Tag Archives: Social media

December 16, 2013Branding, Social MediaBen Sisario, Beyonce, Beyoncé Knowles, branding, Instagram, Online reputation management, Social mediaReputation Communications Staff

At midnight last Thursday, Beyoncé put her own stamp on social media marketing. She bypassed the traditional music industry marketing machine and released a brand new album directly to her fans — on Instagram. Her team was so successful in avoiding leaks that it was a complete surprise.

Ben Sisario reported the unexpected release in The New York Times:

“The release of a blockbuster album has historically come with a few standard marketing moves. Flood the radio with an early single. Book as many TV appearances as possible. Line up partnerships with big retailers and consumer brands.

But at midnight on Thursday, when Beyoncé released her latest album, she did none of those things. Instead, she merely wrote, “Surprise!” to her more than eight million Instagram followers, and the full album — all 14 songs and 17 videos of it — appeared for sale on iTunes.

The stealth rollout of the album, “Beyoncé,” upended the music industry’s conventional wisdom, and was a smashing success.”

The Take Away for Traditional Business Leaders

What can more traditional C.E.O.’s and other business leaders take away from Beyoncé’s successful stealth move? The most important is that social media is a tool that enables users to take ownership of their message.

In online reputation management, the more control you have over the information about your brand online, the more well-balanced your online image is. If it is authentic, interesting and informative, it will have credibility.

Using social media to communicate directly to the public, with no filter of spokesperson or other third parties, enables your message to be viewed exactly as you intend it to be. You still can’t change how the media, critics and consumers respond, but you have complete management over what, how and when you introduce what you want them to know. That results in a more authentic picture of your point of view – one that is less easily skewed by others. It also enables a message that the media can use — including national news outlets.

In more traditional corporate cultures, doing this requires the participation of a lot of team members – including risk, compliance and legal officers. So planning such strategies and having them in your playbook before you need them, is a good strategy for 2014.

Above: Beyonce, Montreal 2013, by Nat Ch Villa

December 9, 2013Branding, Reputation Case Study, Social MediaAuthenticity, branding, David Segal, Gary Vaynerchuk, Linda Boff, Online reputation management, personal branding, Shannon M. Wilkinson, Social media, Twitter, Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV, YouTubeShannon M. Wilkinson

If you scroll through this blog’s archives, you’ll find many different examples of how being authentic is central to successful online reputation management. But there are few better examples of the value of authenticity than Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you’ve read David Segal’s recent New York Times piece—or any of the countless other profiles on Vaynerchuk —you know the remarkable story of his rise from the savvy social media manager/über marketer for a New Jersey wine retailer to one of the top branding and social media thought leaders. In today’s climate, where building a personal brand has become an almost universal concern, we can all benefit by looking at the strategies and tools that have fueled his success. Loud, brash and profane, Vaynerchuk’s personality doesn’t appeal to everyone. But he doesn’t try to.

Uncompromising authenticity has been at the heart of his approach since his breakout video blog, Wine Library TV, which Segal describes as “Mr. Vaynerchuk sitting at a table in his office, demystifying chardonnays, rieslings and other wines by describing them in terms that any mook could understand.” The blog not only presents Vaynerchuk as an unvarnished, passionate and accessible wine enthusiast, but also demonstrates his shrewd understanding of his medium. “My high quality content definitely factored in, but that might not have mattered had I not also made native content—authentic content perfectly crafted for that particular new platform, YouTube,” he reflects.

Early Adopter of Twitter

As an early adopter of Twitter, Vaynerchuk has harnessed it with a similar combination of candidness and insight. “It was the platform that came most naturally to me, because it was perfectly suited for small bursts of quickfire conversation and idea exchanges,” he writes in his latest book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. Vaynerchuk understands that the platform is about more than just “microblogging.” It’s about engaging directly—or, as he puts it, “creating context.”

“Twitter is the cocktail party of the Internet—a place where listening well has tremendous benefits,” he observes in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And listen he does. “About 90 percent of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s tweets are direct replies to people who have written to or about him,” Segal points out in the Times. “I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral,” Vaynerchuk wrote in an Entrepreneur article, “but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships,”

Content Is King

Vaynerchuk also emphasizes the importance of creating content. A recent Forbes article went so far as to call it “the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society” and encouraged people to create as much as possible. “It literally doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist,” he has declared. Vaynerchuk’s characteristic hyperbole aside, this argument has resonance when it comes to online reputation management.

If you don’t publish content that provides accurate and appropriate information about yourself, your company, area of expertise or organization, you are not just losing an opportunity to build your brand—you are endangering it, essentially relinquishing control of your online image anyone else who decides to post content about you. Bringing together engagement and authenticity as well as content and context, Vaynerchuk’s approach highlights some valuable tools and strategies for managing one’s reputation online. G.E.’s Linda Boff may sum it up best. “When I think about Gary, I think about scrappiness before anything else,” she tells Segal in his Times piece. “He lives his own life out loud.”

October 15, 2013Social MediaData mining, National Security Agency, NSA, privacy, Shannon Wilkinson, Social media, Social media data miningReputation Communications Staff

Recent revelations about the NSA’s social media mining and analytic system have attracted much controversy. Many people don’t realize that a growing number of private companies use many of the same methods and have similar capabilities.

Such companies sell information to clients ranging from law enforcement and security companies to human resources departments and corporate intelligence firms. So it is critical to give some thought to strategies for managing your social media and other online activity. That is, if you are concerned with that activity (and your contacts) being collected, analyzed and possibly provided in reports to current or prospective employers, clients, partners and others.

Online investigative firms offer services ranging from basic social media screening, identification and verification to more extensive analysis and investigation, encompassing public records reports, deep Internet searches, social network mapping, activity monitoring, and resume vetting. On a broader scale, data from social media accounts and other online sources are also frequently scraped by automated bots, then aggregated and published by websites such as Intelius.com and USSearch.com.

Protecting your privacy

One way to protect your personal information is to stay off of social media entirely, or to limit your presence to a single trusted platform like LinkedIn. You can minimize the information that data mining companies obtain, while gaining greater control over what you do and don’t want to make available online.

Such a simple solution will work for some, but if abstaining from social media isn’t a viable option, a deliberate and cautious approach to managing your online image is necessary. Develop an appropriate strategy for managing your presence across all the platforms that you use.

Given the “new generation of programs that ‘revolutionize’ data collection and analysis” that are described by the New York Times, it’s also important to take a close look at what you may be revealing on social media in less obvious ways, such as through your network of connections, location metadata, and anything else that could be combined with public records and other available information to glean details about you. These pieces of data may seem obscure or inconsequential on their own, but with the advanced capabilities of the NSA and many private intelligence firms, you may be sharing more than you ever intended.

April 4, 2013Social MediaBrittany Kiefer, Emily Stephenson, Facebook, Greg Bensinger, Howard Lindzon, Investor relations, Jeff Corbin, Jessica Holzer, Julia Boorstin, Ryan Northover, SEC, Social media, TwitterReputation Communications Staff

This week the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that “postings on sites such as Facebook and Twitter are just as good as news releases and company websites.” Some companies, like Dell and eBay, already use Twitter in conjunction with more traditional methods to deliver news and updates to investors, but the SEC’s decision could be a game changer for corporate communications and the ways in which shareholders get investment information.

Driving a Potential Surge in Business Communication

“With this news companies are likely to communicate more via social media and encourage investors to follow them on these new platforms,” says CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “This could drive a surge in business communication and activity.” Jeff Corbin, author of Investor Relations: The Art of Communicating Value, told Boorstin that the SEC’s decision highlights “the importance of channels such as Facebook and Twitter to the way average individuals now communicate,” and Howard Lindzon, founder of Stocktwits, echoed that sentiment. “A press release on Yahoo finance—who reads that anymore?” he told Reuters’ Emily Stephenson. “You’re going to read news on your Facebook stream, your Twitter stream. The industry is changing, and it was a matter of time before it was going to be regulated.”

Implications of the Ruling

Content strategist Ryan Northover explored the impact it could have on the social media landscape for Social Media Today: “It means platforms like Twitter and Facebook will become networks where literally trillions of dollars in investment decisions will be made, beyond the trading desks and Bloomberg terminals of millions of money players across the world.” It’s impossible to predict the exact effects that the ruling will have, but companies would be wise to follow the SEC’s lead. With the right resources, strategies and content, social media may very quickly become the key way companies connect with shareholders. Many shareholders will become late adapters to social media; more companies will need social media managers; and more mainstream communication platforms will become less dominant.

March 6, 2013Crisis Management, Reputation Case Study, Social MediaAuthenticity, Dell, Dell Social Media Timeline, Direct2Dell, Haydn Shaughnessy, IdeaStorm, Jeff Jarvis, Karen Quintos, Klout, Lionel Menchaca, Melinda F. Emerson, Michael Dell, Social media, Social Media Command CenterReputation Communications Staff

Coming off a lackluster quarter and a leveraged buyout deal, veteran computer company Dell is undergoing a period of transition.

It all started with “Dell lies. Dell sucks,” a 2005 blog post by journalist Jeff Jarvis that launched a massive fleet of likeminded complaints about the company’s products and service. While such viral outrage is a regular occurrence today, back then it was a new phenomenon. Dell was not ready, and the damage took its toll, from poor customer service scores to declines in market share and profits. Such an impact marked the end of not just Dell’s dominance as a computer maker, but also of the traditional ways in which companies communicate with their customers and the public.

Public relations, Jarvis asserted in a follow-up post, “can no longer be about the press and publicity” but “must be about a new relationship with the public, with the public in charge.” He also wrote an open letter to Dell, delivering a crucial wake-up call: “Today, when you lose a customer, you don’t lose just that customer, you risk losing that customer’s friends. And thanks to the internet and blogs and consumer rate-and-review services, your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.”

From Worst to First

Dell didn’t respond to Jarvis’ letter right away, but it did start taking his advice to heart. In a 2007 BusinessWeek piece Jarvis acknowledged the company’s turnaround: “In the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first.” Less than a year after Jarvis’ letter imploring the company to start blogging, Dell did just that, launching Direct2Dell. “Chief blogger Lionel Menchaca gave the company a frank and credible human voice,” Jarvis wrote. Dell’s innovative IdeaStorm, a website “created to give a direct voice to our customers,” followed, and its massive Social Media Command Center is a more recent addition to the arsenal. The company’s own “Dell Social Media Timeline”.

Such efforts have earned the company an enduring reputation for large-scale social media savvy. On the New York Times’ small business blog Melinda F. Emerson recently described Dell as “one of the first big companies to strike a good balance among public relations, listening and selling on social media.” Dell’s founder and CEO, Michael Dell, was also recently ranked among “The Most Influential Execs on the Web” by Reuters and Klout.

Leveraging Expertise

Given that reputation, it’s not surprising that Dell plans to start offering its own Social Media Services for businesses and brands. “Customers regularly request our support to build and scale their own social efforts based on what they have seen us doing in this sphere,” Quintos explains to Ad Age. It sounds like a promising direction, but Forbes’ Haydn Shaughnessy says some old habits are holding the company back. Dell “does good social media but is yet to embrace the disruption to its management culture that social brings,” Shaughnessy writes. “Crack this and its reputation will improve no end.”