Creative Concepts

Not every company feels compelled to use social media.  But those who haven’t at least moved to establish their own online presence may be in for a surprise: it’s incredibly easy for someone else to do it for you — and not always with the best of intentions.

Case in point: Michael Werch wondered how long it would take the average corporation to realize that someone was pretending to be them online.  To find out, he began masquerading as the HJ Heinz Corporation on Twitter, mostly as an experiment to test the reflexes of modern business.  The result? Heinz noticed — two weeks later — and Twitter renamed Werch’s account to divest it of any connection to the company.

Werch’s confession in Ad Age has generated an interesting array of (mostly predictable) responses, including:

• The obvious lesson: Businesses must control and protect their online images, even if it means squatting on their own company names across multiple platforms (so enterprising individuals don’t beat them to it).
• The obvious question: Why did Heinz squash Werch’s account, rather than taking it over (or collaborating with him) and building upon the brand goodwill he’d already launched on their behalf?
• The counterpoint: Heinz is the kind of industry leader that “doesn’t need to use Twitter” and other web tools because their perceived impact is so negligible that doing so would be a waste of Heinz’s marketing dollars.
• The counter-counterpoint: Heinz may not need to use Twitter, but imagine the PR headache they’d be facing now if Werch hadn’t been a fan of the brand, but a whistleblower intent on divulging company secrets, questioning their business practices, etc.

Does every company need to use social media?  Of course not.  But just because your company doesn’t use social media, that doesn’t prevent someone else from adopting your company’s name — and, potentially, from damaging your brand.

If your company still isn’t sure about its own intentions toward Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and beyond, here’s a tip: someone in your corporate office should register your company’s name (and all its common derivatives) on all currently-relevant platforms, just in case.  You never have to use them, but you might sleep a little easier knowing that no one else can, either.

(If that tip sounds familiar, it’s probably because someone was telling you the same thing 15 years ago, only the topic was websites, not Twitter accounts.  Same logic, different era, and that logic never stops making sense.)

And, of course, a caveat: if someone really doesn’t like your company, nothing’s stopping them from ranting about you online.  But that kind of vitriol should be spewing from something other than your company’s “official” web presence.  (Plus, if you’ve registered your official presence on Twitter, etc., but your company just hasn’t found a reason to make use of it, there’s nothing like a PR catastrophe to get the engines running — and you don’t want to lose time playing catch-up then, do you?)

It’s no secret that people learn more from their mistakes than they do from their successes.  Maybe that’s why we’re all so reluctant to share stories about our failures: it’s not that we’re embarrassed about “doing it wrong,” but we’re afraid that someone else will learn from our mistakes before we do.  (As if succeeding wasn’t already hard enough without giving the competition a free education!)

But social media is public media, which means new successes and failures happen every day, out in the open, and anyone who’s paying attention can follow along in real time.  Lauren Litwinka has done such a thing, compiling an insightful (and acid-tongued) list of companies who are “doing it wrong” on Twitter.

In Lauren’s case, “wrong” means “not making conversation a two-way street.”  She believes social media provides companies with valuable access to their customers’ desires and opinions, and squandering that two-way invitation with one-way marketing will alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.

How did these companies lose their way?

• Misunderstanding the way customers use these media channels.
• Failing to discern what kinds of information people consider valuable.
• Setting low or unreasonable expectations.
• Ignoring customer feedback (or lack thereof).
• Not implementing lessons to adjust their approach mid-stream.

But that doesn’t mean each of the companies Lauren cites are lost causes.  On the contrary, now that they’ve been told their execution could improve, they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  And that makes the time and effort they’ve invested up ’til now every bit as valuable as it would be if it had led them to automatic success — and maybe moreso, since they now know for certain what won’t work.

Remember: there’s always value in making mistakes.  Just make sure you’re learning from them (before your competition does).

From Twitter’s hacker-fueled downtime to FaceBook’s purchase of FriendFeed, people have been talking a lot this week about the stability of social media — and what to do when your platform of choice becomes unstable.

No one wants to invest time and effort in building a following that can disappear so easily.  But since the most popular social media tools also happen to be free, their users — including businesses — are at the mercy of the markets.  (Or, in some cases, of Russian hackers.)

Since nothing derails your messaging plan like finding out the platform you built it around has suddenly collapsed, we’d like to offer you 3 Tips for Surviving a Social Media Implosion:

1. Be in Five Places at Once. All right, so five is an arbitrary number.  But even if Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all crashed, it would be nice to have your messaging intact on Flickr and your blog, wouldn’t it?
2. Unify Your Online and Offline Presence. The means by which you spread your message may be different, but the message should still be the same.  Let your web assets drive people to your physical assets, and vice versa.  That way, even if your Facebook page were hacked or your Twitter account deleted, your customers would still know how to contact you.  (Or would they?…)
3. You ARE Offline, Aren’t You? How crippled would your messaging — or your entire business — be if the whole web crashed?  Do you have backups of your critical information?  Would your clients still know where to find you?  Would your business still be profitable?

Granted, following these tips won’t guarantee that your online marketing will thrive eternally, problem-free.  But they will help you navigate the rapids that get left behind if your river disappears.

When we saw one of our clients, Bigelow Tea, mentioned in The Twitter Book (by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein) as a positive example of how businesses should use Twitter, we were ecstatic.

And then we realized we’d stopped taking our own advice.

In the book, O’Reilly and Milstein applaud Bigelow Tea for using conversational tweets to direct traffic to their tea-related blog posts, rather than those generic “New Blog Post: Topic X” auto-tweets, which most users have now begun to subconsciously tune out.  Naturally, we were pleased — until we realized the Twitter Tools plugin we’d just installed on the Bigelow Tea Blog was doing precisely what The Twitter Book had lauded us for not doing, all because we hadn’t double-checked the plugin’s default checkboxes.

So we disabled it.  (The auto-tweet part, not the whole plugin.)  Our lesson?  Sometimes a compliment can help you find even more ways to improve.  (And, while you’re at it: make sure you double-check the details…)

By now, even if you don’t live in Chicago, you’ve probably heard of Horizon Realty.  That’s because they recently decided to sue one of their tenants over what they considered to be a libelous message posted to Twitter — specifically:

When news of this lawsuit hit the web, many were astounded by Horizon Realty’s seemingly over-the-top behavior — especially considering the Tweeter in question (Amanda Bonnen) only had 20 followers at the time of the tweet.  (Perhaps even more mind-boggling was Horizon Realty’s response to the public outrage, including the presumed joke, “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization.”)

While the lawsuit itself — and the web firestorm that surrounds it — will find its own conclusion, let’s not miss the opportunity to find several lessons in this fiasco.

1. What you say on Twitter is public. (Even if you don’t think it is.)  That goes not only for what YOU say, but what’s said ABOUT you.
2. The days of being a “sue first, ask questions later” organization may soon be over. Spurious lawsuits only work as scare tactics when the defendant is isolated from legal resources, support and information — none of which is true in this digitally connected age.
3. The public is quick to defend the underdog. Within hours of this story first being tweeted, it was among the top Trending Topics on Twitter.  (Note to corporations: you are almost never the underdog.)
4. The public rarely has all the facts. In this case, Horizon contends that Bonnen had filed a class action lawsuit against them on June 24th regarding the alleged mold issue. If Horizon’s portrayal of Bonnen as a tenant seeking to exploit the system for financial gain turns out to be true, their behavior may not only be understandable but forgivable.
5. Your reputation is ALWAYS in the hands of others. Horizon contends it needed to file its suit against Bonnen because it has a reputation to defend (against her allegations of mold), but they failed to assess the negative impact this lawsuit could have on their reputation in the eyes of potential customers.  Regardless of the facts in the case, the web-going public’s perception is that Horizon Realty is a reactionary and overly-litigious company — not an impression likely to bring in new tenants by the truckload.

All said, there’s still one other question we won’t be able to answer quite yet: namely, how *does* a wave of negative online publicity affect a company? Horizon Realty isn’t Domino’s, and their PR crises aren’t parallel, but the web’s reaction to them has been similar. Whether Horizon’s clientele pays attention to Twitter is something only time (and Horizon Realty’s bottom line) will tell.