Let me ask you some questions. Do you keep a list of the people who have access to your corporate Twitter account?  Do you change your account passwords regularly? Have you set in place clear guidelines for social media engagement? Are you monitoring the names of your senior execs using a sophisticated monitoring tool? And do you know exactly what you’d do if an angry customer kicked-off on your Facebook Page?

If your answer to these questions is “Yes of course, Luke, don’t patronise me”, I congratulate you. Now please move along. For the remaining 99.9% of us – who only respond to crises when they are bearing down upon us – this may be useful…

I gave a talk at Online Information 2011 in London today (see my slides below) that focused on limiting the reputational risks for organisations using social media. I suggested 4 options/steps for doing this:

1. Take preventative measures - These included carefully managing your social media account details, changing passwords, setting up a good quality social media monitoring tool (and employing an Analyst to help create your queries), ensuring your staff are trained and doing dry-runs of “crisis scenarios”. Crucially I also urged companies to engage and “make friends”. When everything hits the fan, it’s great when your customers and contacts leap, unprompted, to your defence.
2. Remove the content – If you’ve posted something you didn’t mean to, you can remove it. If someone else posted something you don’t like, you could ask them to remove it. If it’s illegal (i.e. they don’t have the right to publish it) you can take a more legal route – but if its “malicious” or “misleading”, it may also breaks the terms of conditions on Facebook, Twitter and other networks, so you can ask them to remove it for you.
3. Engage – If someone is maliciously posting negative comments about you, they may be a “troll” – i.e. someone who is simply mischief-making and isn’t interested in resolving the issue. Don’t respond to trolls. If the person has a genuine point and isn’t a troll, but you’re in the right – you should simply state the facts and make your case. If you’re in the wrong, you should apologise, grovel (a little) and offer to  make amends. This is the part where you convert “haters” into “advocates” if you’re diplomatic and/or fortunate.
4. Bury it - Not what I’d usually advise, but if you’re faced with a negative blog post that’s appearing in search results, and all else fails, you can simply publish and optimise content for the same words that the negative content is ranking for (perhaps your company name) to push the bad story down the rankings. It’s remarkable how quickly you can do this if you put your mind to it.

Hopefully this will save you the anguish and unpleasantness of a real-time social media reputation crisis. As and when this occurs, please calculate what it would have cost your business in terms of lost income, damage to reputation, clean-up time etc. and send me a cheque in the post. I’ll be waiting.

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a social media monitoring conference in Boston. As always, there was a heavy emphasis on PR monitoring and measurement.

We were lucky enough to have Katie Delayhaye Paine, aka the Queen of Measurement, as the keynote. She reiterated her belief that AVE (ad value equivalency) the traditional method of measuring PR value, has been made redundant by social media. In her view and, indeed, that of the majority of PR execs present, engagement is the new currency of social PR.

Now, engagement is evidently a tricky concept and measuring it requires some discipline. Katie recommends creating an Engagement Index (in Katie’s case, a Kick-ass Engagement Index) which is unique to your organisation and goals. This makes sense, but what should you class as engagement? She offered a sliding scale showing different forms of engagement, with their relative value – shown above.

I find this a useful approach – but I know it doesn’t work for everyone. I’d welcome any feedback you have on improving this.

You can view Katie’s full presentation here (listed under Oct 6th called “Are we Engaged Yet?”). If you’re interested in PR measurement – Monitoring Social Media New York is on Thurs/Fri this week and Monitoring Social Media London is taking place on 22nd Nov.

The case for buzz monitoring has been made demonstrated repeatedly in recent years. A study from the London School of Economics last year revealed that a 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boosts sales growth by 1% and Dell has attributed a monetary value to this: their average customer is worth $210; their average online detractor costs them $57 and their average online promoter earns them $32.

While it’s not clear how Dell calculated these figures, it’s telling that negative comments posted online have almost double the impact of positive ones. As in traditional media, good news tends to be a by-line; bad news resonates and spreads. What’s different about the web and, in particular, the social web, is the speed of it’s spread.

When two Domino’s Pizza employees posted a disgusting spoof video onto YouTube last year, it was two days before senior management at the pizza giant became aware of it. Inexperienced in the ways of online reputation management, they chose to ignore it and expected it to blow over – as it most likely would have done had it been a press story. By the time they had realised their error, created a Twitter account and posted their own response onto YouTube, the original video has been viewed over 1 million times and the damage to their brand was done. There are few better examples of the destructive viral power of social media.

The irony of this example is that, by using basic buzz monitoring services for social media tracking – many of which are available free of charge – Domino’s could have greatly minimised the damage caused by the incident. At the same time, while this example focuses on a global brand, where the risk would have justified significant expenditure in social media monitoring tools, analysis and engagement, most companies remain reluctant to spend money on what is effectively a form of social media insurance.

So for companies looking for a low cost solution, here’s our five-step guide to social media reputation management on a budget:

1. Decide what you want to track

What are the primary ‘keywords’ relating to your company that you want to track in online conversations? These are likely to include:

• Company name
• Company website address
• Names of products
• Names of senior employees and Directors
• Names of close competitors
• Common expressions – e.g. “[Company] is rubbish”, “company is great”

2. Set up accounts with free social media monitoring tools

There are hundreds of tools available. We have listed a few of the most popular ones here:

• General mentions – Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts), MonitorThis (www.monitorthis.info)
• Tracking social media – SocialMention (www.socialmention.com), Whostalkin (www.whostalkin.com)
• Blog monitoring – BackType (www.backtype.com) Blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com)
• Monitoring Twitter – Monitter (www.monitter.com) Tweetbeep (www.tweetbeep.com)
• Tracking links – Wholinkstome (www.wholinkstome.com)
• Monitoring forums – BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com)
• Mentions of senior staff – Naymz (www.naymz.com)

3.  Set up your alerts and searches

You then need to run regular searches, or better still, set up alerts or RSS feeds that notify you when your keywords are mentioned. This works best when you have an RSS reader or homepage where you can aggregate all of this information, to make it easier to read and review. We recommend setting up an iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig) or Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) homepage to display your feeds and alerts.

4. Set up your own social media accounts

When you’re alerted to a comment about your company, you need to be in a position to respond quickly. The beauty of many of the paid monitoring services is that they provide both the interface (homepage) for your feeds and the ability to respond directly to comments from that same interface. If you’re doing it for free, you need to set up accounts on all the key social media platforms, including: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and any industry-specific or consumer forums where people are likely to talk about your company.

5. Engage

How you respond to comments and posts people make is up to you, but there are certain rules of thumb:

1. Act quickly – the beauty of social media is it’s real-time. You can snub out misconceptions and fix problems instantly through a quick, smart reply. Never expect things to go away. Blog posts and forum comments linger in search engine results forever, so you need to make sure your viewpoint is there too.
2. Be nice – you really want to avoid getting angry or making threats. Try and reason with detractors and understand where they are coming from. By showing that you’re listening, you’ll win respect and support from others.
3. Be pro-active – when discussions arise that relate to your industry, get involved nice and early with your perspective. This encourages promoters to back you and takes the wind out of detractors’ sails.

We hope this is a useful summary. We’ll be having a full discussion about the latest techniques and issues in social media reputation management at Monitoring Social Media 09 taking place in London 17th Nov. Everyone’s welcome.