A report out this week from the Society for New Communications Research trupeted the headline “Blogging Declines as Newer Tools Rule“. As a social media blogger, it attracted my attention.

It turns out though, what’s in decline is the number of Inc. 500 companies maintaining a “corporate blog”, not businesses blogging in general. I’m not at all surprised that some large corporations are stopping using a medium that is, primarily, about building up personal relationships with regular readers through a familiar writing style, interesting topics, wit and discussion. Many corporate blogs are doomed to fail simply because of the tight constraints their authors have to work with.

What’s more interesting is that social media monitoring has not increased over the past year among Inc. 500 companies. In an area of such innovation and growth (I’ll be writing about a company that uses psychometric monitoring to identify brand affinities in the coming weeks) – it’s astonishing to think that major brands are switching off. Perhaps they’ve done what most companies seem to do and monitor before they know why or what they plan to do about it. For more thoughts on that, see my recent post on social media ROI.

During the social media monitoring training course that I hosted in London last Thursday with Marshall Sponder (@webmetricsguru), he suggested an interesting approach to the question of social media ROI.

In Marshall’s view there are essentially 4 levels of maturity which dictate the degree of ROI that you should expect to get out of social media:

1. Social Media Monitoring – Listening to brand, product and industry mentions.
2. Online Research – “Operationalising” your monitoring, so that you achieve measurable targets and results.
3. Social Targeting – Using social CRM and targeting to develop stronger relationships with your customers.
4. Social Business Collaboration – Mapping this knowledge across your organisation to streamline processes and maximise benefits.

Each of these levels denotes a step forward in maturity, and the more mature your business is, the greater the ROI you’re likely to achieve from your activities – as indicated in the simplified graph above. This seems to offer a very sensible solution to a very tricky question. It might also help several million hard-pressed Marketing Managers who can now point to this list and say: “we’re only level two. No wonder we didn’t hit the jackpot”.

Marshall Sponder at his London Monitoring Course

In addition to this, Marshall offered many more pearls of wisdom.  He dismissed the counts of “social media mentions” that most monitoring tools use as the basis of their reporting, saying: “all mentions are not equal; a video is not the same as a blog post is not the same as a tweet!” When you think about it, this is obvious, but it’s amazing how many brands still monitor mentions as if they’re a homogenised  unit of value.

He also suggested that companies that monitor without knowing exactly what they hope to achieve (i.e. specific targets) and what they’ll do about it if they do/don’t achieve such targets, are wasting their time. In other words, monitoring doesn’t work unless you go into it knowing clearly what you’re hoping to find out. This is certainly not the approach of the majority of companies – many of which sign contracts with dashboard vendors before they’ve got any idea what they’re hoping to achieve from using them.

It was a fascinating day for the 25 students who joined us – and we’re now planning to run more courses, both in the UK, US and perhaps elsewhere. If you’re interested in attending one of these, please contact us.

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.