PMI San Diego Chapter

Isn’t it interesting how social communities have the potential to heavily influence (positively or negatively) the branding efforts of any company? Organizations spend millions of marketing dollars to influence how you think and feel about their product or services. Now it seems the social networking power of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn offer more transparency into the company’s true products, services and operations. Does anyone have any stories about brands or company images that were impacted (positively or negatively) by Web 2.0 technology?

I don’t have any negative stories however…

people like iJustine and Ashton Kutcher have developed large followings on Twitter and Social Media sites where they are garnering a semi Oprah affect. So from my perspective the power of being able to build a brand using social media or even reinforce a brand is very palpable.

Whether or not it is positive or negative all depends on the messaging being sent and its reception to the masses. The presentation we had at the PMI-SD Communication meeting last month was very astute in pointing out that egregious corporate plugs were never well received, nor was the hard sell. But posts that provide value to the discussion were held as darlings and provided a perceived value to the social media discussion.

In the game industry metacritic scores are held very high with more and more consumers providing their own reviews on social medium we could start to see different branding and quality impacts.

-j

In the spring of 2008, a band from Canada, Sons of Maxwell http://sonsofmaxwell.com/ was traveling to a job in Nebraska and one of their guitars was thrown by United Airlines baggage handler in Chicago. The $3500 guitar was severely damaged. United Airlines didn’t deny the experience occurred did not step up to resolving the damage.

The band wrote several songs about the incident and United Airline’s negligence in handling the baggage and their poor response to the complaint. The songs were posted on YouTube http://bit.ly/z2GU5 . One of the songs has received more than 7Million views and generated more than 25,000 comments. The story also received mainstream print and broadcast media attention.

In the end, United offered to pay for the guitar.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com said that “If you make customers unhappy in the real world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. Or in this case, 7 Million people.

Companies need to have a Social Media reputation management strategy whether they are active in Social Media or not because their customers are.

Our last presidential election was a great example of Web 2.0 having a huge positive effect. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum each of us lives on, we have to give a lot of credit to the web efforts for spreading the word about Barack Obama. He was able to get his word out more effectively to more people.

The connectedness of social media lets each one of us reach so many more people than before. As we hear a message (good or bad) repeated from many other peer sources, we assign more credibility to it. When each of us can connect with 6,000 (or 7 million) people, that credibility can grow huge quickly.

I do wonder, though, what are the ways that this connectedness can be subverted? Who is working on that? How do we guard against them?