Your Brand: Taking Social Media Seriously

Now that Google has added live results from Twitter into searches, you need to face the fact once and for all that you can no longer control your organization’s online reputation. Negative comments on blogs, Facebook, or Twitter have the power to tarnish your brand overnight in ways unimaginable a few years back.

Even a small business should take social media seriously and try to influence conversations about its brand. A common concern, however, is managing social media takes too much time. Here’s a plan for one person from a small- to medium-sized organization to protect your organization’s online reputation in about 90 minutes a week.

The plan’s objectives are to build brand advocates and maximize your search engine optimization (SEO), so your messages—and not your critics’—fill the first page of search engine results about your organization.

• Counter any negativity about your brand (10 minutes). Using the 12-minute-a-day social media monitoring plan from my Dec. 9, 2009, post, identify social media sites that mention your organization’s name, services, products, executives, or brand terms. You don’t need to respond to every posting, but you do need to quickly offer support or resolve any problems you can.
• Always keep SEO and keywords in mind (ongoing). Use Google’s keyword tool to identify the keywords related to your organization being searched for most. Use these keywords in your organization’s blog posts, news releases, Facebook posts, tweets, and other digital copy.
• Make your Twitter account valuable to the people who follow you (50 minutes). Use your organization’s Twitter account primarily to share helpful tips, news, and information related to (but not about) your brand. Do send out tweets about your organization’s blog posts, media mentions, newsletter, etc. (at least twice per week), but try to spend on average 12 times as much time talking about other people and organizations as you do about your organization.
• Create relationships with bloggers (10 minutes). Figure out who the “thought leaders” are for your organization’s products or services. Read their blogs, leave comments on them regularly, and promote them too.
• Answer industry-related LinkedIn questions (10 minutes). Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your organization can answer (to check once a day, set up an RSS feed using Google Reader). When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website.
• Maintain a vibrant Facebook page (10 minutes). Leverage the time you put into Twitter using Facebook’s Selective Twitter application. By putting the hashtag #FB at the end of certain tweets (ones about your organization or particularly relevant to your organization), the tweets will also appear as daily updates to your organization’s Facebook page. At least once a week, post additional photos and useful information to make your page as up-to-date, attractive, and interesting as possible (while keeping unnecessary in-your-face sales-like links out).
• Use your blog to enhance your organization’s reputation as a “thought leader” (ongoing). Make sure your organization’s blog contains the kind of content that starts conversations and dialogue, gets forwarded to colleagues and friends, and motivates the people you serve to get involved and teach you how to serve them better (again, remember SEO keywords).

Any questions? Leave them in the comments.

Part One of my “Your Brand” series covered how to monitor your organization’s social media presence in 10-minutes a day.

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