From the category archives:

Brand Promotion

How Netflix Became Netf–ked And How Social Media Finesse Could Have Fixed It

by Tinu

I’m not going to recount what Neflix did to get into this mess or how other companies avoided the DVD issue altogether through innovation.

I won’t lament about how they made it worse with a sadly backhanded apology or the Qwikster brand failure. And I don’t need to guess why Netflix screwed this up so royally- other have also speculated on the brilliant possibility of an Amazon- Netflix deal.

In fact, others smarter than me have written about all of these things already.

I’m just going to explain to you how a bit of social media finesse could have avoided the entire episode, if Netflix had been so inclined.

A look at the Netflix situation is a case study on what not to do – and from their mistakes, and other company’s successes, we can learn how to insulate our companies against a similar fate.

Community Around Netflix – Not Just Movies

People were passionate about Netflix – people are Still passionate about Netflix, just no longer in a positive way.

We customers were growing to love the experience and options Netflix was giving us, and those feelings were translating to its brand identity. Netflix had the technology to create the review systems, and partnered with Ning to create a film community.

Why not take those throngs of people and start having conversations with them?

Ask for community suggestions and let the community know when you implement them.

Communicate when there will be an outage on pages everyone views, such as the film queue. Or put a ticker across the top of the page when there are unexpected problems.

Hire customer service people to assist in on-site chats, and to write in the blog. And put them and other Netflix personnel from all parts of the company on Twitter, Google+ (under personal accounts of course), Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube – how was the video  apology the first and only YouTube video of a company centered around film?!

Please tell me I’m missing something and that a company that deals in moving images has another long standing YouTube account that I just couldn’t find.

Open Dialog and Transparency

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Reputation Offense – Can You Prevent Reputation Attacks?

by Tinu

It’s tricky. How do you catch a ball no one has thrown yet? And how do you measure how well you’re catching the balls you can’t see?

Better yet, just what in the heck am I even talking about?

Managing your reputation online.

It’s one of the fears that executives at successful companies have about the internet – anyone can say anything about any person, place or thing on the web, and it can go completely unchallenged as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of libel (or slander in the case of video or audio.)

And that’s one way to look at it. But what’s missing is that search and social are the ultimate referees.

The assumption is that what ever information out there is

1- find-able,

2- usable,

3- relevant and

4- thought to be so by search engines and people using social media.

This assumption is fueled by the fact that is it technically correct sometimes. However, it isn’t always practically so.

Just because another company can say – or has said – something bad about you doesn’t mean that item is going to appear whenever your name is mentioned. If you know to look for a particular article by a specific name, then yes, that article would be much easier to find, assuming the people who published it know how to bring it to a search engine’s attention, or at least to the attention of someone who uses social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

On the other hand, people may just be looking up your company name to make sure you aren’t running a scam, or to find positive reviews about you before they buy. If that’s the case, a lone article against you may not show up – IF the other hundreds of positive commentary is already at the top and well-supported.

What if it does? Well, there are defenses against that, but I’m writing about the offensive today, so we won’t wade too deeply into those waters now.  (If you have an emergency, feel free to call me.) [click to continue...]

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