Online reputation management and social media
Online reputation management and social media
Customer relationship management is an important activity for any brand or business. As the new word-of-mouth, social media generates many conversations online and many of them revolve around consumers’ brand experiences. Are you monitoring what is being said about your brand online and do you have an online reputation management strategy in place?
FNB is doing a superb job of managing customer relationships via social media. Their “official FNB internet guy” is RB Jacobs and here is an example of how he handles customer complaints online. Last week Craig Rodney posted “Apparently it’s quicker and easier to fly to London and draw £50 from an ATM than it is to get it from FNB” and within an hour RB Jacobs replied to the tweet with “Hi, saw your Tweets, are you trying to close an account? Or draw money from an ATM?”
The key to delivering outstanding customer service online (not only through social media) is to monitor and respond. If only other South African brands (like Absa, Dial Direct and Vodacom for instance) realised the potential of social media monitoring they could enhance their brand reputation significantly. I don’t know about you, but if I complain about a brand online and the brand in question contacts me to sort the problem out, I’m impressed.
Social media monitoring is a time consuming activity and the person in charge of the monitoring and responses has to know the brand’s service offering and policies inside-out, otherwise your brand might end up with a dilemma like Nestlé. Therefore, if you’re going to appoint a social media brand ambassador, keep the following in mind:
-The person has to be familiar with social networks, tools and response tactics
– Response time is critical, in the online sphere response has to happen almost instantly
– Social media monitoring is time consuming and most definitely a full-time job, not something you let the new intern ‘take care of’
If you would like to keep an eye on your brand in the online sphere, try these tools:
– In Tweetdeck and Hootsuite you can add columns to track certain keywords and phrases
– On Search.twitter.com you can search for your brand name or keywords related to your brand manually
– Set-up Google Alerts for your brand name, keywords related to your business and for your competitors’ brand names
If you would like to know more about social media and monitoring your brand online, feel free to ask us.
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