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.

Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp offers a series of in-depth, “how to” sessions, presented by some of the worlds leading experts on social media monitoring and analytics. There will also be live demos from some of the best monitoring solutions, an Exhibition Area with other suppliers, lunch, networking and a comprehensive handout with notes, case studies and e-books. In short: it’s going to be the ultimate social media monitoring training session.

MSM Bootcamp will cover these topics:

• Getting Started with Social Media Monitoring
• How to Choose The Right Social Media Monitoring Tool
• How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service
• How to Monitor Sentiment and Benefit from The Insight this Provides
• How to Identify influencers and Build Valuable Relationships with them
• How to Monitor and Engage with Customers in Real-time
• How to Measure the Success of your Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Each session will include clear guidance on how to run your own social media monitoring campaign, using case studies, examples, demos, volunteers and interactive Q&A sessions. If you have any questions – you’ll have ample opportunity to ask them.

Our Presenters include:

• Nathan Gilliatt, the principal of Social Target and the author of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, who blogs at The Net-Savvy Executive and also runs the industry portal, Social Media Analysis.
• Marshall Sponder, the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, Emeritus Director of Social Media at the Web Analytics Association, currently working with PR firm Porter Novelli.
• Katy Howell, Managing Director of immediate future, whose clients include Sony Europe, BT, Diageo, BBC and Mirror Group and who manages the online PR diploma module for the Institute of Direct Marketing.
• Luke Brynley-Jones, social media marketing consultant and Founder of Our Social Times, which hosts Monitoring Social Media and the Monitoring Bootcamp.

Early bird tickets are on sale here now. Places are limited – so early booking is strongly advised.

For delegates – here are some useful bits of info:

• Doors open at 8.15am – and we’ll start at 9am sharp
• There is wi-fi throughout the Cavendish Conference Centre – and we’ve added 30 power-points to the auditorium, so please share these around.
• We will have a Twitter stream and be taking questions via Twitter using the hashtag #msm09.  So if you’re a virtual attendee – speak up!
• We’ve got drinks at the end of the day until 6.30pm – and some people will be heading on to the Digital Marketing London meetup afterwards.

We will be providing delegate packs with a handout that includes a section for notes. So just bring a pen and your brain.

Any problems – call us on 0845 463 1435 or Tweet us @oursocialtimes.

See you there!