In this day and age of social networking, branding yourself and your product, company, or service is extremely important. After all, information about your brand can spread like wildfire across the countless social networks, so it makes sense that you would want to take advantage of a medium like that.Unfortunately, bad press can just as quickly spread throughout the internet, thus negatively affecting your brand. Consider the PR nightmare that BP endured when
someone started the fake account @BPGlobalPR Even if your brand is infinitesimally smaller than that of BP’s, you should still be wary of bad press.
So how can you avoid bad press on social networks and online?
Well, first you have to control your brand. This means purchasing domains related to your brand before someone else can. You should register accounts with Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks and link them together. The key here is to make the move first. If you control the domain name, you have the advantage in controlling your brand, even if you don’t yet have a website up. BP’s public relations team would have benefitted from trying to register many iterations of BP on Twitter, simply to keep those possibilities out of the hands of others; of course, they never expected that to happen, and so now find themselves a case-study regarding managing one’s brand.
Secondly, you have to act on that advantage. Create a base that controls your brand, and from that base link out to the other pages you have on Twitter and Facebook. If you have a central focus that ultimately defines your brand, you can use that central focus to help you decide how else you will present your brand in other social networks. Consider the example of Judith Griggs and Cooks Source, a New England cooking magazine, which was recently embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that eventually cost them the majority of their advertising revenue, thus forcing them to close down. Griggs’ first mistake, aside from failing to immediately apologize, was failing to understand how the internet worked: she didn’t have an active website, and she failed to understand how to moderate her Facebook page. She ultimately lost control of her brand.
Finally, you have to always be vigilant regarding your brand name and move to immediately respond to potential damage to your brand. This means saving searches within Twitter regarding your brand name and constantly checking search results. Likewise, you should set up a Google Alerts notification that will email you whenever your brand appears anywhere on the internet. That way you can stay up-to-date regarding what’s being said about you and your company.
Of course, how you respond to a public relations nightmare is just as important; in fact, its so important that it probably needs a post of its own. How would you respond to bad press regarding you or your brand?