Managing a global brand in today’s high-speed world of instantaneous customer feedback on numerous technology platforms is like keeping your guard up in a 12-round match.
Here are common ways managers hurt their image:
6. An emergency adds insult to injury
Most business operate as if they assume nothing bad will ever happen to them, or if it does, planning won’t help anyways. A public relations nightmare hits your company and you scramble to get communications out quickly. These days, transparency and immediacy are critical elements of any crisis response. In our online world, consumers immediately go to an organization's website when news breaks. Furthermore news outlets link to the websites in their online stories. Make sure you can quickly update your website to include news and information about the current situation, including social media such as your company's Facebook, and Twitter feed. One of the best weapons in fighting reputational damage from a crisis is arming people with the facts. A strongly branded presence online gives you an unfiltered way to provide the facts to the public.
Just as important as a well rehearsed PR crisis communications plan, a cohesive set of branding tools is a lifesaver. You can be prepared with branded templates that can create distributable web blasts, emails, flyers, maps, charts and graphs all within the look and feel of your corporate identity. A company that delivers an on time and on brand message in a crisis will have a stronger chance of weathering the storm and restoring public confidence.
7. Underutilization of resources in social media.
Fans, enthusiasts, and evangelists are valuable resources that can extend your image beyond your known reach. Ignoring new paths in social media can leave your message absent, left to critics, or badly mangled. Over here at Green Street we are immersing ourselves in our social media strategy in order to build, monitor, and maintain our message online. We were fondly remembering the days when we would simply write a nice headline, find a humorous picture, send a newsletter to our clients, then go home. Times have changed, because web-based communications are 24/7. It turns out to be a good thing, we are finding greater reach because of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Social media can also help create buzz with a limited budget. Green Street developed an ad campaign centered around traffic safety for the city of Pasadena. We were able to extend the impact of our campaign budget by creating a Public Service Announcement (PSA), featuring two characters from our traditional print media campaign, Otis and Dena. We also created a Facebook and Twitter account for Otis and Dena. We posted the PSA on YouTube. We employed a street team, passed out Otis and Dena stickers with empty cartoon caption bubbles, with a link to the branded Otis and Dena website that carried the YouTube video. In addition, there were empty Cartoon caption bubbles above Otis and Dena on the website. Pedestrians and drivers could leave messages in theses bubbles (filtered by a human) by using Facebook or Twitter. We were able to monitor the resulting analytics. There’s more on this as a case study. Have fun out there, and don't drop your guard.
