I vow to present you with unbiased notes since I’m a big fan of Trackur & Andy Beal on the Reputation Management school of thought, so I hope to expand my own knowledge a bit.  The panel consisted of:

• Paull Young, Senior Strategist, Converseon
• Todd Steinman, COO, M80
• Daniel Riveong, Head of Search Marketing, e-storm.com

The presentation was a good overview on reputation management.  All three had their own slide shows which was a bit awkward, but I’m just a girl in love with unity.  Daniel’s presentation was more of a high level overview while Todd’s was a best practices lesson.  Todd’s was also too fast for the amount of data he had within the slides.

Paull didn’t even start until 1:52 for the panel that’s scheduled to end at 2, so it was pretty rushed, but his was mostly a case study on what Converseon did with Graco.  Is it just me or doesn’t the note “proprietary and confidential” in the footer of a presentation usual mean it’s only meant for internal eyes?  I’m not saying he was presenting something that wasn’t for public eyes, but it irritates me when people don’t pay attention to details like removing that from the template you use.

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• “Word of mouth is now a public conversation, carried n blog comments and customer reviews” – Chris Anderson.
• Google has turned into a reputation engine.
• News travels faster and further (Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster).
• Ignorance is throwing money away.
• Bad Customer Experience -> Unsolved Issues -> Bad Reputation
• 2% reduction in negative word of mouth boost sales growth by 1% (London School of Economics study).
• How do you start?  Build customer relationships, offer great customer service.  You need to increase the goodwill invested in your brand (make whuffie!)
• Listen -> Respond -> Engage.  Measure is an underlying factor and the listening process continues.
• Know how to respond to the community in their own language.
• Understand where your customers are when deciding where you want to be – don’t just jump on the bandwagon with the newest technology.
• Where are people talking about us?
  • Search your company name, url, products, public facing employees (not always the CEO), competing products, descriptions (company name + sucks, company name + rocks, company name + review + sucks).
• How do you track the conversation?  There are tools that can help you beyond Google Alerts, like Trackur, BuzzLogic, and Cymfony.
• Find your voice – how do you engage with people?  Often you might make this more complicated than it is.
• There’s a certain amount of casualness and informality when engaging.  When you think about “how do I talk to bloggers or twitterers” remember that they’re people too, just talk to them like a person.
• Public Relations vs. Public Relationships is a required mind shift.
• Speak as a peer, not a spokesman.
• Negative comments?  Be transparent and honest.
• When you get feedback you still have to process it and decide what works – don’t be dictated by negative feedback.
• It’s easy to say “Home Depot sucks” but it’s harder to say “Daniel from Home Depot sucks” when you know he’s listening and engaging.
• Good examples of corporations finding their voice: 10 Downing Street, H&R Block, and Zappos on Twitter.
• Advertisers are talking about it because they’ve heard it will “go viral” and that it’s cheap.
• Advertisers are still coming from a world where they want to control the message and are sticking with known, comfortable advertising methods.
• Be useful – the best advertising is something that is useful to the target customers.
• Make a social media commitment – advertising used to be about campaigns, but not anymore.
• Read & react in real time – engage without delay.  Helps to relay that there’s a real person on the other end and softens interactions.
• Keep the channel open and on.
• Establish a baseline to help measure effectiveness and set the benchmark for a brand or roduct.
• Listen and understand while setting up access for social influencers and media.
• Necessary considerations: preparation, messaging, conversation focus, authority, tonality.
• It’s about nuance messaging.
• Tonality: formal, canned, contextual, echo.
• Authority: accurately state who you represent – it’s slightly above and beyond just transparency.
• Use subject matter experts!
• Also amplify positive sentiment to overturn any negative sentiments.
• Another tool for brand management: Visible Technologies (allows you to track sentiment and top authors and the screen shot of the dashboards did look awfully cool), sentiment maps.
• Quick & Dirty tools: Twitter Search, Google Blog Search, Technorati Search.
• Converseon as a tool called eResponder that easily aggregates what people are saying.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• For a mid-sized company that can’t hire a community manager to engage or monitor, how do you train someone internally to handle a social media crisis?  You have three sentiment types – positive, neutral, and negative.  Go to the positive sentiments and amplify, try to sway neutral, you may choose to pass on negative if you think they’re obviously goading you into the “wrong” reaction.
• You have to understand who’s behind the negative sentiment – if they’re usually a pretty sarcastic blog then you might just want to ignore it, but if they’re a serious publication you may want to pay more attention & tackle it.
• Let a community manager “take their lumps” with another company, then hire them.
• Any difference in reputation management between B2B and B2C – nope, you’re still talking to a group of people.  More subject matter expertise is needed in B2B but the general approach is the same.
• With B2B there might be less volume but the price tags are higher so it might even be more important to engage and sway that ill sentiment.
• At the very least, understand what’s being said about you.
• Working with both the PR and Marketing teams, but also research, media buying, advertising, and more and more customer service departments.  It really differs from company to company, and they usually touch base with legal as well.  Adapt from company to company.  More and more, it’s whoever the social media representative it is, but many companies are hiring someone specific relegated to that position.

At least Paull’s presentation was really short, so he did finish by 1:59!  I appreciated that there was still about 10 minutes of Q&A because some of the questions were really good.  Although sorry Daniel – one Office Space screen shot is just not enough for my blood!  Overall, it was an effective presentation and I actually did pick up a lot of tools that I previously didn’t know about.  I appreciated that Daniel didn’t really throw out what his company does and just stuck to the facts that people want to hear, and Todd kept his plug to a very minimum only once really mentioning what it was that M80 does.  Of course with any case study the company who helped them has to toot their own horn, but I expected that from seeing past speakers who represented Converseon.

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Many of us who are students of this space continue their learning throughout the year and not just at Affiliate Summit.  So it’s important for people like me to remember that just because I didn’t really learn anything new from this panel doesn’t mean there weren’t some newbies that learned volumes.  I can’t speak for them, of course. The panel consisted of:

• Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO, IZEA (Moderator)
• Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
• Stephanie Agresta, InternetGeekGirl.com
• Chris Brogan, VP Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media

Hopefully you’ll learn some more things than I did.

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• 70% of people online last month watched a video.
• The top rated websites are the social media networks.
• There really are strategies to using social media.
• Seeing how the flow of conversation is going is hard to track, but when cross conversational tracking becomes available it will be exciting.
• This is a marketing channel just like any other; it can work well with other channels to a brand or company’s advantage.
• Tracking is coming soon… and will be immensely valuable.
• A comment on a blog or a good blog post as social value.
• Brands are starting to bring enthusiasts in to help market.
• FriendFeed could be taken more advantage of by affiliates.
  • It allows for more nuanced opportunities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Personally I asked if there were any tools to help manage a social media strategy (knowing slightly that there weren’t any I knew of) and the answer was “don’t get caught up in tools”.  Fail.
• Social media may bring rise to a different kind of content.
• There are listening tools like Radian6, BuzzLogic, lots of deep dive listening tools for brands to hear what the conversation is.
• Twitter isn’t a good place to recruit affiliates but it’s good for conversions (no real expansion on that was given).
• Will we see a change in the code of ethics regarding transparency & disclosure?  Not sure but disclosure breeds trust.
• Interesting argument – more and more people are giving kudos to those that disclose affiliate links however no one in television bothers to disclose even blatant product placements so it’s a fine line & unresolved argument.
• Recognize the conversation AS a conversation – treating it like a traditional marketing venue doesn’t work.
• Look at social media like a picnic, says Chris Brogan.  Don’t just run up & start selling your product to people hanging around having a good time.
  • “Turn your stupid bullhorn into a party hat”.
• Give something to the social media community before you take – content + trust (+ conversions).
• Try to think just a hair outside your brand.
• Conversion rates coming through social media sites are 4 times higher than traditional channels.
  • Note: Since there’s no standard of tracking it’s very difficult to isolate this.
  • The social media forerunners are working on an open wiki to open up discussion on how to isolate.
• Many brands are worried about the affiliate channel cannibalizing other in-house channels like search.
• It takes a high level of comfort to let go of the brand & get into social media.
• There’s a big education process for merchants before jumping into the pool.
  • “We’re really afraid of this because we don’t want people pooing on the brand”.
• Listening to the conversations that are out there is the easiest “gateway drug” to get companies hooked on wanting to participate.
• If you’re going to disclose your affiliate links, at least do so on your about page and possibly at the end of every post.
  • At IZEA when they decided to make the disclosure banner mandatory, conversions surprisingly went up 20% – 15% of the clicks were on the “Sponsored by” button itself.

Overall it seemed like a lot of the conversation was “when we get tracking… ooh boy watch out!” and tried to steer away from the fact that there is NO real solid way to track any social media “strategy”.  I had an interesting conversation with Wil Reynolds, another speaker at Affiliate Summit who is an “SEO guy” later in the day about the pannel – tracking really is the KEY to having companies on larger scales start to really dig into social media.  Without it, they’re going to go spend their budget on an SEO firm instead of someone who’s talking to them about Twitter & Facebook.

As I mentioned… this may not have been the best session for me.  They didn’t talk much about just HOW social media is changing affiliate marketing, so name fail.  I’m pretty versed in social media at this point, so a lot of this was the same song & dance – but I really do hope that somewhere in the room there was a newbie who learned a lot.

So, like I said… overall, I only learned of a couple of new tools for “listening to the conversation” from this and I was actually pretty surprised that they didn’t mention Trackur.com, a really great tool touted as an “online reputation management” tool – really other than the name I can’t see how it couldn’t be beneficial for listening in on the online conversation about your brand.  But I hope you learned something from the recap!

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