Facebook Brand Management
By Sonya James
Very few people realize how difficult managing your reputation on Facebook actually is. There is a small minority of business owners who know what a minefield Facebook is, and they avoid it like the plague. The trouble is, online chatter is going to happen whether you are a part of it or not, especially when it comes to Facebook which is currently the largest social networking site on earth. It is far worse to let negative online chatter spread than it is to tackle it head on. Here we explain how to manage your reputation on Facebook. The article explains how to find your online feedback and how to respond to it. It also explains the importance of your online presence and the steps you should take to protect your online reputation.
Finding the chatter
One of the hardest parts of reputation management on a mammoth platform such as Facebook is finding the positive and negative chatter in the first place. If you can secure the services of a company that finds negative chatter and a company that protects brands then you are half way towards success already.
If you find positive comments then you need to efficiently, but subtly, draw people’s attention to it. If there are negative comments on Facebook then you need to do one of three things. You need to remove it, you need to challenge it or you need to draw attention away from it.
Challenging negative chatter
Challenging negative press may appear as if it is the worst thing a company can do. It seems confrontational and aggressive, but it is actually the best way of showing that you care about the reputation of your company, website and products.
A poorly run company will challenge the chatter like a child in a schoolyard and start a dialogue that is more at home in pantomime. A savvy reputation manager will dissect the reasons for the negative chatter and try to fix the problem. Even if the writer is uncooperative and negative, the savvy reputation manager can actually flip negative comments around so that they become selling points.
Brand and production protocols can be explained and introduced to show the viewers that you take negative press seriously. Even if the best you can do is to break up big pages of complaints with your defense, it is surely going to look better than comment after comment, and page after page, of negative chatter and press.
Claiming your brand
How can you ensure things such as brand protection on Facebook if you do not have an online brand to protect? If people are going to recognize your brand as something they can trust, and whose principles they understand, you are going to have to take steps to claim your brand online.
Figuring out where you should promote your brand
Knowing which sites to invest in creating brand recognition and protection is essential. There is little point in spending time and money fighting for your brand’s good name on a website that is not attended by your target audience. That would be like arguing with fish about the best cycling routes through Berlin.
Having constant protection
Protecting your claimed brand’s reputation over the Internet is not chronically difficult, but it is labor intensive. To correctly protect your brand online you are going to have to dedicate a lot of staff hours and attention in order to do it correctly.
The nature of your online reputation
An online reputation is like a bucket of water with holes in, if you keep adding to the water at a faster rate than it drains away, then you are winning. If you stop filling the bucket then eventually all the water (in your case all your goodwill and brand recognition) will drain away.
(See original article on dreamgrow.com)