I was struck by this article that the brand itself is the second-most trusted source for information about a brand on a social networking site. Wow. Does that strike you as wild?

It does…and it doesn’t. While we know that, foremost, consumers trust online peers’ recommendations about brands and products (second only to friends and family), what strikes me about these survey results is the proven value of social media. Social network activities by an organization – when implemented well – create trust, enthusiasm, and credibility. That can translate into moving fans to action. That’s ROI.

While most brands initially hopped onto the social media bandwagon to generate sales, enough companies are communicating effectively and passionately using social media that they are creating a credibility scale for others to meet. You know who I’m talking about – the brands that are genuine, real connectors with stakeholders, and are transparent. These are the brands at the top of the credibility scale, and the ones that are still in it for a quick customer are at the bottom.

A report by Lightspeed Research about what US consumers want from brands online states that the top demand is “to improve their knowledge.” Specifically, consumers want brands to offer relevant news and analysis, new ideas and thinking, useful applications that consumers can download, and to create a space where consumers can interact directly with the company or staff. This type of content moves a company way up on the credibility scale.

Brand consumers want real value from social media, and real conversation.

This is what puts a brand or organization at the top of the credibility scale.

I imagine the credibility scale to look something like this (comments and improvements welcome!):

Nonprofit organizations: social network users are definitely looking to you for credible information about your organization and the cause. And they want to connect with your staff in an online space, in a real way. How can you reach the top of the credibility scale?

Here are a few ideas for nonprofits reaching for the top of the scale:

• More transparency about the successes, failure/challenges, and realities of the organization. Fans are looking to you for the real deal. Give it to them.
• Integrate more stakeholder content into the website, and the social media. Is there a way to vote or “thumb up” content? How can you use social voting to show how popular a concept or campaign is? How can you better integrate your social fans’ thoughts into your online spaces?
• Stream into the website how social media fans are referencing your work: create a social bookmarking feed of stakeholder-tagged content about organization, create a scroll of your tweets, showcase a Q&A on the website that comes directly from fan interaction on the social sites.
• Double-up your efforts to connect online with your fans: spend more time chatting with them, listening to them, and offering value to them.
• Ensure that the content you offer has value to your stakeholders, as mentioned above. Don’t think “here’s an article about what we just did.” Think “here’s an article about what we did, but we want to know how to improve it to better serve you.”
• Offer added value in the online spaces that you don’t offer elsewhere. Great examples: Seafood Watch offers added value with its iPhone app, BullyingUK displays user-created posters on Flickr, and Epic Change highlights the Twitter Kids’ tweetstream.

If there is an argument for social media improving brand credibility, which is a great ROI, then these survey results seem to verify to be the argument. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the brand credibility scale, and social network brand credibility in general.

I’m live blogging a reputation management session at SphinnCon Israel. The moderator is Vannesa Fox (ninebyblue). The speakers are Shira Abel (Abel Communications), Sam Michaelson (Fiveblocks), Dan Gerstenfeld (Interteam), and Gil Reich (Answers.com).

Shira Abel: How to Control the Noise (and deal with a management reputation problem)

Look at rep management issue as an opportunity. Companies and individuals are often judged by how they handle the issue and control the noise. The Lower Merion school system installed webcams in the laptops of students, and people found out about it, and the news media went crazy.  What should they have done? Think about breaking the story themselves. Do something immediately after the story breaks – silence costs reputation and trust. They should have given out as much info as possible…but they didn’t. If there is more information and noise coming from one side, then that side will win in reputation.

Gil Reich: How to use Q and A sites to build your reputation

Engage others. Create value. Be memorable. Bring friends.

Example: Best Buy Metals. Owner joins Yahoo! Answers and give out useful info, then talks about himself, then gives more useful info. As long as you are contributing value, you can get some self-promotion out of it. Other Yahoo! Answers searchers will see the answer and get value from it. Yahoo! Answers are also searched by Google – turns out that his answer is ranked #2 for this specific question.

Another example: give a lot of good quality, targeted answers to build up reputation in a competitive market. One guy’s answers are ranked very high in shopping because he answered a lot of questions about a specific product niche.

Answers sites: Yahoo! Answers is largest ranked (43 mil), WikiAnswers, then Linkedin Answers (for whole site).

Q & A Sites: Community Q & A sites get about 100 million unique visitors/month from the US alone.There are both consumer and B2B sites, many sites allow multiple answers, some are wiki sites, some have questions open for days and best answers are selected (opportunity for more traffic if your answer is selected), and consider horizonal vs. niche answers sites. Niche sites are stackoverflow, wikianswers. Aardvark is another one. Yedda is an Israeli site.

How to become an answer god: Ask questions, answer questions with useful questions, interact and follow-up when you’ve answered or asked, don’t lose control and remember everything is listed by google…forever.

Quick ROI Analysis – answering questions at 7 mins per answer is a lower cost/conversion than cost/conversion on a successful PPC campaign. Over 90% of people who use business Q & A find it useful for business-survey results. (This is my favorite quote: “if there are A-listers in the industry you are stalking, then you can use Q & A to attract their attention.”)

Dan Gerstenfeld: 67% of top executives regard their company’s online reputation as vulnerable. How would you want your company to be presented in a crisis situation? Take control of the situation by putting info on it on your website: answer questions, give information (positive and negative), and the SERP results will reflect how you are proactively handling the issue.

How to be proactive? Define an overall PR and social media marketing strategy. Adopt a hands-on approach with good listening tools and handle all responses yourself. Be proactive. Network with others online. Create a place online that people know about, that people will know where to go to if a crisis breaks out. Optimize your content online.

Sam Michaelson: Reputation Management Pitfalls for the client and the service provider

Client pitfalls: biggest thing that clients do wrong is not being prepared in advance. Look at the names of people in the company  – and buy the domains of their names as well as the defensive use of the names (such as thispersonsucks.com). Own your own name! Make sure you own your own keywords and properties related to the top ten search results.

Another pitfall: Clients forget to use simple means when they are available, such as calling someone to take down the bad info if you know the person. Sometimes it’s that easy!

Service Provider Pitfalls: Really bad to optimize pages that have comments on them because you never know what the next comment will say. Optimizing pages that might change (news sites, wikipedia). Don’t forget to take control of the top ten sites…bad things may be coming.  Not setting clear expectations may be a problem – you will always get a client coming back after months thinking you’re giving them poor results. Not optimizing sites you build into top spots. Missing what the client really wants. Misunderstanding the perception of your role.

A few conclusions:

1. Have a reputation management plan and be proactive.

2. How you handle a reputation management issue affects how people see you in search engine results.

3. Think about a Q & A answers strategy to build your reputation AND rank for search engine results.

4. There are a lot of missed opportunities and pitfalls in brand management – avoid the big pitfalls.

In early November, the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation (CSF) (which my association management company manages) accidentally discovered an industry competitor had created a copycat ripoff of our TweetUp4Troops effort to generate support for the Foundation’s Trees for Troops program.

The Background:

The Christmas SPIRIT Foundation, the 501(c)(3) charitable branch of the National Christmas Tree Association, advances the spirit of Christmas for kids, families and the environment.  For four years, the Foundation — with in-kind support from FedEx Freight — has implemented a hugely successful Trees for Troops program which touches the lives of military families by providing them a free, farm-grown Christmas tree.  The majority of trees go to troops with someone stationed overseas during the holidays. In its first four years, the Foundation has reached 50,082 military families around the world.  We trademarked Trees for Troops to protect the name. In 2007, we added Trees for Troops Weekends during which consumers could purchase a farm-grown tree and donate it to the Trees for Troops program.  (In three years, about 11,000 consumers have been involved in this effort.)

To engage more consumers in the program and to generate financial support for Trees for Troops, the Foundation created and organized TweetUp4Troops events to be held during Veterans Day Week (Nov 7-14). As part of the campaign, the Foundation created a TweetUp4Troops group site, web site and Twitter handle.

The Scam

At the beginning of November, a Foundation staffer accidentally typed in www.Tweetupfortroops.org and discovered that an artificial tree company had registered this domain name and directed people to its commercial Web site that is purely sales, a giant advertisement for artificial Christmas trees. The site’s creator has NOTHING to do with the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation and does NOTHING to support the Trees for Troops program.

The Christmas SPIRIT Foundation sees the fake tree industry’s action as a rouse designed to “capture and divert” people who support (or want to support) the Foundation and its Trees for Troops program. We don’t know how many potential sponsors accidentally typed “for” rather than “4″ and got the fake page rather than the real TweetUp4Troops site.

The Foundation was stunned that a company/industry would stoop so low as to try to deceive donors interested in supporting U.S. military families.

The first thing we did was check with legal regarding sending a cease and desist letter. (However, because of the crush of implementation for Trees for Troops and TweetUp4Troops, we did not send the letter.) We reached out to the Twitter community to seek advice on how to respond.  I wrote this blog post asking social media community to give me feedback and advice.  We were overwhelmed with the fabulous response from our social media community!

Following the community’s advice, the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation issued a news release.  In addition to sending it to the legacy media, we tweeted it to our social media community on Twitter and Facebook. Within minutes the word was spreading to hundreds, then thousands of people interested in social media, cause marketing, associations and non profits. Some re-tweeted. Others posted blogs about this case. Based on a quick analysis, the message was tweeted to more than 600,000 followers within 24 hours.

Follow-Up Questions and Answers

Q: Has there been an effect on donations positively or negatively? Can you compare or quantify that?
Since TweetUp4Troops is a new initiative, we have no baseline thus no real numbers or way to measure impact on results. The Foundation (and NCTA) has commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct a post-season consumer tracking poll annually.  We will have those results in mid-January.

Q: What lessons have you learned about brand management?
Monitor your brand across multiple channels. This means: implement regular monitoring of your brand to find anyone trying to hijack it. (Remember, we discovered the TweetUp4Troops brandjacking accidentally!) Use social media platforms to help your cause if it is hijacked. Get legal “protection” of your brand through copyright and trade mark/service mark registrations. Register multiple domain names and Social Media accounts.  You cannot consider all possibilities but look at as many as possible.

This has influenced our thinking for the 2010 program! As a result of both the brandjacking and lessons we learned from talking with the folks at Tweetsgiving, we’re likely to implement the 2010 program through our “master” (and legally protected) Trees for Troops sites. We are likely to move to legally register the name so we have greater protection in event of new attempts at brandjacking.

About Steve Drake

Steve Drake is president/owner of Drake & Company, an accredited association management company serving as headquarters and staff of 10 nonprofit organizations.  Drake’s expertise in cause marketing programs includes serving as the CEO of the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation and its award-winning Trees for Troops program.

For more information about Trees For Troops: read this November 2009 Ad Age column

So many more organizations and people are engaged in social media today than they were a year ago. What that means is that so many more people are talking about your company, your competitors, your employees and your brands today than they were a year ago. At least, that’s the potential.  According to Forrester Research, the number of US regular social network users has doubled since 2007. So, are you monitoring the conversation? Have you set up your listening posts? Simply put, email alerts (daily, or in real time) are the best way to make sure you are not missing out on any online mentions  relevant to you or your company, positive or negative.

I’ve compiled what I believe is the “do not miss,” list of (free) email listening tools your organization should use. There are a lot of great paid listening systems out there, but this list is about free tools and ones that send email alerts. If you use them, you will catch 95% of the online mentions relevant to you and your company. And, to back it up, I use these personally.

My question to you is: what are the other essential free listening alerts out there? I’d love to know about them.

In no particular order, here are the six free listening tools you cannot do without:

1. Google Alerts

Be sure and sign up for the comprehensive alert. Since Google is now indexing most social media updates (Facebook, Twitter, comments, etc), this is the one “must have” alert. Sign up for as many as 10 at a time, for free. Once these alerts are verified, you can sign up for 10 more. Don’t forget to sign up for video alerts (video comments, tags, etc) separately.

2. Backtype Alerts

Backtype has two functions: it compiles all of your blog comments into one space. I heard someone describe it as “backtype keeps track of all my comments, like crumbs left in the blogosphere.” However, you can set up email alerts as well for any phrase, word, name, etc. I recently found out that there was a discussion going on in the comments of someone else’s blog about one of my blog posts – I was happy to know about it so that I could join in the conversation. Don’t miss out on the mentions of your company in someone else’s blog comments!

3. Socialmention Alerts

Similar to Google Alerts, this is a comprehensive search and alert listening system. The best part is, it’s free and sent to you by email!

4. Boardtracker Alerts

Ever wonder what people are saying about your brands in the message boards? All public message boards are open for search, but Boardtracker seems to pick up the ones that everyone else forgets. Don’t forget this one and miss out on the discussion about your brand features, organization’s last fundraiser, and more.

5. TweetBeep Alerts

TweetBeep is a Google Alert – but for twitter. It searches the search.twitter.com site for mentions of the specific keywords or phrases that you input. You are allowed up to 10 free alerts, and they are sent as an email to you either hourly, daily, or as they occur. If you are not always on twitter, or checking in to the search feature of Twitter, this is a great alert system.

6. Filtrbox Alerts

I find Filtrbox to be one of the more interesting alerts out there. Though the company says that it offers real time social media monitoring on twitter and other platforms, I primarily receive Twitter alerts from them, and frankly think it misses a lot of Twitter mentions, too. However, on a few critical occasions, they have delivered email alerts to me when all my other listening posts were silent. For that, I am loyal to Filtrbox as an alert when every other alert fails.

OK, I lied: the following is not an email alert, but it does come to your online RSS reader. It’s so important I thought I should share this:

Create RSS Feeds on Delicous and Flickr

This may not be obvious, but many times people will tag a social news site or photo site with your name, the name of your company, your organization, your brand, etc. For example, there are many Flickr photos that people have uploaded of their activities on charity walks to raise funds, and tagged with the name of the charity. However, did those same people also upload the photos to that charity’s photo group? Just to be sure, create an RSS feed of any tag name that you want to keep track of and send all those mentions to your RSS reader.

If you want to create a feed of a tag just search for the tag, and look for the RSS orange icon somewhere on that page. See my Delicious screen shot (below) with a search for the tag “livestrong” and the RSS feed at the bottom left of the screen.

Delicious tag "livestrong"

Do you use any of the six tools for listening mentioned here? How would you rate them? Are there any other ones that you cannot do without?

Image courtesy of Numberstumper

Social media is FUN. You get to make new friends. And pass along really interesting information. You get to ask others to help you change the world and support your cause. You meet all sorts of wonderful, generous people. But what are you really doing? You are creating gathering places, living rooms for discussion, kitchens for cooking up ideas, in order to develop real stakeholders. Social media is, after all, an engagement strategy. You want to create online ties that engage, create relationships, and move people to act on behalf of a cause, company, or organization. After you spend all that time creating those relationships, you have to commit to maintaining them.

What happens when you can’t be there all the time that your stakeholders want to drop by? Or if you decide it’s just too much work to cook meals regularly for all of those guests? Maybe your organization realizes that it’s hard to maintain all those relationships, and just as difficult to post regular content.

This post is a look at the back side of starting a social media presence: the obligations of maintaining it.

It takes three to six months of work to build up an organization’s social media presence. I think it takes a minimum of three months to start seeing a return on that engagement. Don’t start if you can’t commit to maintenance. Select your platforms carefully – what do you have time to maintain, and which platforms will take more time and resources than your organization has currently? The hard truth is that you have to commit to keeping that virtual kitchen stocked with food, and the virtual living room accessible. That means keeping the blog fresh with new content, communicating regularly, creating real relationships on social networks, and offering information and conversation topics on platforms regularly.

If your company’s social sites are not tended to with care, then your organization is actually risking its online and offline credibility.

Here are some quick thoughts on the repercussions of not tending to your online presence:

1. People stop caring.

In the hyper-paced world of social media, your followers and fans quickly lose interest and forget you. Here’s the test: the last time you or your company took a break from creating regular online content (conversations, news, articles, etc), how many people asked you where you were?  There are a lot of organizations vying for time and attention online. Tend to those relationships regularly and cultivate lasting ones. The real test is creating relationships where someone writes to ask: “How are you? Haven’t seen you posting much lately.”

2. People stop spreading your news.

Viralness is a key factor in social media. If you aren’t maintaining connections, people are less likely to pass along your content. Relationships strengthens the desire to “do good” for others, whether that’s passing along content, recommending your site, or suggesting someone become of fan of your Facebook Page.

3. You lose friendship credibility.

If you’re not there for them now, will you be there later? If you post content randomly, or only sporadically engage online, how can they count on you? If you are a regular news source for information in your field, you need to continue to do that.  What if you posted content regularly, gathered a following, then stopped? When your organization decides to resume, it’s lost its credibility for being dependable, and for maintaining the site. It may very well have lost viewers it cannot ever regain.

It’s tempting to think that “no one will notice” if you are not maintaining your homes regularly, but someone always drives by. It’s also tempting to think “it’s all right if we don’t put up any new content for a month.” But someone cares, and misses it. That fan who would’ve done anything for your cause is a lot less likely to do that when they don’t know why you went away for a while…or when you are coming back.

There is a marketing credo that it is much cheaper to keep a regular customer happy than find new customers. No matter what type of organization you are, it’s easier to keep your existing following than to build a new one.

What do you think? Is your organization struggling with this very issue? How are you addressing the issues of time/maintenance/engagement?

This is the story of the “flip side” of online reputation management – when monitoring one’s online reputation brings an unexpected bounty of good news.

I won an award. A great, wonderful award. How did I learn about the award? A Google alert arrived in my inbox!

I always recommend that companies set up online “listening posts” for mentions of the company name, staff names, and industry keywords, at a minimum.  It is impossible to stay on top of all the chatter and noise online without them. If we want to know what our fans, critics and friends are saying online, we have to be listening to them. You never know when a critic will write about your company in their personal blog, mention an employee personally on Twitter, or talk about your organization’s programming on a host of online forums and social media networks. Unlike Domino’s, we don’t want to be caught unaware of a viral video that puts our company in a bad light.

What we cannot forget is that the flip side of reputation management is listening to the good things people say about your company online.

And that’s what happened to me two days ago. First, the Google Alert arrived at 10pm to my email inbox:

Google Web Alerts only offer a short excerpt of the online mention, which is not often enough to understand the context. It is advisable to click the hyperlink and read it for yourself.  I wanted to know more, so I followed the link back to WebHostMagazine.com and found this:

Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Two hours later, this TweetBeep (a type of Twitter alert) arrived in my email inbox:

So, of course, I traced the alert back to the original Tempus Group online “tweet” and found this:

Which prompted me to respond with this tweet to Tempus Group:

The lesson here? Don’t forget to set up your listening posts!  For monitoring Twitter, I use TweetBeep, Twitterfall, and a TweetDeck “search” is always open for “@askdebra.” I use BoardTracker to listen for keywords mentioned on discussion forums, listservs and chat groups. I use Google Alerts to catch any links or keywords scanned by Google, and I have set up a watchlist on Technorati to monitor certain keywords mentioned in blogs. I also created an alert on Socialmention to pick up anything that the other alerts missed. Of all of them, Google Alerts, Socialmention and TweetBeep are by far the most useful.

In fact without Google Alerts and TweetBeep, I would have missed a great honor and award!

Which listening posts do you use, and which are most helpful?

Domino's Pizza, image by Adam Kuban

Hasn’t every nonprofit or business had the “customer from hell?” I remember one client that kept threatening to sue our organization for every minute perceived slight: she wasn’t receiving the services she wanted, she thought our processes weren’t fair, or she didn’t get a spot in every program we offered. I can only imagine if she had been tech-savvy with a blog. Her posts could have gone viral, spread to our funders, our other clients, and local politicians. From there, it would have been no time until her discontent would have affected our funding sources, donors, and political standing. Did we have listening filters in place? NO. Should we have?

YES!

Domino’s Pizza is in the middle of a bad dream. They probably could not have imagined that two employees would create a video of themselves violating all sorts of health regulations while making pizza for delivery. (The employees claim it was a prank.) These two employees uploaded their video, and…guess what? It went viral. Within a few days, the video had been viewed more than a million times on You Tube. The astounding part to me is that Domino’s corporate had no idea that this video was out and garnering attention until a blogger notified Domino’s of the video.

The real takeaway for me is: why did a blogger notify Domino’s of the prank? Why wasn’t Domino’s Pizza listening?

As reported in the New York Times: “’we got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,’ said a Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, who added that the company was preparing a civil lawsuit.” As further reported by the New York Times, “executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down.” Additionally, it was The Consumerist that tracked down the franchise location and employees, not Domino’s Pizza, and notified Domino’s. Domino’s should never have been blindsided; they should have had reputation management filters and screens in place. The result: “the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov…”

Wow. Domino’s missed the boat. Well really, they missed the video.

What happened?

1. They weren’t listening. Not at all. Until now.

There are enough cases of one blogger bringing down a company’s reputation a notch to warrant online reputation monitoring for every company.  I previously discussed one woman’s charge against a You Tube video ad by Johnson and Johnson.  The “Motrin Moms” campaign led J&J to take the offensive video off the air. Blogger Jeff Jarvis single-handily coined the term “Dell Hell” and drowned Dell’s reputation…until Dell started paying attention.

2. They didn’t respond immediately.

According to the New York Times, “as the company learned about the video on Tuesday, Mr. McIntyre said, executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down.” They should have learned from Dell. Dell didn’t respond in any timely way to Mr. Jarvis’ repeated complaints, which fostered other Dell consumers’ frustration, and eventually led to stock decline, executive firing, and customer abandonment. Read about the way that Dell has dealt with its reputation issues, and Sony has not, in this insightful article.

3. They let the citizen journalists and social media participants define the news story.

The video garnered one million views in a few days. It was discussed all over Twitter. Since Domino’s didn’t respond quickly online, they lost control of the story.

I’ve just finished an amazing book, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss. (I’m sure they are listening online to me now.) They emphasize that brand control is shifting to citizen journalists and the obvious follow that companies do not control their own reputation anymore. They are right to say “search engines are reputation engines,” and we need to pay attention. Are you paying attention?

All of this brings up for me this point: No person or company is immune. Not even nonprofits.

Gather together your online monitoring toolkit and start listening. What are you hearing?

If you’re looking for a tips, tools and an overview, here are a few online and offline resources:

Radically Transparent, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss. A comprehensive overview and do-it-yourself guide to reputation monitoring.

My earier post, Listening Tour, on how to set up a simple online monitoring system.

Dan Schwabel: Six Free Tools for Online Reputation Management

ReadWriteWeb: review of other free and paid reputation monitoring tools

Lifehacker: Using RSS and MonitorThis

Chris Brogan: Five Tools I Use for Listening

MissionCreep: 4 Methods and 40 Free Tools for Listening to Online Conversations

Interactive Insights Group: How to Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit

Social Media Answers: Reputation Management and Monitoring Online

I am a casual donor. I don’t donate regularly to the same causes, but try to spread my limited funds around.  When I  received an email today from charity: water with the heading “See the First Twestival Well Drilled,” I became more than a casual donor. Charity: water sent me a personal invitation to ask questions about how the Twestival funds are being allocated, view the drilling for new wells in Africa via daily videos, follow the drilling via Twitter updates, and hear answers to the most popular questions on April 13th.

Now that is stakeholder engagement.

When was the last time you were asked to by a charity to engage in conversation?

I was one of the organizers of the February 12th Jerusalem Twestival, a gathering of local Twitter fans to raise funds for charity: water. At the time I proposed the idea, I thought it would be a great way to meet more people and help Jerusalemites give to another part of the globe.  Like most stakeholders and donors, I assumed that my money would be used towards the stated purpose (drill wells in Africa near villages without access to potable water), but I didn’t know much else.

What did I expect from my one-time donation? My excuse to throw a party and meet others at a fundraiser? Not much, honestly. I expected a thank-you note of some sort. I expected to be solicited for further donations. I certainly expected a year-end update. But I never expected to be involved.  Here are the opportunities I now have to get involved:

• As charity:water goes from village to village drilling wells, I can watch four daily short videos of the drilling.
• I can follow the drilling updates via a twitter stream update
• I can ask questions of the local drilling team during the five days of drilling, via email or twitter
• The local charity:water drill team will answer the top five questions on video April 13th

Brilliant. What has charity: water done?

• Involved me in the funds disbursement.
• Offered transparency.
• Made me part of the success story.

The recent Community Philanthropy 2.0 survey of social media power users by Mashable indicates that donors want to be involved. According to Mashable,

These online donors aged 30-49 want conversation about the following:

• 80% organizational impact
• 74% success stories
• 71% learning more about the organizations they are participating with
• 70% want information on causes they care about
• 43% want information on financial accountability

Furthermore, donors aged 50 and above want the same sort of information, but prioritized differently. According to Mashable, “verifying this opportunity for content sources, 71 percent of 30-49-year-olds directly looked to the charity they support for information, and 63 percent trust referrals from friends. In comparison, 78 percent of those 50 and older directly look to their charities and 72 percent trust friends.”

Charity: water is giving its donors exactly what they want: success stories, videos of the impact of donations, and information about financial accountability.

The study also shows that these same donors are already chatting online about philanthropy. Charity: water has is taking advantage of this trend (see chart below). Their twestival page offers simple button press options to “tweet about the facts” and “tweet about the live drill.”

image courtesy of Mashable

Charity:water understands its Twestival donors are actively involved in social networks (many become involved through Twitter), understands online giving, and understands donor engagement.

From this one email Twestival update, I’m engaged and excited to talk about charity: water in my online networks and…guess what?

Give again.

What can your organization learn from charity: water?

image by dbking

ReadWriteWeb’s Lidje Davis recently posted a very thought-provoking article entitled The Unforseen Consequences of the Social Web. In the article, Davis notes the many ways that that one’s actions on the social web can adversely affect one’s own reputation.  The flip side is how other peoples’ actions on the social web can affect your reputation as well. “Reputation Management” means monitoring and tracking of one’s own brand, creating appropriate online personas, and developing an encompassing reputation strategy.  The best way to manage your reputation is by creating a proactive reputation management strategy.

Why should an organization spend its time to create a proactive reputation management strategy?

• There is no delete button on the internet. Your posts, and comments about your organization live forever. A great example is when I searched under the terms “L’Oreal+Israel” using Google: the third and fourth listings were entitled “Boycott Israel Campaign” and “L’Oreal: Makeup for Israeli Apartheid.” These campaigns are at least 10 years old. Is this really what L’Oreal, Israel, wants its customers to see at the top of the search page?
• Current comments about your organization can spread like wildfire and affect your organization’s ability to raise funds successfully. As Elaine Fogel writes in Network for Good’s blog here, “one negative media report on a nonprofit can set it back to the point where it may not recover. A nonprofit’s main asset is its reputation.” No one wants to give money to a company with a poor reputation.
• Inability to react quickly to negative online publicity and conversation will damage your reputation as well. See my previous post analyzing two online reputation management cases for examples.
  
• If your organization’s online brand is not up to date, it will also affect fundraising. Imagine soliciting major donors…but donors researching your company find negative listings in the top ten Google search returns.  Or better yet, what if Twitter searches for your organization’s name show many negative comments? Smart donors search online first for information about organizations. You want the top online results to be positive.
  

A little bit of proactive attention to your organization’s online profile can prevent problems down the road, and find allies, collaborators and donors. That said, how about getting started? I suggest a few starter actions, listed below.

• Set up “listening posts” to monitor online conversations about your organization.
  
• Buy your domain name, those related to your organization, and potential common domain name misspellings.
• Create a blog so that your organization has a platform from which to issue its own stories.
• Pick two social networking sites to join where your stakeholders hang out,  and begin to converse with people there.
• Create an organizational social profile on a handful of social networking sites. You don’t have to be active on them, but you’re ready to be if need be, and it will help increase your organization’s search engine rankings.

Resources:
Ask Dave Taylor asks: What Is Reputation Management? Dave answers this question thoroughly.
Social Media Optimization’s blog post:  Five Steps to Managing Reputation Management.
Reputation Advisor’s Six Easy Steps to Personal Reputation Management.
Chris Bennet on Reputation Management.
Search Insider’s 17 Search Engine Reputation Management Optimization Tips.

If your organization wants to delve deeper, there is great information available online. Here are some of the best management reputation informational posts that I found:

• The “mother of all” resources and tips to manage your online reputation was compiled by Jacob Share at Job Mob. He lists 170+ Resources and Tips to Help Manage Your Reputation Online. This post gives a thorough list of online tools to manage your reputation and specific steps of how to “clean up” one’s reputation in each participatory media sphere.

• Brett Borders’ Copy Brighter blog speaks only to online reputation management, with wonderful posts about managing one’s online reputation, how to deal with “impossible” online reputation issues, and more. If you want to know more about this specific area, I’d start here first. Ditto for finding answers to your questions regarding online reputation management and strategies.

• Marketing Pilgrim focuses on the search engine that determines all of our reputations, Google, and how to adjust one’s rankings within Google.  There are very practical ways to increase your organization’s Google rankings in the post Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation and Remove Negative Results. Some are quite easy to implement. Though the article focuses on fixing a negative Google reputation, it is worthwhile to read and implement these strategies proactively so that your organization controls as much of its reputation as it can.

• Marketing Pilgrim also put together a great guide called the Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide. The guide includes social media monitoring tools and practical advice on how to address negative consumer-generated media.

• The New Zealand State Services has an article about monitoring social media buzz. The article focuses on creating RSS feeds for each social media tool, and specifically how to do this for Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia references boost Google search engine rankings, it is important to stay on top of the chatter on it.

I hope that this inspires you to dip your toes into proactive reputation management. Let me know what you find!

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image by altemark

I once worked for a non-profit organization that created a particularly controversial education curriculum for the public school system. After launching the curriculum, the local newspaper published an op-ed piece criticizing it, and negative press soon followed. The organization is local to its city, offering varied projects and services, and funded partially by public funds.  All of its good work was lost, temporarily, in the maelstrom following the op-ed piece. This was in the days before social media and Web 2.0.  What could my organization do? They tried to get their own op-ed piece published, sent out a press release, spoke at the local city council, sent letters to their members and donors, and organized a neighborhood rally. Did it mediate public opinion? A bit.  The biggest problem was that of reach, not message. Secondly was the lack of opportunities to engage directly with its critics.

If this organization were to encounter the same problem today, they could achieve much greater reach and impact using social media applications.

Your organization can’t afford NOT to be on all social media sites relevant to your stakeholders.

Your reputation depends on it.

Let’s look at two companies that faced reputation problems, and what non-profits can learn from them: Network Solutions and Motrin. Jason Falls, at Social Media Explorer, wrote a comprehensive case study about Network Solutions’ reputation problem and analyzed their brand invigoration strategy.

In his case study, Falls explains that “Network Solutions reserved domains that are searched for over a four-day period if they aren’t purchased right away, preventing you from registering them elsewhere unless you call customer service to have them released.”  (They have since changed this policy.) Because of this policy, they increasingly encountered soured customers, negative online conversations, and a brand reputation problem. What did they do? They hired a communications firm to monitor and engage in conversations on-line, address issues directly on their blog, and they provided valuable information to their customers through their blog. They fully engaged, directly answered issues, and listened to their stakeholders, using all the available social media tools. Through this invigoration strategy, they directly addressed reputation issues, potentially creating more advocates.

The second case is more recent and public: The Motrin Moms. For those of you unfamiliar with this campaign, Motrin launched a viral video ad in November 2008 offering mothers with back problems from wearing baby carriers relief through Motrin.  However, many mothers (myself included) were offended by the implications of the ad:  we may not enjoy carrying our children and/or may not want to be labeled as “that kind of mom.”  (You can watch the ad here.) The backlash began immediately on Twitter and YouTube.  The social web waited while Johnson and Johnson (Motrin’s parent company) did…nothing…for a few days. Eventually, the subsidiary company that markets Motrin emailed apologies to bloggers, and the VP of marketing at Johnson and Johnson apologized to consumers on Motrin’s home page. Critics (myself included) agree that Motrin failed to listen to its critics in real time, reacted too slowly to the reputation crisis, and did not satisfactorily engage with its critics on the social web.

There are several interesting case analyses of this case: Jeremiah Owyang looks at the reputation backlash by the numbers, Pistachio offers her insightful  in-the-moment analysis of the issue (with later updates), and David Gelles of the Financial Times wrote a longer piece (reprinted here) that highlights the episode within a larger discussion of brand management.

What is the difference between Motrin’s and Network Solutions’ strategy? Did Motrin open up a special portal for its disgruntled consumers? Did Motrin engage in conversations on the web? Not at all. Motrin (and Johnson and Johnson) talked to consumers, not with consumers. Even today, Motrin’s website is primarily information- and sales-based, with a few FAQs. On the other hand, Network Solutions engaged and addressed critics where they posted in the social web, and learned from it: today Network Solutions asks for customer ideas and feedback on its Ideas Are Power portal.

Two different companies, two different situations, two different approaches. Motrin was hit with a brand reputation crisis, and Network Solutions was trying to raise its reputation and decrease negativity towards the brand. We can learn from these two cases, and hopefully react better than Motrin did.

Organizations must be ready to deal with brand reputation crises. In order to do so, you should have all the appropriate social media tools in place to listen, engage with your stakeholders, and broadcast messages if a crisis hits.  What tools should you have in place?

1. A Blog: the only media source fully controlled by you. See John Hayden’s post on 22 Ways A Blog Can Rock Your Non-Profit’s Social Media Campaign.

2. Listening Tools: I previously wrote about how to set up a “listening post” to monitor online conversations about you and your organization. For additional reading, try Chris Brogan’s 5 Tools I Use for Listening.

3. Participate in Social Media Spaces: Where are your stakeholders? Engage with them where they are spending time. Is it on Facebook? Twitter? Bebo? HiFive? LinkedIn? Maybe the local community forum or listserv? Set up a few accounts now and begin engaging with your stakeholders so that if your organization’s reputation is ever questioned, you are in the conversation and able to address the concerns quickly. A plus is that your stakeholders will be more likely to trust your response because you have spent the time building up their trust through your engagement efforts.

4. An Interactive Website: not the static website of old, but one that includes opportunities for engagement, clear calls for action, guest posts by stakeholders, and an Idea Portal.

If you have a great example of crisis reputation management through social media, I’d love to know of it. In another post, I’ll address the issue of proactive reputation management.

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