We all know that social media data is driving us towards thinking about our business differently. Whether it is engaging your consumer demographic in new ways: engaging with customers on a Facebook fan page or managing up to the minute attacks on your brand; handling a viral twitter crisis or simply peeking in on those talking about your brand; listening to people talk about what they like on forums or becoming a trusted resource in those communities; your world is now upside down. To add insult to injury, all of this is starting to become necessary at the speed of social. To put it bluntly, this means real time baby. It isn’t enough to simply track your brand week by week now, it is becoming moment by moment. And you can’t simply look at key attributes at only the highest level, you need to look at the attributes you know as well as ones that you may not even know exist.
I’m sure that we all understand that our business’s (as well as our personal) reputation on the web is critical to our success and ability to prosper. In the prehistoric ’80s and ’90s, businesses and their brands pretty much controlled their own public image on the web by “pushing” out marketing and public relations communications to an interested public. Friends, those days are gone forever!
Today, it is incredibly easy for anyone to post positive or negative comments and reviews about you or your business online; and these posts by people like you and me can not only go viral very quickly, but can, and do, affect people’s behaviors.