Heckle Me This

They’re out there. No matter how great your brand is, there are people who are bitching about it to someone. If they are doing it online, their audience size can be tremendous. I know of one brand that has a detractor that received tens of thousands of uniques a month to his bitching site. I won’t tell you WHAT brand, because it’ll just add thousands more, and get me in the middle of something that is none of my business. But your brand is your business. And taking an active role in digital reputation influencing is absolutely critical.

The Control Fallacy

You cannot control what people say about your brand. I’d add the word "anymore" to that sentence, but the reality is that you never could. What is new is the potential audience size that a brand heckler can reach.

Unless you’re the Chinese Government, and you are capable of censoring ALL of digital for your users, control is simply not an option.

But there is a ginormous difference between control and doing nothing. You CAN help to influence discussion about your brand, and with it your brand’s reputation. But to do this effectively, you need a brand reputation plan.

Seven Basic Steps

Broadly, digital reputation influencing is a seven step process:

1. Monitor the digital ether. You can start by doing a Yahoo or Goggle search for your brand. Follow the links, especially to blogs, posts, videos, and other UGC. This can give you some sense of what the broadest reaching messages are saying. Do a simple calculation: Percent positive comments, percent negative, percent neutral. This is often enough to interest the company in the issue and demonstrate its potential importance.


To do really do a thorough job monitoring, you need to do it on a more comprehensive and ongoing basis. Services like Cymfony and Nielsen Buzzmetrics offer ways to conduct comprehensive brand monitoring services across digital. There are many others, and I would be delighted to hear your experiences with these or other services. I have no relationship with either of the mentioned companies.

2. Analyze what you find. What do people say? What are the themes? Are users the key sources of info? Non users? Employees? This will help you develop a plan of action. In my experience, it’s best to define ways to quantify the data so you can set goals for improving the digital reputation environment. Of course, improving will mean different things for different people. For some it will be driving down negatives. For others pushing up positive messages. For still others it might mean trying to get people to talk about your brand at all. A good plan probably should involve all three. But it’s usually easiest to get money to deal with the negatives. ;-)

3. Plan an approach to address. You should never go at digital willy nilly, and this is especially true for reputation influencing. What are your goals? How are
they quantifiable? How will you measure progress? How will you know you have succeeded? What tools will you use?

One of the most overlooked approaches is to reach out to hecklers and ask them why they feel the way they do. Most people will be impressed if you show genuine concern and reach out.

Major “macro” issues might also be in play. Ecology and green are going to be major sources of kudos and raspberries in the next few years. Are you prepared? Do you have a positive message to deliver? Or are the issues blurry? Having a communications plan focused on the millions of citizen journalists out there would probably be wise.

4. Message to impact the dialogue: This is where you put your plan into action. Say what you planned to say in the ways you planned to say it.

5. Empower your evangelists: Almost all brands have megafans. Even the most maligned brands. I, for example, am huge defender for the United States Postal Service. I won’t get on my soapbox for long, but how amazing is it that for less than 1/6 of the price of a Starbucks latte they can get a birthday card to my Mom across the country in a couple days?

By giving your fans tools to talk you up, you influence the digosphere hugely. Hey Postmaster General, are you listening???

Take this example. If you were looking at a hybrid car, and there were 65 negative comments online, and 80 positive, you’d probably feel ambivalent. But if the hybrid brand had succeeded in encouraging 1000 of their drivers to talk the car up, you’re looking at 95% online favorability. Your prospect will feel much better buying you with that behind them. Since people are by some estimates 20 times more likely to heckle then to applaud, you can simply level the playing field through proactive user empowerment.

6. Assess your effectiveness: Is what you’re doing working? Did you deliver? Prepare your scorecard. Be honest.

7. Optimize your plan by identifying what works and learning from mistakes: Remember this is not a sprint. It is a marathon. And with digital, nothing is permanent. Nothing is “done”. It’s all constantly in process. And by continuous optimization you’ll get better and better at this.

Talk to an Expert

I ain’t one. But I am a firm believer that marketing ain’t rocket science, and I have an opinion on everything. I am also a believer in finding someone more adept and experienced in important areas like this. Your corporate comms people may fit the bill. Or an agency. Or a consultant. They can breathe life into your program in ways I can’t even imagine.

Thanks for reading. And don’t forget to write…