The dark (and bright) side to Social Media...

I met with a colleague the other day and we talked about Social Media Marketing (SMM). It is on everyone's minds these days. It promises great opportunity and also some peril. I'll give an example of each and suggest some tools I found that might help you manage some of the risk.

Here is an example of the opportunity:

Universal Orlando Resorts was launching a new Harry Potter theme park. They had an unlimited budget for getting the word out. But instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on conventional marketing, the person heading the team invited 7 of the most popular bloggers to a private webcast at midnight and told them the news. Within 24 hours 350 million people knew about the theme park launch.
source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4mwdMtlEM

Moral of the story:

1. Clearly, it helps to have the world's most famous wizard at your disposal!
2. SMM has a crazy powerful exponential factor that can work for large and small companies alike and save you a bundle.
3. SMM is built on word of mouth, which is so much more trusted and therefore powerful than "paid" advertising.

But as I said, there are some perils (and a few horror stories too!) Here's an example of one of the perils:

The colleague I visited told me a story about a well known construction company in NYC that had a fine reputation among the general public for years. Though among other construction professionals, their work was not known for being of the highest quality. This company was early in their industry to embrace SMM, and perhaps it was a bit easier back then to manage and even remove negative publicity if and when it did surface. So their reputation, among the general public, remained intact. Well, as SMM has grown since then, it's become harder to manipulate reviews posted online. Apparently, not too long ago, a few negative posts from the general public began to surface about this company. Today they are facing an avalanche of bad posts and their reputation is getting slammed.

Moral of the story:

1. Most important – provide quality products and services!
2. Deal with complaints proactively
3. Make sure part of your ongoing SMM strategy includes the ability to monitor and manage your reputation online

And as I promised, here are some tools to help you do that.

Google alerts - lots of people use this and its pretty simple, straight forward and free. You can enter a phrase for it to search, and when the phrase shows up in Google, you get an alert in your email. However, I tested it and it failed to track a twitter post in real time, so I decided looked at some other tools. However, there is a great article here that helps you determine which keywords you might want to track. The principles apply whichever tool you choose to use.

http://steprep.myfrontsteps.com - I LOVE this tool! What I love about it it's free, easy to use and very robust - you can REALLY manage your reputation, not just monitor it. I also love how I found it – I didn't! It found me. I tweeted about some of the other reputation management tools I had looked at, and StepRep tweeted me and invited me to check them out. Now that's SMM at its best! I investigated and I'm really happy I did. It's a GREAT tool. Go and see for yourself!

http://www.trackur.com - they have range of price points that's quite reasonable for small businesses and nonprofits. Using them is pretty simple and they have a 60 second tutorial. Also they rate the posts on the internet (about your company) as good, bad and neutral. This helps you see at a glance if there's anything to deal with.

http://www.buzzaround.us - this is a very cool, easy to use tool. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you can add it to your tool bar and see who's talking about you very easily. And its free. Always nice!

So don't be afraid of SMM (its too late for that anyway - it is already here!) Do some research, take it in small steps and learn what you can to be prepared. Then go and have fun!