The Wax Blog

After such strong comments on my post about corporate digital footprints, I got a REAL expert to weigh in on monitoring your online reputation. Here are Kevin Kaiser’s thoughts – Kevin is the founder of Startup Biz Blog an up and coming small business blog with some really smart advice. Stay tuned as I kick off my new series on writing an actionable social media plan next Monday.

After all of the energy you’ve put into creating your company, don’t let it get lost in the giant tangle of the world wide web. Managing your online reputation so that people get the correct picture of your company right off the bat is more important now than ever. (more…)

Bart the Dumpster Dog

I realized right away that @bartthedog was gaining followers at a much faster rate than @waxgirl333 , my twitter handle. Not to mention the fact that he has more than ten times the number of Facebook fans for his Bart the Dumpster Dog fan page. Neither of us are megastars in the social media stratosphere (yet!) but I thought taking a look at how @bartthedog pays attention to his social media might give you an idea of how he’s added more than 3000 followers in such a short time – with very little effort.

1. Bart has a GREAT back story. Not everyone can say they were rescued starving and frozen from a dumpster on an Indian reservation.

2. Bart has a unique and consistent voice. This is probably because I have anthropomorphized Bart and his brother for the past three years to such an extent that I’m fairly fluent in Dog.  His followers call him “cutey” and “sweetie” and “lovey” so I guess it doesn’t matter that he’s over 90 pounds – his voice is crystal clear to them.

3. The dog lover niche, particularly for rescued dogs, is really strong, if not zealous. I told a car dealer once that if he supported his local humane society in a big way he’d have more customers than he could handle and I was right. One woman drove from South Dakota to Minnesota to buy a car from the guy – for helping rescued animals.

4. Bart’s not selling anything. He’s just a friendly guy that sends out tweets about interesting dogs for adoption on petfinder, cool doggy news and stuff he’s been doing lately.  He’s also very good at RT’ing information for animal rescue groups, so there’s a certain altruistic side to the boy.

5. Finally, Bart is always positive and never controversial. He doesn’t take sides and has no politics.

I started Bart’s accounts as a way to test some of the programs and apps for Twitter and Facebook, not to grow his profile.  Before long he’ll be writing a book and signing pawtographs.

100 million years ago I worked as an executive at a publicly held tech firm. We knew that in order to bury bad news (ie a poor quarter) we would send the release out at 4 pm on Friday. By the time Monday rolled around there would be two to three more days of news covering ours.   Now more companies have become much more ingenious ways at burying their bad news – rather than addressing it properly. (For more on that, read my post on  “Crisis Communications in a 2.0 World“)

Wondering how they do it? Here are just a few methods I’ve seen. Comment with more examples, please!

1) Flood the Internet with alternative messaging. Piling on the social media releases, blogs and Twitter posts can help bury a negative opinion or story quickly by using SEO. Studies show about 60% of Internet users click on a result in the first page. Keeping that page inundated with positive information – particularly if it appears to come from sources that are not your own – can easily bury negative opinions. I agree with the Online Marketing Blog, though, that using this to address a real crisis is not a long-term fix.

2) Bury it on a holiday. At the end of 2009, a story came out about Goldman Sachs selling mortgaged-based CDO’s to clients and at the same time  selling the securities short themselves. Goldman Sachs supposedly made it quite hard for reporters to reach executives for comment and further blocked the story so that it came out Christmas Eve in the New York Times. Thereafter it’s received little press.

3) Make it impossible to fact-check the article. Although bloggers can write pretty much whatever they want, traditional media still needs to check facts in order to run with a story. Keeping CBS or as in Goldman Sachs “allegedly” keeping the New York Times from verifying aspects of a story can bury it too.

4) Divert the issue.  Although most of the messaging surrounding the Toyota recall focuses on sticky floor mats, the real problem may be the pedal or as Steve Wozniak asserts, it could be a computer glitch. (If you haven’t heard, the Woz ’s Prius gets stuck at 97mph while in cruise control) Although Toyota states there “may” be a problem with the pedal in its latest update, much of what we’ve seen in our media is concerning the floor mats. The Woz asserts its a software problem, not a pedal or mat issue. Since the main issue is sudden acceleration – something we haven’t seen in any of Toyota’s messaging – this is probably a good example of a diversion tactic.

5) Lie. It almost worked for Martha and it definitely worked for OJ.

Bottom line is that the organizations with true investigative journalists are dwindling. TV and print media no longer has the budget to spend months on uncovering stories ala Watergate. Companies have learned the game and crisis communications firms have become much more adept at the spin.  And that could be a very bad thing for us.

I just got yet another invitation to join a company’s Facebook “fan” page.  Heavy sigh. Another company Facebook fan page in which they beat their chest with pride at their AMAZING business accomplishments and expect us all to chuckle with fond affection at photos of  their zany antics. (OMG, food fight!)

Lots of companies have incredible Facebook fan pages.  I think Starbucks does a great job, integrating much of its marketing efforts with the page . The Humane Society ’s  Facebook fan page is jam packed with information. But recently it feels like everyone is trying to take advantage of Facebook without doing any of the work. And there’s no reason for it, plenty of online pundits tell you what makes a great Facebook page. Mashable had a great post earlier in the year on the top five components of a good Facebook fan page, for example.  So I’m not going to rehash that information here. Instead, here are a few “Wax Don’ts”  if you want to avoid annoying your customers and friends (or me) on Facebook.

1. Don’t put a Facebook fan page up just to have a “presence” or because you think you “should.”  We already went through this with blogs. Companies wasted a huge amount of time figuring out what it should look like, who would be the “owner”, where it would sit on the site, etc. Then when it came time to actually keep it going  the employees who volunteered to post suddenly became too busy.

2. Don’t just throw content up there when you think of it.  Plan editorial guidelines for your page. Decide the categories of information you’re going to post – what will make it on the page, who will post it and when it will get posted. Unless this page is strictly for your employees (which is an okay idea) most of your fans won’t care about a party that happened a month ago and you’re just getting around to posting the photos.

3. Don’t get surprised by negative comments. Remembercomments are public and on the permanent record. Are you sure you want anyone posting things on your Facebook page? Years ago Yahoo chatrooms showed us what can happen  when ex-employees start trashing their former employers publicly.  If you’re going to have a public forum  make sure you know how you will deal with potentially negative comments BEFORE they happen.

4. Don’t just tell us about your company. Provide us with CONTENT. As in all media, especially the social kind, content is king. You won’t gain fans unless you have something interesting to report or you’ve found NEW news that has to do with your industry or business. You can add in your own company news, such as links to articles or press releases, on a regular basis just don’t make this a duplicate of your press page on your website.

5. Finally, don’t invite  all your contacts to be a fan until you really have something to be a fan OF. A new page with a post or two of company information doesn’t really thrill me. And this is not a place to just re-post your blog postings either, no matter how great it is for SEO.

In case you were wonder, there is a Waxmarketing Facebook page. But it’s only there for search optimization. I really don’t think you care that today, I’m still in my pajamas eating oatmeal at 10:30 am.