I have just finished reading a white paper on Social Media written by Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins. It is a very good introduction to how new media is changing our working environment.
What really got me, however, was a quote in the front of the paper that, given my recent comments about reputation management [here and here], really resonated.
Your brand is no stronger than your reputation – and will increasingly depend on what comes up when you are Googled.
Allan Jenkins
This really impressed me. Given that once an issue becomes part of the conversation in the blogosphere, there is no way that you can roll it back. And Technorati are now putting the number of blogs at more that 57 million, which is a tremendous amount of potential Google juice.
So in order to effectively manage your reputation in this environment, you have to:
- be aware of what is happening - at a minimum monitor the conversations,
- be engaged in the conversation: have a presence and be credible, and
- proactively manage your reputation by representing the values your agency espouses.
This means that, if your agency does drop the ball, you have some credibility in this space, which translates as reputation ‘credits,’ you are engaged so you can respond early (and disclose everything), and – in the very distant future – it is less likely that when someone googles your agency, the first couple of returns won’t be a painful reminder of how ineptly you managed a particular issue…
