Businesses – Are you failing to maintain your online presence?

Negative Comments Can Spread Like Wildfire

It’s not enough to have an online presence anymore.  It is great that you have a Facebook Page, Twitter Account, and YouTube channel, but are you maintaining them?  In 2011 we saw many businesses leap online, eager to try out social media and leverage the communication and business power of these tools. Now, a year later, the scary fact is that most of these websites and social accounts have been abandoned or are not being used effectively (or even correctly in some situations).  You may have had the right intentions by setting these accounts up, especially if you were doing it to secure your IP and registered business names to protect your corporation.  If you set up accounts in order to have access to the platform, to monitor or listen to feedback, criticism, and comments, that is also a great reason to be on social media, but only if you are engaging back. OK, so now you are thinking to yourself: “So what?  We have a presence on social media platforms as our bosses told us we had to do.”

What if I told you that these abandoned, neglected, and incomplete accounts are actually hurting your business, and that they were actually costing you money to your bottom line, in spite of the fact that it was free to set up accounts on most of these platforms. If you are neglecting, abandoning, and failing to complete and monitor these accounts, you are losing customers, for the following reasons:

1. The perception that your company is “Out of Date”, “Out of Touch”, and downright “Incompetent” in engaging your audience on social media – Many customers that encounter your business on the web, will check out these accounts just to see what is happening.  If, for instance, your Twitter account hasn’t been updated in the last 90 days, you are perceived as being “out of touch” and therefore a company that is seemed as approachable and eager to listen to a customer.  Incomplete profiles, pages without headshots or branding, or important information missing, such as contact info, gives off the impression that you are incompetent, especially to the under 35 crowd that is pretty much living their lives on the internet and mobile devices.
2. The perception that your company isn’t listening – 98% of all internet users expect you to not only have a presence on these social media platforms, but they want you to engage with them as well on these platforms.  Especially when a customer has a question or complaint. Today’s internet users in this text driven society, demand and expect to have a response from your company quickly on the social media platform where they made the comment or complaint.  24 hours is an eternity and will not gain you any favors.  You need someone to actively manage these accounts and respond. 
3. The perception that your company is ( insert descriptor word here: bad, evil, inept, uncaring, etc.) – More and more web companies live or die by their online reputation. If your company lets too many negative reports build online over any subject, without addressing and responding to these comments and complaints, can lead to the escalation of the issue, and in turn its ability to go viral.

Ultimately, you can think of each of these social media accounts the same way you would as building little campfires.  If you neglect them, all sorts of things can result. Your best hope is that they fizzle, die, and disappear.  occasionally though there are those fires that can flare up, escape its confines and end up becoming a raging wildfire, leaving behind swaths of ruin for your business.  If you are struggling with how to maintain your social media accounts, contact us and we’ll help you to take control of your accounts. www.sterlingcrossgroup.com.

All stats were compiled from www.pewinternet.org

My Apologies for the Lapse in Blogging – Real Life Interrupts Virtual Life

When you blog or post regularly on social media sites such as I do, there is an expectation from readers to have new content posted on a regular, frequent, basis. I have failed in my end of the bargain.  I hope I can be forgiven, as my reasons are fairly legitimate.  Part of the reason for my lapse was that I have been busily finishing my first book: Checking Into Foursquare - Strategies for Retail and Restaurant Marketing with Social Media, and working on my second and third books relating to QR Code Marketing and Online Reputation Management.

The remaining reason, and reason I have had a lot of time for writing is that I have gone through some pretty major heart health related issues over the past year, that has taken me out of the game for long stretches of time.  I am back and recharged (literally)and look forward to seeing if I can regain some readership and faith in my ability to provide useful relevant content going forward.

Thanks for Reading!

Removing Social Media Accounts – What happens when you need to end a presence online?

It’s become a fact in this economy that companies are going out of business.  Even those companies that were forward thinking in their marketing have not been able to escape the factors in the economy, and they have had to close down.  A client of ours became such a casualty two months ago.  They had just launched several online platform accounts at the beginning of the year.  All was going very well for them as they built their followers slowly and steadily to amass an engaged audience.  Then we received “the email” alerting us that the client was ceasing all business activities and requested we shut down all of their accounts online.

This would be a first for us.  We’ve worked with over a dozen companies, all with varying degrees of success, but, it has always been success.  It was even successful for this client as well; we had executed the initial strategy well, and were growing our audience to allow us to move into the second phase of the strategy.  Now we had proof though, that even the almighty social media with all of its bells and whistles could not solve all problems a company faced.

So we went and started deactivating accounts and learning to what degree the information could truly be removed or purged from the internet.  The results were interesting to say the least:

The Corporate Website – This was able to be turned off. Searches to the domain name now lead to a placeholder page put up by the hosting company.  Two months later though, the site still shows up in searches.  The links are broken, so I will assume Google, Bing, and other engines will eventually drop the results, it wasn’t gone in two months.  The search engines have archives and cached pages of the website, which are starting to deteriorate as well. Queries made to the search engine companies have come back with inconclusive answers as to how long something can live online.  Some items that are heavily linked to from other sites will last longer than those that had only a few links.

Facebook – the Company’s professional page was shut down, but the owner of the Company kept his personal page up to continue building his personal brand for a new career/job.  Facebook is fairly complete when it comes to deleting material permanently.  Due to the fact that most of the content is kept inside of the Facebook community tags, and unless it was open to search by the outside internet community, it seldom shows up in outside searches.

Twitter – After the corporate Twitter account was shut down, it was determined that the content would not easily go away, in spite of Twitter having the content open for immediate outside search.  The several different search applications associated to Twitter archived Tweets almost immediately and most kept running archives up to eight pages long.  The owner of the company decided to re-brand the Twitter account and continue its use for his personal brand.

A WordPress Blog – The blog was deactivated, but is still found in several searches. The codes that many blogs are created in are very search friendly.  Search sites have copies and cached copies of the blog posts, and many of the posts were reposted on other sites.  Unless those posts are removed by the individuals that reposted them, they will stay online.

Linkedin – The Company profile was removed, but the fact that it is listed by former employees, and as past positions of the owners, the company listings will stay online in Linkedin.

Some of this material can be litigated to be removed, but you’ll want to make sure you are going down the right path with the right legal team for that.  Most bloggers are protected by 1^st Amendment rights and you will need to engage an attorney with experience in Constitutional law.  Other sites may require formal legal requests to remove photos, videos and other charts and images.

The bottom line is that yes you can deactivate your accounts and remove some material online, that it will not result in the immediate removal of all of the material from being found online. It may fade over time, like the memory of the company, but for now it is a record of existence that won’t easily go away.  With that in mind, what kind of online legacy is company leaving online?

Making your blog stand out in a crowd…

 

I was asked a great question in the comment of my last post (Thanks Kathryn!) about how can you make your blog stand out in a crowd of, according to Technorati, millions of other blogs out there each day.  It was not such an easy question to answer.  There is a lot of background information I would need to advise someone on a specific blog.  I had responded to the comment with ten of the questions I ask clients during a blog assessment, and I decided to list them in this post.  To help develop any strategy to promote and differentiate a blog, you need be crystal clear on what your blog’s purpose is and what you are intending to be the outcome of your blog.

In my next post I will go into some of the strategies to best differentiate your blog and will include some great examples of blogs that are achieving these, including some special guest appearance posts from these bloggers.  Here is the list and let me know your thoughts:

1.       What is the purpose of your blog? (Business? Personal? To give you a voice?)

2.       Who is blogging? (Several businesses use a team approach to blogging and share the writing, while other companies such as ours are set up where we each have our own individual blogs. See them at www.sterlingcrossgroup.com/company/the-team/)

3.       How often will you update the blog?

4.       Who is the audience? (Is this communication to an internal audience of team members or employees? Or is this to an external audience (customers, prospects, target demographic, etc)?

5.       How will you promote this blog?

6.       What other items will be on this blog (links, resources, widgets, etc)?

7.       Will you try to or do you desire to monetize this blog?

8.       Will this blog include multimedia (videos, audio, pictures, etc.)?

9.       Where will this blog reside (on your own website, on a tool such as wordpress or blogger)?

10.   What other initiatives is this blog tied to?

Giving a Presentation on blogging to Business Executives…

I am giving a presentation on blogging to Business Executives that have no experience with blogging. I love to use this video as a conversation starter.  For those of you interested in attending (this will be very basic entry to blogging level stuff) and are in the Twin Cities, I will be presenting to: The Council of Independant Consultants on June 27th, 2008 from 7-9AM (CST).  You can click here for more info: http://www.cipcmn.org/.  What tools do you recommend for new bloggers without any experience? Share and I will give you a plug at my presentation!

more about “Giving a Presentation on blogging to …“, posted with vodpod