25 3 / 2010
3 Tips for Managing Brand Safety and Control in Brand-Owned Communities
Yesterday, blogger Caroline McCarthy from the blog, The Social, covered Nestle’s PR nightmare on its Facebook fan page. The fiasco is an unfortunate example of how vulnerable a brand can be when it opens itself up to complete transparency in such a public forum as Facebook. As frightening as this may be to your brand and your executives, the potential benefits social media affords in brand engagement and traffic can far outweigh the risks of being exposed in such an open way.
We regularly encounter this dilemma with our clients during the planning process of a social media campaign or project. While everyone expects transparency and free speech when engaging in social media, the fact is brands are extremely skittish when it comes to allowing totally open dialogue in online communities. Marketers work hard to establish and protect a brand’s reputation and there are very valid reasons for doing so.
Forget Nestle’s environmental accusations for a moment and imagine, for example, the types of inappropriate content that can be generated in a community site for a youth brand geared towards kids 8 to 14. There are obvious and legitimate reasons for wanting to maintain control over the situation and minimize damage to the brand.
For those of you who manage (or are considering implementing) custom online communities, here are three tips to manage the conversation that happens around your brand and keep your brand safe:
Tip 1: Gain moderation control over your community.
Consider moving your community to a customizable platform that enables you to manage and moderate user generated activity including uploaded video content and comments. While transparency and open dialogue are key elements of a successful social engagement, you should have say over what level of moderation occurs on your own branded community site, from immediate publishing of user generated content to requiring approval of every video, photo and comment that is uploaded before it gets published.
Reality Digital’s Opus social media platform include comprehensive moderation tools that give you this flexibility and can make moderation relatively quick and easy. Public social networks like Facebook and YouTube don’t allow you this. All that content belongs to them. Not you.
Tip 2: Develop guidelines for moderation.
As Jeremiah Owyang explains in a recent post on the Nestle story, you need to develop a community strategy a crises communication plan. While your community may not need the level of protection that the youth site example above requires, having clearly defined guidelines of what user generated content is acceptable and what content requires scrutiny or escalation will make it much easier to deal with when the time comes. Brands running high-impact, short-term social media campaigns are among those that we strongly advise developing this plan for.
Tip 3: Dedicate experienced resources to the community.
A community is a relationship between your brand and your customers. It doesn’t work if you don’t listen to and participate in the conversation going within your community. Depending on the size and activity level of your community, dedicate someone or a team of content creators and moderators who are experienced with community relations and know your brand inside-out. Then monitor your community diligently. With effective platform moderation tools, many communities really only require one person to moderate UGC activity. If your users submit a considerable amount of content daily, consider engaging a moderation services vendor to manage the experience for you. With well-defined parameters and a professionally-trained team, your community can be an open, transparent forum and safe for your brand at the same time.
