Online Reputation Management, a Cautionary Tale

Business owners are very careful about managing their reputation but for some reason they have not come to realize the risks involved in the Internet or more specifically what is called social media.

I would like to tell you the story of Kevin, and trust me there is a business story here, but let's watch the train wreck first.

Meet Kevin

This is a true story and an absolute Reputation Management Disaster. Kevin, who happens to be pictured here in a dress, carrying a wand and a fine malt beverage, lost his job and embarrassed his employer with a quick post intended for his friends and peers. Kevin was an intern at a large New York bank. He sent his boss an e-mail letting him know that he had a family emergency and would be out for a day or two. In reality Kevin blew off work to go to a Halloween party back home and take some unfortunate pictures. Wanting to share the excitement of his Halloween costume with his friends he posted the picture to the left on his Facebook Page. By the time Kevin got back to work the picture he posted had already made it to his boss' inbox. Kevin, as you would expect, got fired.

But our story doesn't end with the indignity of getting fired. Kevin's boss forwarded the e-mail exchange to a few people with the attached picture. It ended up making Kevin an overnight Internet sensation. Social bookmarking sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com picked up the story and it became a viral hit with hundreds of thousands of readers enjoying his pain.

Kevin went from being a guy with a bright future and a good internship to being famous for dressing like a fairy godmother, lying to his employer, and getting fired. Not exactly the legacy one would necessarily desire. Not to mention at this moment every Google search for his name is dominated by this story, and he even made the front page for his employer's name!

Anybody nervous yet? Is your mind racing wondering what your employees have ever done online? Or how that might play in front of the next big client proposal? Need to do a Google Search? It's cool I'll wait...

Now for the business angle... How would you like to be the business behind Kevin's story? Oh sure you would get lots of hits on your web site, but those would also be hits to your reputation. Managing your reputation online is serious business. Many prospects will do a search on your business name before they ever contact you and is a drunk kid with a wand the image you want to share with the world? Here are a just a few of the issues to discuss at your next management team meeting.

• Do you understand what social media is?
  
• What is your policy regarding posts in social media?
  
• Have you trained all employees on this policy?
  
• What if you hire the next Kevin and the story gets away from you?
  
• Should you proactively manage your brand in social media?
  
• What is the policy of employees using the business name/brands?
  
• How should your business be represented in social media?
  
• Are you leveraging social media or just watching the world go by?
  

In closing we recommend that you proactively manage your reputation or it will manage you. Things happen fast on the Internet and you need to stay ahead of the curve or you could be the next train wreck.

Explore Social Networking at SLOCAMA

*UPDATE*
The links and presentation from last night are available at : www.smsrd.com/slocama.html

Tomorrow I am going to be speaking at the San Luis Obispo Creative and Marketing Alliance's (SLOCAMA) monthly meeting about Social Networking. SLOCAMA is pretty cool for a trade group, the people are a lot of fun, and the meetings are always a good time. This month's meeting is at Aspect Studios, 755 Fiero Lane, Suite 110, San Luis Obsipo and the in-person networking starts at 5:30.

I am going to be covering Social Networking first at a high level to make sure everybody understands the basic concepts, and then a little more in depth on a few of the larger networks (Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

If you're a SLOCAMA member I have set up some places for us to congregate online that I encourage you to join.

• SLOCAMA Myspace Page
  
• SLOCAMA Facebook Group
  
• SLOCAMA LinkedIn Group
  

If you have the chance to come out I hope to see you tomorrow night!

Facebook Flyers PPC Program

SMS is always looking for new opportunities to market ourselves and our clients on the Internet. Recently we've begun to experiment with Facebook Flyers. Facebook has millions of members and now offers a PPC program with a lot of potential!

For the uninitiated, Facebook is a social networking site where you can create a profile about yourself and link it to all of your friends. This type of site has exploded in popularity in the last few years and Facebook is one of the biggest in the market space. To give you an idea of the size of the Facebook user base, the network currently shows 20,665,600 people for the US. It's also become very popular overseas. For example, I got into Facebook after one of my Swedish friends asked me to join. The network for Sweden is now almost 1 million people in a country of only 9 million! Facebook continues to grow at a staggering pace and if your customer base includes 18-34 year olds (Facebook has 15,788,600 of them) you can't afford to ignore the opportunity this marketing channel presents.

The coolest thing about this new offering is the targeting. Some PPC engines attempt to give you the ability to target demographics but can't really guarantee their guess will be correct, Facebook knows for sure who you are advertising to. The Facebook Flyer platform allows you to target by a country or cities, gender, age, keywords, political views, relationship status, educational status, school, major, and workplace!

So for example you could target single Men ages 18-24 in San Luis Obispo, CA enrolled in Cal Poly majoring in Mechanical/Electrical/Computer/Civil engineering who have moderate to conservative political views. In that particular example I get about 340 very specifically selected guys that would be able to receive my flyer.




Facebook has made this a Pay Per Click system so you only pay for the people who click your ads and visit your site, which is good because in our tests we have gotten huge impression numbers in very short amounts of time. Currently The minimum bid you can make is $0.10 and the most they will let you spend in a day is $50.

For our new and existing clients, we are adding Facebook Flyers to our PPC repertoire. If you want to try out this new media give us a call or send us an e-mail at rob@smsrd.com and we can help you figure out if this new advertising platform will benefit your business.

So far Facebook's program isn't perfect, and I think we're in for some big improvements soon, but the one thing that won't change is the potential in this new way of getting your message out. We're excited to see how this platform and its traffic patterns evolve, and if you're a 25-65 year old interested in marketing, advertising or the internet keep an eye out for the Adwords monster!