Are Blogs Killing Your Company Brand?
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Over the last few months on Profectio.com there seems to be a consumer storm brewing over some coverage I provided about a story on a Canadian VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service. It has been interesting to be able to sit back and watch things unfold as consumers have consistently commented about their disappointment for this vendor’s service.
One reader even went as far as to say they’ve appreciated that I’ve kept the post open and comments to continue, I have a mini-soap opera brewing right in front of my eyes I noticed one of the comments was from the manufacturer
who tried to educate those who were commenting but that has since moved down the page with a flood of more negative comments. Do you think the manufacture handled the situation to their best of abilities? Could or should something else be done by them?I share this this with you not to tear them apart, but to hopefully educate readers about the importance of monitoring your (or clients) brand and what is being said about them by consumers, whish as you see by this example the damage might be from the comment section. Or maybe it is me, is monitoring of social media not yet a common practice for public relations?
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One point I always bring up in the context of user generated reviews for retailers (which would also work for negative comments) is that while they can seem damaging to a brand, the real potential for damage comes with the brand’s reactions.
A great example is hotel reviews. I recently booked a hotel and when looking at reviews, every single hotel had some bad reviews (because you can’t please everyone ALL the time) however, those hotels that had management react in an timely and appropriate manner actually impressed me, rather than left me concerned.
Company’s should have a ‘crisis management’ plan for dealing with online backlash as they likely would for poor coverage in traditional media.
Now if there are hundreds of bad comments, it’s time to look at root causes and clean up your act, but generally negative feedback can be turned into positive.
Tod Maffin gave a superb presentation at last year’s CPRS national conference about Webswarms (http://todmaffin.com/category/pr), which sound a lot like what happened to the manufacturer in your case. If you have the chance to see Todd talk about how to handle this kind of negative blog commenting stuff and handle it well, I really recommend it.
He made the case for me about monitoring social media as a PR must. Google alerts anyone?