Home / Archive: September 2009
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Proactive social media monitoring deals with minor social media flames before they turn into forest fires. When spotting a negative comment on your brand in a discussion forum the question quickly becomes, “how big is this”?
You don’t want to engage a diper rash personality who is using social media to symptomatically complain. However, DO pay attention if the comment resonates with other forum participants.
Next, find out who placed the comment. Is it a real person with a social media following? Is his/her audience likely to have resonance with your target group? In short, in doing social media monitoring, try to establish what level of influence the person posting the comment has.
It’s time to pay particular attention when social media monitoring shows that members of your core audience are posting negative comments. If some of your evangelist users are unhappy now, more are likely feel the same way in the near future.
When you find that comments and forum posts spread to a blog post, you need to take a closer look. The fact that a message makes a channel shift, from a forum discussion to blog post, is a red flag.
The blog may at that point be a good place to actively respond to criticism and do some active online reputation management. Start by getting in touch with the author and establish rapport. Explain your side of the story and ask to contribute with a comment.
With some luck, the blogger may issue an update on the previous post and report your solution to the problem. Proactive social media monitoring could prevent the issue from making another channel shift, for example to other blogs, online news sites, video and/or picture sharing sites.
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The Communication Summit is the yearly highlight for PR and Communication professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. During a panel discussion on online PR and communication, Mr. Volker Gaßner from Greenpeace, made an interesting contribution to the topic of online reputation monitoring.
Greenpeace does online reputation monitoring of companies they see as “greenwashing” their corporate image (i.e. claiming without merit that they are green and sustainable). He used an example of RWE, a large energy provider, who recently hired a high profile PR and marketing agency to create a video to improve their corporate image. The video depicts an animated version of the energy giant planting windmills, wave power generators and fixing broken power lines.
In fact, only 2% of RWE’s energy comes from green and sustainable energy and Greenpeace sees the RWE video as a typical “greenwashing” campaign. Accordingly, Greenpeace re-cut and altered the video to be shown on a TV monitor, sitting in a wasteland of nuclear energy plants (RWE owns 5 of them in Germany).
After only a few weeks the Greenpeace response has almost as many YouTube views as the original, it backfired.
Mr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler AG, also addressed the topic at his opening Keynote to the Communication Summit. The challenges for PR and communication professionals in communicating green technology efforts are indeed real. It is not only a complex and difficult technology to understand (especially in the car industry), it is also easy to fall for the temptation of playing with statistics and nice imagery.
Mr. Zetsche concluded that only communication of real substance is likely to gain trust and goodwill. It is also safe to assume that Greenpeace, as well as competitors, will continue with online reputation monitoring, to keep track of greenwashing and misleading advertising.
