7. New Practice #7: The Reputation Task Force Member
The word reputation just may be one of the most talked about words in public relations. As of this writing, a simple Google search on “public relations” and “reputation” produced more than 47.7 million entries. Reputation management has long been a core function in public relations. Another search with the words “public relations,” “reputation,” and “social media” returned more than 29.4 million resources. Even though reputation management was always an “expected” part of the PR person’s job responsibilities, it wasn’t necessarily an every day, every minute function. Of course, there were times PR pros were relied upon more to mend a damaged image. Unfortunately, it was usually after a negative situation or crisis occurred. With social media, there is no waiting for a crisis to strike; reputation monitoring and proactive management becomes a much larger part of your daily focus.
There are serious consequences if you don’t pay careful attention to reputation, especially in the age of public conversations. Today, your audience has an audience and so on. Social media creates connections that make sharing instantaneous across a human network, which is made up of personal cluster networks where peers trust peers. Companies can’t control the conversations and, in many cases, they don’t even cause the controversy or the damage they experience. A perfect example was the Dominos Pizza crisis. The company certainly didn’t expect, create, or cause the situation that occurred in April 2009. Two employees at the Conover, North Carolina franchise decided to pull a prank, videotaping disgusting acts, as they prepared food for customers. Then, they proudly broadcasted their tainted food creations over YouTube.
Unfortunately, the situation just happened, and there was no way to stop it from occurring. As a result, the Dominos brand faced serious consequences. Even though the CEO, Patrick Doyle, made a heartfelt public video apology via YouTube, and the two employees were fired and faced felony charges, damage to the company’s reputation went on long after the posting of the video. According to an article in The New York Times, “The perception of its [Dominos] quality among consumers went from positive to negative...according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.”1
The events that took place immediately affected Dominos sales and productivity. An April 2009 Forbes article pointed out a national study conducted by HCD Research, which revealed approximately 65% of survey respondents, who would have previously visited or ordered from Domino’s Pizza, “Were less likely to do so after viewing the offensive video.”2 Then, in September 2009, the Conover, North Carolina franchise, where the incident occurred, was forced to shut its doors, as a result of the social media prank.
Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are the companies less than careful with their reputations. For instance, Kenneth Cole, chairman and chief creative officer, decided to tweet about the uprisings in Egypt. His tweet made light of the situation, stating the uproar was a result of the new KC spring collection. When the CCO used the #cairo hashtag on Twitter, not surprisingly, the tweet caused tremendous backlash. Numerous tweets rang loudly throughout the Twitterverse; some went as far as calling for a boycott of the company’s products. Others ranged from “Insensitive and not funny” to “It’s surprising how some companies still don’t get what social media is....” Of course, the chairman and CCO apologized for the insensitivity; however, there will be consumers who may choose not to purchase from Kenneth Cole in the future. If you know Twitter, then you would call the incident a “#fail” in reputation management.3
Practice #7, The Reputation Task Force Member, is a practice based upon the increased need to:
• Be more proactive with brand reputation.
• Provide internal education about brand value and voice.
• Build a team of relentless sentiment auditors.
The Reputation Task Force Member is a natural position for the PR person who usually is immersed in the negative communications issues, the crisis situations, or the damaged reputation. PR professionals also have the knowledge and skills to minimize or neutralize the issues and concerns. If given the opportunity, PR can do this before the social media floodgates open completely. Your new practice (see Figure 7.1) starts in the monitoring/tracking phase of your social media plan and extends into your channel development and the content you share and must also become a part of your measurement strategy.
Figure 7.1. The Social Media Strategy Wheel: PR Practice #7
Being on a task force could be an organized effort through the Social Media Core Team or perhaps it’s an informal team formed through departments (the Social Media Coalition) that have a mission to monitor for sentiment at all times. Your brand, and its reputation, is vulnerable no matter what type of company. As you can see from the Dominos incident, you don’t have to cause the situation; it can just happen. In addition, the 24-hour response time used to be acceptable for traditional media. Now, that kind of timeframe is considered a significant lapse of time, which can cause a brand severe damage.
What Are the Best Practices of the Reputation Task Force Member?
You’re involved in several activities when you become a member of the Reputation Task Force, as you work to protect the reputation of your company and your products. A best practice approach for the Reputation Task Force Member is broken into a few areas, which include the following:
• Building the Human Face
• Helping Stakeholders to Understand the Brand’s Core Values
• Learning the Best Ways to Monitor and Measure Sentiment
• Growing the Reputation Task Force Team
Building the Human Face
Proactively protecting a reputation starts with the human face. Anyone who has said social media requires transparency and a human face is 100% correct. People relate to people. We are social beings who want to connect and engage with other people in different ways. Your ability to interact and build strong relationships may directly correlate to the transparency and human side you show. Other than following a brand for promotions, discounts, contents/sweepstakes, and the most up-to-date news, do you feel there’s a difference in the number of times you connect with a brand based upon whom you’re speaking to? Does it make a difference if the brand simply uses its logo on Twitter versus the brand that puts employees front and center, by using their photos as avatars? Do you feel more comfortable when you see an employee’s initials at the end of a tweet? For customer service issues, some may find it easier to interact with @Joe_XYZCo or @Mary WidgetCo because you’re talking to a specific person, who can relate to what you’re saying or better understand how you feel. A person can empathize with you; a logo cannot.
People want to know they are talking, sharing, and creating with other humans. When they have questions, they want the empathy of a person who can recognize their concerns and make them feel at ease. They don’t want a canned response or an automated message. The human face and empathy helps to build brand advocates. Build your advocates the right way, and they will be there to tell you exactly how they feel, and also alert you to any issues that are not even on your radar. In addition, these advocates can quickly come to the brand’s rescue when negative comments flood into your social properties. Their positive praise often neutralizes the situation, much more effectively and with credibility, even before you address what’s occurred.
Being a member of the Reputation Task Force means being more aware of your brand champions and knowing you can enlist their support, in good times and in bad. One college in Massachusetts knew during its snowy winters, for all the students who complained about the snow and trekking to class, there would be student ambassadors on Facebook who would jump into the conversation to tell their complaining peers, “Suck it up and go to class!”
Creating the human face is the first step, and you might even be doing this personally or as a member of a communications team. At all times, you will be upholding the voice and the messaging of your brand, but your own unique voice is what actually breaks through when you engage. If you consistently use the same unique voice day in and day out, your friends and followers can relate more to your personality and look forward to interacting with you as a peer who can offer help, advice, and interesting information—and to ease any concerns. The trust you build often extends directly to the brand
Being on the Reputation Task Force also means you understand the value of employee participation and how enlisting the support of other employees is key to customer engagement. In an interview on the Britopian blog, Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software at IBM, mentioned, “...it’s closer to 25,000 IBMers actively tweeting on Twitter and counting. Not only are we present on Twitter but we also have over 300,000 IBMers on LinkedIn and 198,000 on Facebook. This is just our external social media footprint.” The IBM culture lends hand to numerous blogs and social networks where employees collaborate and innovate internally, too. IBM knew early that having employees interact through social media with customers would make people feel closer to the brand. According to the same interview, the company set up the BlueIQ training team with eight trainers, who started with 16,0000 salespeople being trained on social media tools and engagement. The effort was later expanded, increasing the numbers to a 400,000+ workforce.4
Along with IBM, there are many other great examples of companies with strong employee ambassador programs in social media, including Intel, SAS, Virgin, Whole Foods, and American Express. These companies know if they’re successful and experience growth, then the employees will experience the same. When employees act as brand evangelists through social media and help to make the company’s brand shine, they are motivated by being more involved. In turn, they offer customers better service, resulting in more loyal relationships. As a member of the Reputation Task Force, you’re one of the active internal brand champions, and you begin to help others to understand how the strength of the brand transcends across the company and then outward. Suddenly it’s a win-win situation for everyone.
Helping Stakeholders Understand Your Brand’s Core Values
If you’re familiar with marketing and branding work, then you know the value of creating brand style guidelines or what’s known as the brand style guide. The brand style guide is designed to keep the brand’s look and feel intact and to ensure its messaging remains consistent. You may use a brand style guide (in some cases, it could be as large as a style binder) in different capacities, from sharing the information with printing partners and web service providers to your own external communications usage through different channels. However, you may not have been directly involved in the creation of the brand style guide. What’s interesting is most brand style guides have a section dedicated to communication and messaging, including voice, style, and tone. This is right up the PR person’s alley because you are responsible for responding to the public, whether it’s via the media or now directly to customers in social networks. The Reputation Task Force Member should be more involved in the development of the brand development to help identify and guide brand communications.
Of course, one of the most overlooked parts of the launch of the brand style guide is communicating the benefits internally. When these guidelines are developed, they should automatically be shared with all employees. Then, there’s a much greater chance the same messages and core values will be communicated naturally through conversations outside of the company. But the challenge is always making sure your internal army of champions has a good grasp of what your brand stands for, and what customers expect with every interaction.
In 2009, one of the largest healthcare insurance companies in the United States decided it was time to unite its employee forces to have “One Vision and One Voice” through an internal branding campaign. They educated their managers, who interfaced directly with customers about brand standards and values and prepared a campaign to address their overall communications with customers, partners, and other constituents. The corporate communications department initiated a series of internal brand parties in different office locations across the country to motivate their managers. These rallies were not only educational, but also excited the managers about the brand’s core values and how to better communicate those values to the public.
As a member of the Reputation Task Force, you may want to consider a communications initiative to educate and excite other internal champions who can then use the information and enthusiasm to engage more effectively on behalf of the company. It’s time to ask for the brand style guide and to make sure all communication through every channel is represented accurately. Communication for a brand must be consistent through different channels, and social media are the new and growing channels. Remember, you’re a PR Policymaker too (PR Practice #1), so you should make sure your company’s brand style guide is tied to your social media policy. There must be cross-references to enforce both the look and feel of the brand visually on social profiles, as well as the messages, which could take the shape of 140 characters or less, or be weaved into a Facebook update.
Understanding the Best Ways to Monitor and Measure Sentiment
Here’s where the PR professional becomes the relentless auditor of social media for brand reputation. Of course, you were always reviewing news clippings and online coverage in the past, making sure that your companies, products/services, and executives were represented in a favorable light. There were times when you saw a story before it went to print, and then there were times you were chasing down an editor to get a retraction. Today’s reputation monitoring is a proactive measure saving precious time and energy later, by squashing issues that could affect a brand’s reputation.
There are several ways to monitor social media sentiment. As a member of the Reputation Task Force, you may be officially assigned the role of setting up the monitoring for your department, and then coordinating and sharing intelligence with other areas of the company, when you see something is a potential concern. However, there are other members of the Reputation Task Force who are not in communications and may be monitoring as well. These members include employees who are naturally active in different channels and watching closely, from the sales team and product development to HR and customer service. However, being in the communications department and also a skilled PR Tech Tester (Practice #3), you are familiar with different monitoring software platforms. You should have direct access to the tools/resources as you listen to the public and respond in real-time.
Sentiment monitoring may spark an immediate and direct response to an issue that surfaces. To catch what could be the wave of negative wildfire, you want to set up keyword monitoring so that you see any mentions of the company name, executives, products, or services across millions of social media sites. If you use a monitoring platform, you can view aggregated conversations over time, which helps to make sentiments comparisons. Several of the sentiment-monitoring dashboards allow you to:
• Compare fluctuations in positive and negative sentiment on different platforms.
• Review audience emotion and tone of content during specific incidents or events.
• Analyze the sentiment of competitors in comparison to your own over a period of time.
• Watch influencer sentiment closely to make sure it remains positive.
• Track positive and negative sentiment over time, and tie it to public confidence and the brand’s overall reputation (done through brand awareness/perception analysis, which can be pre-PR versus post-PR for the long term).
In many platforms, you can report on sentiment in different ways, including a word cloud formation, a bar chart comparing sentiment during different timeframes (before, during, and after a crisis), a line graph mapping sentiment over time compared to competitors, or as a pie chart with percentages of sentiment through various channels.
If you are just starting your social media program, it doesn’t necessarily mean no one has been talking about you. The Reputation Task Force Member finds the negative sentiment and makes sure it’s addressed immediately. Of course, if you come across a lot of positive praise, you need to share this, too. Encountering all positive sentiment means the brand has many satisfied customer advocates and happy stakeholders. With your strong sense of ethics, your knowledge of the brand voice, and your constant need to be a part of the brand police, participating on the Reputation Task Force is the best way to utilize your skills to uphold, guide, and protect the brand’s reputation. Of course, this also includes your own personal brand!
What Makes a Reputation Task Force Member?
Leon Chaddock is the managing director of Sentiment Metrics in the UK. Leon gave his insight on how the Reputation Task Force can monitor reputation and capture sentiment through social media.
Q: What are the social media sentiment monitoring best practices, so PR professionals can keep a close eye on daily sentiment and any negative situations that may arise?
A: In a new and rapidly advancing field, best practices can vary from industry and specific use case and the amount of data collected. If you have a large enough brand, we would recommend using a commercial solution for your monitoring, such as Sentiment Metrics, but there are many others. However, following are a few common practices people should do, whether using a commercial solution or free monitoring:
1. Make sure you check for your mentions at least once a day; new topics and trends can emerge quickly, so it is vital to keep your finger on the pulse.
2. Set up email alerts in your monitoring system or via Google alerts to warn you at least daily (hourly is better) to any new conversations. This is a great time saver as well, as it then requires you to only log into the monitoring system or search services when you want to do a deeper dive.
3. If you have a commercial solution that is sentiment-enabled, then check the extreme sentiments as part of your daily or hourly checks. Just one negative comment can have a ripple effect in social media.
Q: How accurate and far reaching is social media sentiment monitoring?
A: It depends on the sentiment monitoring you are talking about. There is always the debate on human versus automated sentiment. We, for instance, use automated sentiment that can be overruled by the client. We generally see highly acceptable accuracy rates of above 70% in real-time across eight core languages. With this accuracy, sentiment scoring is useful for trending over time and spotting negative or positive events. But, it is important clients understand what sentiment scoring is good for and what it is not good for.
Q: Is there a difference between daily monitoring and monitoring during a crisis situation?
A: Crisis monitoring is different than daily monitoring. With daily monitoring, you usually have set objectives you are trying to achieve. In a crisis, quite often you are in a fluid situation that needs careful handling. We always recommend clients put a crisis plan together before they get hit with a crisis. Nobody wants to be in a firefight. We do extensive crisis monitoring for our clients and also provide evaluation reports on what happened after the event, so clients have a full debrief.
We would always recommend having a social media monitoring and engagement system in place at all times for ongoing monitoring, especially during a crisis, which allows you to know exactly what is happening and respond immediately, if required.
Learning to Grow the Reputation Task Force Team
Most likely, you’ve realized by now, being in communications means you’re a Reputation Task Force Member; it’s automatically a part of your job. Either formally or informally, guess what? You’re on the team. However, it’s an effort that should be spread companywide. Every employee who partakes in social media technically becomes a part of customer service and may come across issues, concerns, reputation damage, and so on during the course of a normal day. It doesn’t take a scandal or natural disaster anymore to create a wave of negative sentiment to damage a brand. The more employee brand ambassadors who join the team, the easier the effort to maintain a healthy brand reputation.
It’s important your own internal front line knows what the brand stands for and how the voice should resonate with different audiences. Taking the time to educate employees across the organization on brand persona, tone, language, and purpose sends a message loud and clear; employee training and involvement is important. According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), it also takes a clear understanding of the purpose of the task force, so the group can form and work collectively. People in organizations want to be involved in company initiatives that go beyond themselves and have greater meaning.5
Of course, having goals in place can also keep people on the task force on track. The overall goal of growing the task force team is to better maintain the health and well being of the company’s reputation in the age of public conversations. Seeing positive progress through the growth of your task force, and effective sentiment monitoring and measurement, is an indication of “reputation wins.” Positive progress means the participating task force members have done a great job.
Amber Naslund is co-founder of Hidden Startup (stealth until 2012), the author of Brass Tack Thinking, and coauthor of The Now Revolution. Amber stressed in an interview how a company’s reputation must be managed holistically:
Q: Public conversations make it important for PR professionals to listen carefully and respond to brand issues and concerns. Today, PR professionals are automatically placed on a reputation task force that forms within their organizations. However, because social media goes across the company, how can PR professionals educate other members of the organization (beyond the communications department) to join the task force and become brand reputation champions?
A: The same way that overall company reputation is earned holistically, it needs to be managed that way. PR teams can help be the conduit between stakeholders and the organization, but it’s critical that business area leaders—from sales to marketing to customer service—are invested in the input from stakeholders that’s gathered through all channels, including social media, and that they’re empowered to act on that information.
Progress and change can’t happen unless the entire organization can actually receive information and data and then make decisions based on that data. Listening in social media is a powerful source of intelligence and information, but it needs to be put on the table in front of a cross-functional team—or at least in the hands of operational-level leadership—so that it can be analyzed and actually acted upon.
Q: Do you think offering more internal brand education, as a part of social media training, can help employees to not only uphold a company’s brand voice, but also allow them to inject their own unique voices through social media?
A: Yes, yes, yes. And I wish more organizations did this. In fact, irrespective of social media, companies should be doing this as simply a matter of helping all employees find their own purpose within the company’s direction.
The expectations of customers, prospects, and the online audience at large are so different from what we’ve come to know as communicators. Key messages and corporate statements just don’t fly. The people who are communicating with companies expect to be talking with other humans, and they have a keen eye for BS and canned messages. The more you can immerse your people in what you value and why, the more you can learn to trust those things as guiding principles within which individuals can shape unique, genuine, and personalized communication that still upholds the goals and ideals of the company.
Getting employees better invested in their organizations’ brands is never a wasted effort.
Reputation Task Force Member Best Practices
Mark Ragan is the CEO of Ragan Communication and the publisher of PR Daily, PR Daily Europe, Ragan.com, and Health Care Communication News. Mark shared his insight on handling reputation in an age of public conversations.
Q: Does social media make it harder or easier for PR pros to manage a brand’s reputation?
A: It depends.
For companies that have sophisticated social monitoring tools in place—and more important, trained PR managers who know how to use them—social media is the most powerful channel in the history of our profession.
But for companies that lack a social strategy and crisis response plan, social media can become their worst nightmare. The good news is that most companies have come to recognize this communications revolution and are adapting accordingly. And yet, there is a lot of work to be done.
In my workshops, I often ask a crowded room of PR professionals whether they have a crisis plan in place to address social media firestorms. Only one or two of my workshop attendees typically raise their hands.
Q: Do PR professionals spend more, less, or about the same amount of time monitoring company reputation/public sentiment, as they did pre-social media?
A: There’s no contest—PR professionals are not only spending more time monitoring their organization’s reputation today than in the pre-social era, but also the overwhelming impact of social has raised the PR profession to an unprecedented place of influence.
More companies are dedicating staff and resources to real-time monitoring of social sites. The mushrooming growth of media monitoring services like Radian6 and Vocus attests to this trend. Moreover, titles that didn’t exist five years ago are now cropping up in organizational charts throughout the world: Chief Listening Officer and Social Media Director are now becoming commonplace.
Q: What are some best practices to uphold integrity, ethics, and to maintain a positive brand image through social media?
A: Companies must understand that top-down communication no longer works. Gone are the days when a company could simply push the same, vanilla message to its customers.
Social media is about building relationships, often one customer at a time. One unaddressed complaint delivered over Twitter or Facebook can quickly ignite a firestorm of bad publicity in both traditional and new media.
At the same time, the rapid ascendance of “brand journalism” gives organizations the ability to become media outlets in their own right. No longer content to wait for traditional media to write about them, these companies are providing news and information about their markets directly to consumers. American Express, IBM, Best Buy, The Mayo Clinic, Southwest Airlines—this is just a short list of companies that have become news and information providers. Many of them are scooping up reporters from traditional media and building news sites around their brands. Like Ragan, they are also using the content curation model of mixing original content with aggregated content from bloggers, traditional media, and other online sources.
On the internal side of the business, companies will continue to rely increasingly on user-generated content produced in internal, collaborative networks, so-called Facebook-type sites behind the firewall. The smartest among them are building mobile platforms, so employees can access their intranets from home or while on the road.
But social media also requires honesty, candor, and the willingness to admit mistakes, flaws, and weaknesses within the organization. There is no escaping this new fact of life.
Q: Does social media make PR professionals more proactive about reputation monitoring and measurement?
A: There is no other option than to be proactive.
The traditional, manageable news cycle disappeared years ago. PR professionals can no longer afford to simply respond to what the press reports. Everyone with a Twitter feed or Facebook site has the potential to create news about your organization for good or ill. And it can happen any time and originate from any corner of the globe.
When the Hollywood director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight because he was too fat to fly, he responded with a torrent of tweets to his more than 1 million followers.
Is he the media in the traditional sense? Of course not. But, in the world of real-time social media, his megaphone is as big as that of most The New York Times columnists. And to its credit, the airline responded to his criticism in the exact same way it would have responded to a reporter—immediately and with respect.
Q: What are some key resources that you use to measure reputation and brand sentiment in the age of public conversations?
A: We are a small company. We can’t afford the big media monitoring sites. So we use every free tool available to us, including Google Alerts, Social Mention, TweetDeck, and HootSuite.
My staff monitors every major social media platform for discussions about the company. I personally respond to any complaint or question directed at us from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or other social sites.
We have the advantage of being a news organization. My reporters and editors live on social media every day of their lives. It’s a rare case where our company is mentioned in the online world and we aren’t aware of it.
I also employ a social media director. Her job is to monitor the social space for any mention of the company and make sure we respond to every customer—or potential customer—as quickly as possible. She also acts as a bridge between our customer service and editorial staff and the social world, passing along story ideas, business opportunities, and the sharing of content.
The Reputation Task Force Member Check List
Start with the monitoring/tracking phase of your social media plan, which also extends into your channel development and the content you share, which must become a part of your measurement strategy as well.
Build the brand’s reputation by presenting the human face.
Determine the correlation between interacting and building strong relationships with the transparency and human side you show.
Build your advocates the right way, and they will be there to tell you exactly how they feel and also alert you to any issues that are not on your radar.
Identify your brand champions and enlist their support, in good times and in bad.
Uphold the brand voice and the messaging of your brand; however, your own unique voice is what breaks through when you engage.
Understand the value of employee participation and how enlisting the support of other internal champions is key to customer engagement.
Become an educator to help others in your company understand how the value of the brand transcends across the company and then outward.
Ask for the brand style guide, and make sure all communication, via every channel, is represented accurately.
Assign yourself the role or coordinate with others to set up the sentiment monitoring for your department, and then share intelligence with other areas of the company.
Find the negative sentiment, and make sure it’s addressed immediately.
Grow the Reputation Task Force Team by organizing an effort to teach about your company’s brand promise, value, and its voice.
Educate the front line so that they know what the brand stands for and how its voice should resonate with different audiences.
Take the opportunity to get involved in company initiatives that go beyond your individual self, and have greater meaning.