Managing Your Brand Online

The Internet provides an avenue for instant communication to a vast, diverse group of potential customers. As you are aware, a well executed campaign can lead to phenomenal sales growth at a fraction of the cost of traditional media. But what happens when a campaign unintentionally offends a portion of this diverse market? How will you handle a disgruntled customer who uses the same instant communication vehicles to publicize his disdain? Since you’ve worked so hard to build your companies reputation, it only makes sense that you would create an online brand management strategy to protect it.

The first step to managing your brand is to get a sense of how your business is perceived by the online community. Google offers search alerts that can notify you when the name of your business appears on other website or blogs. This is a simple way to keep track of what others are saying about you. Although Twitter can be a powerful tool for marketing to a wide audience it is also extremely valuable for brand management. You should search for your company’s name on a regular basis. This approach can be used for any number of social networking sites such as Facebook, Blogger and MySpace. Any site where your customers regularly communicate should be monitored on a semi regular basis. The sooner you are aware of a potential issue the quicker you can respond and control the situation. Negative communications can go viral as well and the results can be far reaching.

Should the inevitable happen, the key to minimizing the damage is to correct the situation quickly. Your website’s design should allow for easy and instant updates. You may even want to consider investing in a content management system, or CMS, so your site can be instantly reverted to a prior version. If you site is difficult to update your only options will be to keep the offensive content or completely disable your site until updates can be completed. Either option is sure to impact your bottom line.