Social Media and its role in Reputation Management:

Well, it is common knowledge that the consumers of today say around 70 per cent of them, before even they set out to buy a product or service do a lot of research about it as well as the company on the web. And so, if you want your business to flourish (who wouldn’t), it is absolutely necessary that you move all the way up search engines and make yourselves visible to others. Now, it does not stop with that. You still have got a long way to go!
Just as it is important for you to make yourselves visible, it is also essential that your consumers find positive reviews about your company and product. Consumers look for chatter and conversations between previous customers and if they have nothing good (or rather something bad) to say about you, then buddy you have screwed up the whole thing!
Now, where do customers look for chatter? Yes, you know the answer – the best place where conversations are most frequent, most frank, most lively and of course most visible is the social media network like facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
According to Marketing Sherpa’s “2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide”, “At least two-thirds of consumers agree that recommendations and information from other people online are valuable, relevant, and influence their purchase decision.”
What can tweets with just 140 characters do to your product? A whole lot - remember consumers can read a 100 bad things about your product in a matter of minutes.
What can a facebook message do to your online reputation? Again a lot - remember these messages became a campaign and brought back the original Pears soap formula in recent times when the company tried to make new fragrances.
Now just imagine a case where the customer buys your product but he does not read the instructions and the experience turns out to be a bad one. The result – plenty of tweets and face book messages narrating his/her experience and with people joining the conversation, the issue snowballs. You can sense the problem right? A serious reputation management issue.
While 70-80 per cent of the people are out there doing this, 60 per cent of the companies scoff these negative reviews which can do a lot of harm. In short, if you are not monitoring these networks, you are in for trouble as regards your product. Switch to reputation and crisis management techniques and save the face of your company.