers down your spine. But for XP PR (!) it is all about touching ground after every short campaign. With your client or management, obviously, but also with the public. Constant monitoring is essential to maintain efficiency. Systematic monitoring after each micro campaign will inform you on the reaction of your public and will pinpoint your progress towards your long-term goal.

Imagine a navigator adjusting his sails on one side of an ocean and never altering them during the crossing in spite of wind changes. Monitoring will give you feedback on the wind to constantly keep on the closest possible track in spite of changing wind (perceptions and technologies). It will also save your life if the end goal changes during the crossing!

Shhh, it’s a secret !

Another reason for describing XP here is that, as I have mentioned in previous posts, we have big news coming that will help you get EXTREME very easily. But shhh, my lips are sealed. Stay tuned!

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Why your brand image could be crippling your corporate reputation

October 14, 2011 by 5 Comments

It has been argued that corporate reputation is an aggregate of the company’s image over long periods but that’s not entirely true. And confusing image with reputation could in fact lead to a degradation of the latter.

It’s all relative

Let me explain.

Building brand image is trying to establish strong, favourable and unique associations with the brand in the consumer’s mind. When you think of Nike, the swoosh – Athena’s wings – comes to mind. So do the slogan “Just do it” and associations with high performing athletes.

Nike's swoosh

Corporate Reputation, on the other hand is the sum of perceptions by all stakeholder groups relative to their reputation drivers. World wide surveys such as Edelman’s Trust Barometer reveal what these reputation drivers are, year after year, at the country level.

But for a corporation, these can – and do – change with geography and stakeholder types. Consumers might or might not be happy with product quality. NGOs may still have memories of underaged labour or environmental misconduct. Partners may appreciate doing business with the company. Employees may love internal training and salaries but dislike work conditions …

  • One is about changing mindsets, the other about listening.
  • One is about selling products, the other about enabling business.
  • One is short-term, the other lasts for years. Years ago, Nike signed onto the Global Compact in an attempt to promote an environmentally and socially responsible image but negative associations still linger ten years on.

Social Media should not be (exclusively) a branding channel

Nowhere is stakeholder monitoring (and engagement) more important than in corporate reputation management. In order to find the reputation drivers and issues relative to them, there simply is no alternative to listen and engage.

Reputation barometers such as the Reputation Institute’s are vast surveys asking stakeholders what matter most to them. PR guidelines such as those published by the IPR and AMEC are constantly pushing towards primary reasearch because it is an area that has demonstrated the ability to provide actionable insights and meaningful information.

social media activity types for large french companies

Click the image to access our study (in French)

And yet, social media, the one area where organisations can engage directly with their public is very rarely used to question visitors and discuss social or environmental issues. It does happen, but more often social media is being used to promote brand image, run community-boosting contests or games and develop entertainment programs.

We have just released a study showing how France’s largest corporations are using social media. After recent surveys revealed how much social activity was being devoted by the public to these companies and their boards, we evaluated how these companies were responding.

We measured their presence on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube, their publication frequency, the variety of activities on these networks and community engagement. You can read the complete analysis on our website by clicking on the picture above, but here are three takeaways:

  • Companies tweet about 100x less than their public
  • Only 8% of social activity is devoted to bilateral engagement
  • Community engagement is non-existent for 70% of companies

Marketing and PR could share ownership of social media

In her book No Logo, writer Naomi Klein noted: “In many ways branding is the Achilles heel of the corporate world. The more these companies shift to being all about brand meaning and brand image, the more vulnerable they are to attacks on image.” That was a decade ago. But it remains as true today and nowhere is it more in evidence than on social media.

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that a Facebook page dealing only with the company’s environmental programs would remain quite empty and would not sell many products. But a combined effort between marketing and communications teams would likely be profitable to both. Organisations that have gathered large communities could listen to them more actively and combine reputation management with brand building. Just do it!

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Measuring reputation from A to Z

June 27, 2011 by 1 Comment

Or at least from A to M in part 1 (of 2) of this post. Part 2 now ready.

Regular readers will remember I have repeatedly argued against Facebook fan counting and the use of AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) for measuring PR efficiency because these unique – silver bullet – metrics fail to represent what is really happening behind the score.

So this post will obviously not introduce a new indicator that can magically represent the state of your reputation. Rather, it will describe a generic framework that can be used in most situations and activity sectors as a part of the virtuous stakeholder engagement cycle (Map, Engage, Measure) described in our free “Positive Engagement” white paper.

So, what is reputation and how do you measure it?
 

There are no standards for reputation scoring

Google the term and most answers by social media gurus will point you to counting fans as well as LIKES and comments. While there is merit in that approach, it is very partial as many a company’s most influent stakeholders make their voice heard through other media. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that @BPGlobalPR‘s anti BP tweets during the gulf disaster provided more comic relief to Tony Hayward than they distilled anguish, particularly compared to President Obama’s rulings. A more ideal system would measure how much social media actually influenced these rulings and the perceptions of other key stakeholders.

Then, there are the high profile scoring/ranking systems such as:

  • Fortune magazine’s “Most Admired”,a list published each spring and based on an extensive set of ranking criteria (Innovation, People management, Use of assets, Social responsibility, Management quality, Financial soundness, Long-term investment, Product quality, Global competitiveness).
  • Reputation Institute’s RepTrak, which measures how a number of attributes of 7 key dimensions (products/services, innovation, governance, workplace, citizenship, leadership and performance) are perceived by the general public.
  • Harris Interactive’s Reputation Quotient also measures 20 attributes along 6 dimensions.

A common point of these methods is that they resort to surveys and other forms of primary research to collect information on companies and evaluate their reputation along the lines of a pre-defined model. Consequently, measurement only occurs at regular intervals, every time a round of interviewing has been conducted and analysed.

Primary research studies are not comparable, as certain target the general public while others focus on specific interest groups. For instance, the Reputation Institute focuses on the general public and consumers whereas Fortune’s “Most admired” ranking addresses investors, analysts and executives.

These provide great insight. But their formula is locked, ascribing weightings to various themes and stakeholders, in a business world that sees trust factors and sources of influence change significantly from one year to the next (compare Edelman’s Trust factors for 2009 ‘trust in businesses and CEOs at an all time low’, 2010 ‘trust in businesses rises globally’ and 2011, for instance). The real irony is that the modern gurus who root for an exclusive reliance on social media scoring base their reasoning on antiquated 2005 and 2006 trust factors: “trust shifts from authority to peers” a.k.a “a person like me”, while industry experts are far more credible today.

Risk Analysis GraphIn contrast, monitoring-based reputation measurement seeks to evaluate public perceptions by analysing the media coverage they are subjected to and listening to their own tone of voice in blogs and social media. Therefore, this form of reputation monitoring lets companies evaluate perceptions as soon as they emerge and segment them accurately along more stakeholder groups than primary surveys usually focus on (patient associations, NGOs, regulators and legislators, business partners …).

Finally, there are other reputation studies performed by NGOs and specialist groups that target specific policy issues using in-house methodology.

In truth, even the Edelman trust barometer results (I refer to above) are debatable since the methodology targets only well off populations that might not reflect every company’s stakeholder base. And there lies the real drawback of any fixed methodology. In part 2, I will describe a general framework that can be used to integrate all these types of measurement into a meaningful and actionable result set.

Part 2 is now available.
Your feedback on how you measure your reputation is welcome.

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Creative Commons Image by MarcelGermain

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5 keys to facing social media disaster

June 20, 2011 by 3 Comments

One of your employees wrote something very disparaging on your corporate twitter feed. One of your deficient products is turning your Facebook wall into a river of hate. Your community manager mistook his private account for the company’s social outpost and publicly invited his bros to get wasted with him in the evening.

Ouch!
As described in Should companies fear social media blunders?, this is a common nightmare of CCOs entering the social highway. Although social engagement policies and guidelines go a long way towards eliminating the greatest risks, these situations do happen and should be tackled appropriately.

Here are five ways of containing the wildfire before it spreads.

Dealing with trouble on social media

1. Stay out of trouble. Pretty obvious, I know, but still true!

While damaging cases of crises born on social media do happen (Domino Pizza, Dell Hell), they are the minority. In most cases, social media is simply relaying real world bad news such as product failure, bad customer service or some form of scandal.

If you already have an online community giving you feedback, it is essential to monitor what is being said to identify sources of tension and locate the greatest risks and those who foster them: are they just whining with no following, determined detractors, is the community responding? Is the topic a pain-point likely to contaminate offline audiences and important to your business and reputation or something you can totally forget about? Are there real factors behind the rant? Is it misinformed? …

Understanding this feedback lets you steer clear of trouble or at least plan a reaction for it.

2. Be prepared. Have a plan and a community ready.
Focus
Reacting quickly and efficiently requires you to have rehearsed a corporate crisis plan for all the possible situations you can encounter on your social media outposts (see: Is your crisis management destroying your corporate reputation?). If you are constantly extinguishing fires and never find time to define and rehearse plans, you will always be fumbling and will never communicate successfully in stressful situations. Rehearsing crisis scenarios (product recall, rogue employee, internal scandal, accident …) is also a great way of discovering how you and your team react to upheaval. Be sure to evaluate and update your plan after use.

Also, do you have executive support endorsement to engage online when crisis strikes? Or will you require lengthy authorizations in order to respond on twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums … ?

3. Engage, inform and build trust. Publish great content.

Owning a community online is a great way of ensuring that any trouble will happen on your turf rather than in some uncharted corner of the social universe. It will give you the ability to react earlier and existing fans will actively defend you. But this requires establishing the community on the appropriate media (where people are already discussing your industry) and nurturing the community.

Great content is one of the keys to successful community building. Publishing regular, informative (or fun, depending on your sector) sharable updates will support your PR and community growing efforts. (see: Why PR teams should use Social Media for Online Reputation Management) Today, can your online audiences understand your company’s values and vision by through online information?

4. Think global. Social Media is only a part of the picture.
Is your company purely a brand pushed along by marketing or does it have a strong PR culture? Is the social media crisis you are experiencing likely to interest more audiences than your social community?

Depending on your profile and the situation, you can focus exclusively on the community itself or need to engage proactively with the media and your other important stakeholders. In any case, stakeholder engagement is an essential pre-crisis success factor because it provides a credibility cushion. Any stakeholder you have kept informed will question bad news rather than buy into the rumour. Edelman’s 2011 Trust barometer shows how much less bad news is likely to have an impact on a company with a good reputation (and vice versa).

5. Stay calm and respond. Find the right spokesperson.

In What makes an ideal crisis manager?, Vickie Elmer identifies the three key consistent characteristics that the best leaders display when faced with impending doom. Realistic optimism, a passion for confronting reality and an ability to find order in chaos are all important. And in the previous post, I argued that PR is best suited to handle crisis management.

Whatever your company culture, social media communications require an authentic voice (turn again to Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer: company experts are among the most valued spokespersons) and one that brings enough knowledge to share and a good view of how the company is handling the situation.

How and what you communicate is up to you and the situation at hand. In most cases, acknowledging responsibility and planning believable recovery steps help tremendously. That will be the subject of a future post.

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Creative common images by lincolnblues and Checkered and aMUSEd

Rachel: – Do you have a plan?
Phoebe: – I don’t even have a pl
My apologies if you are not a “Friends” fan.

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