He Said, She Said - Social Media and the Art of Positive Spin November 30, 2009
When Your Customers and Competitors Use Social Media
Social media is used to create a buzz about a product or company. Unfortunately, this buzz isn’t always one that is positive. Your customers and competitors can use social media to spread negative rumors and reports about the way that you do business. Part of learning how to use social media effectively is learning how to deal with this problem when it arises. The key to this is to remember that social media isn’t solely about creating buzz but also about generating an interactive conversation with your customers. Remembering this will help you to stay focused on building a positive image through social media, neutralizing problems when they arise and getting one step ahead of your competitors.
The main thing that you can do to counteract negative online publicity about your business is to make sure that you are consistently presenting a positive image for your business through social media. You want to have a clear social media plan which includes promoting your mission statement and core messages to others. Of course, you want to do this subtly and appropriately. For example, if you believe in green business then you would use social media to not only spread the word about your own green efforts but also to promote links to other people who have green practices that you admire. Additionally, you want to use social media to really connect with your customers by answering their questions and providing them with useful information. This will give you a strong social media foundation that will be harder to topple.
Unfortunately, you may still find that negative rumors or comments about your business do have an impact on you. The fact is that you have to stay on top of what people are saying about you online and work to neutralize any problems that arise. You’ll want to track what others say about you. You can do this by entering your business name into real time searches on sites like Twitter to see what comes up about you. You can also set Google Alerts for your business name to be notified when something is written about your company on news or blog sites. Once you’ve found what’s being written, you want to neutralize the information with a calm, reasonable and informative response. (Take the high road here; don’t get into petty arguments). For example, if someone posts that your product broke the first time that they used it then you can respond that you haven’t been aware of this problem before but are glad to be aware of it now and let the person know about your return policy. This shows people online that you’re interested in what customers are saying about you and willing to respond to problems.
Finally, you’ll want to use social media yourself to stay aware of what is going on with your competitors. You don’t want to get nasty and promote negative rumors about them but you do want to track what they’re doing online so that you can compete with them effectively. You can track your competitors in the same way that you track news about yourself. With Twitter’s new “lists” function you can follow all of your competitors’ Twitter updates and set the list to private so that they don’t even know that you’re paying attention to them. This will give you an edge up in the industry.
