I came across a fascinating story on Michael Gray’s blog blog about the TSA and how it used its blog to refute a passenger’s story.

Nic, is a 28 year old freelancing writer who has a 16 month old son. On her blog last week, Nic a post called “TSA Agents Took My Son”.

Her post detailed a parent’s worst nightmare; in that she was separated from her child:

My son was taken from me.
Taken.
My son was taken from me by the TSA agents at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport yesterday.

Now when you read the post, you can empathize with Nic. No parent wants to see their child taken away from them, especially by a “government official”. Anyone who has flown since 9/11 can tell a story about dealing with the TSA at an airport.

This is usually where the story ends. Expect it doesn’t because the TSA, which has their own blog (who knew!) decided to respond to Nic’s post, complete with video!

From the TSA blog:

TSA works daily to achieve the balance of effective security and passenger convenience. We diligently review claims of improper conduct. But when inaccurate passenger accounts are made either via media outlets or on the blogs, TSA works to resolve them and present both sides of the story. In this case, TSA has made the decision to post the CCTV video of the incident online to allow for transparency.

After watching the video footage, you’ll see the video clearly shows that this individual was never separated from her baby by TSA. You’ll also see that a lot of the other claims are also unfounded.

The TSA followed several rules of success reputation management

• By having a blog already in place, the TSA was able to quickly jump into the conversation that was happening online.
• If there is bad news about your company or brand, you can either remain on the sideline and let others dictate what is said about you, or you can jump into the conversation and share your side of the story, to make the coverage more balanced.

There is a really interesting strategy being played out on Facebook and Twitter by Sarah Palin that Politico wrote about this weekend. Regardless of what you think of her political views, Palin’s social media strategy is worth looking at.

Think back to earlier this summer when the national health care debate was all about the so-called “death panels.” The conversation started in a large part because of two widely-publicized Palin Facebook posts.

The posts were immediately rebuked by Democrats and Palin’s response was very interesting. Instead of holding a press conference or sending out a press release, Palin posted her response on Facebook. The post, simply titled “concerning the ‘death panels,’” went up shortly before midnight on a Wednesday night. By late Thursday morning, a write up of her statement was on the homepage of dozens of national and local newspapers. The post also quickly became one of the most mentioned topics within the political blogosphere.

With 850,000 friends on Facebook and 140,000 Twitter followers Sarah Palin has established herself as of one of the most powerful social media brands in politics. And she is doing it without going through traditional media channels, which is something that a lot of small and medium sized companies are trying to do.

Think about her reaction to the firestorm he “death panels” posts created. Palin did not call a press conference or send out a press release in response, where she could not control the message. Instead she communicated directly with her “customers” through another Facebook post which resulted in the mainstream media going with her message. That is a very interesting tactic. Could this sort of tactic work for a consumer brand?

In short yes. Imagine a company that has had some bad press. Instead of holding a press conference or sending out a press release the company created a video which they put on YouTube, wrote about the issue on their Facebook page (and the video also) and then Tweeted about it. Now the company controls the message that the mainstream media will pick up and use. That is called Reputation Management 2.0 Palin style.

So if someone writes something negative about you on Twitter how should you respond? Should you:

a) Ignore it
b) Contact the person directly and see if you can work something out
c) Sure them for $50,000

I your answer was c then you must work for Chicago’s Horizon Realty!

I came across a post on Podcasting News about how Horizon Realty, a property management company, filed a $50,000 libel lawsuit Monday against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over one of her alleged Twitter posts.

Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it’s okay.”

To compound things, Podcasting News has this quote from Jeffrey Michael of Horizon”

“The statements are obviously false, and it’s our intention to prove that… “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Michael added that the company has a “good reputation it wants to preserve.”

Horizon Realty is positioning itself as a a “sue first, ask questions later” kind of company. Wow!

The irony of the situation is that Amanda Bonnen had less than 25 twitter followers and practically nobody read her original tweet. But because of Horizon’s actions they show up first for the terms Twitter lawsuit.

In today’s world, it’s not enough to just have a web site. Or be #1 in Google. You need to have your finger on the pulse – and know what people are saying about you and your brand. Because on today’s internet, what you don’t know CAN hurt you.

Five years ago, you could have lied, cheated and stolen from your customers – and probably still stayed in business. Sure, some of them would tell their friends or other potential customers they might know, but there would always be someone willing to buy. Your customer’s ignorance was your bliss.

Today, however, that is completely different. People still talk. But they talk faster. And they tell more people. They can post something about you on the internet and tell everyone they know INSTANTLY.

And with social media sites like Twitter, not only can they tell everyone they know – but their friends can tell everyone they know. So within minutes, that message can be passed to thousands, even MILLIONS of people.

It has a far greater potential to ruin your business.

Most big brands don’t understand this concept. But now Motrin does. On a Saturday last November, as part of International Baby Wearing Week, they put out a commercial about wearing your baby. With the slogan “we feel your pain”.

Jessica Gottlieb was outraged. She started the conversation – and one of the most viral conversations to date.

By Saturday evening, the Motrin conversation was the most talked about conversation on Twitter. Even The New York Times blogged about it.

It took Motrin nearly two days to respond. They apologized and pulled the ad off their web site. Why didn’t Motrin know sooner? Why couldn’t they have fixed the problem within an hour?

Laura Fitton puts it best: “Maybe you’re not even ready for full-time social media monitoring. That’s your call. But not tuning in while you launch a new tactic borders on gross negligence, in this day and age.”

Not tuning in. It’s negligence. As Gary Vaynerchuk recently described it, “Twitter is word of mouth on steroids.” How can you not be listening?

The solution is simple. Reputation monitoring. It’s just one of many features in EasyTweets.

EasyTweets is an all in one Twitter marketing tool that allows you to promote your brand and keep your finger on the pulse. At the same time.

If Motrin were using EasyTweets, they would have received SMS and e-mail notifications within 15 minutes of Jessica’s first tweet. They could have seen the conversation, and responded quickly. Even on a Saturday. Even when all of their PR folks were out of the office. Even if they were asleep.

And they could have done something about it two days earlier.

EasyTweets allows you to track trends, get summaries of conversations by e-mail, and get SMS notifications when brand mentions exceed your desired threshold. You can keep your finger on the pulse, even when you’re out of the office.

In this day and age, you can’t afford not to. Sign Up For The EasyTweets Plus Plan

American Airlines has been in the news a lot recently because of the cancellation of thousands of flights due to mechanical troubles. What has been interesting is watching how AA have approached this PR nightmare. AA first step in conjunction with its PR agency of record, Weber Shandwick, was to immediately initiate a major crisis-communications plan.

AA Crisis Response

• Immediately issued a press release to drive passengers to the advisory section on its website for updates
• Communicated with frontline employees so they were prepared to deal with questions from travelers
• Proactively and reactively worked with media through its news desk
• Sent update e-mails to Advance members
• Compensated stranded passengers
• Continued to monitor feedback from customers, employees and media to keep stakeholders fully informed

Mike Flanagan, senior VP at Weber and agency lead on the American account in an Adage interview said the goal was to quickly convey two messages to its customers: what the situation was flight cancellations and how “we were getting them back in service,” followed by “letting customers know we would do everything to reaccommodate them.”

“We fly over 100 million passengers a year, and they are all important to us,” he said. “A large percentage of them fly with us exclusively, so the most important goal was to stay in contact and let them know what was going on. And we used every communications channel we have available to us.”

What I found most interesting was this follow-up quote from Flanagan.

“Mr. Flanagan said the airline’s strategy included some new plays, including monitoring blogs, as soon as the crisis started. “That was an important part of our strategy,” he said. “And we felt, in general, that the information was generally correct and balanced enough to where we didn’t have to get involved in the conversation. Some of the remarks were tough to take and on some blogs people were actually defending us.”

Interesting that AA felt the blogosphere was balanced enough that they did not have to enter the conversation. Were they correct?

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise had an interesting post on where people were going after visiting AA.com. And surprisingly consumers were going from AA.com to websites for Email Services, Social Networks and News and Media.

The American Airlines website asked customers who were inconvenienced by the canceled flights to send an email to request compensation. So seeing an increase in traffic of 13% to Email Services makes sense. What stood out to me was the 74% increase in traffic to Social Networking and Forums.

MySpace was the #15 website visited after AA.com last week, up from #30 the week before. Last week 1 in 30 visits to AA.com left to go to a social network. This serves as a good reminder that customers broadcast their experience to friends. How American handled the cancellations and how they continue to handle claims is sure to be broadcast online – and affect their brand.

MySpace is still thought of as a pre-teen and teen social network, but the amount of traffic going to MySpace from AA shows that this is not true. While AA might have been monitoring blogs, I wonder if they were on MySpace, Facebook and the other social networks listening to the conversation there?

I recently had the chance to ask search engine optimization expert Aaron Wall about reputation management and how to use different social media tools to “squeeze out” negative references from showing up on the search results page. This was a topic that Aaron had written about in the past and I am grateful to Aaron to take time to answer my questions

Q: I read the post you made back in January “Fighting Off Negative Publicity and Affiliates in the SERPs” where you offered a large number of resources that are available. So where does a company start? Let’s assume that negative information about a brand or company has come out and this negative information has started to show up in the SERPS. From all of the options that you identified in your January post, what are the first 3-5 steps that a company should take and why?

Aaron: I think the first step is to have empathy for the person who is writing negatively about you. Is there any truth or logic to what they said? Does it seem like something where contacting them and apologizing might sort out the issue? Don’t contact them unless the apology is sincere. If you think they are a nutcase then no sense contacting them, skip on to the next step.

Do you have an “in the press” section? One of the easiest ways to bury negative information is to feature positive coverage on your site. Pages that were ranking #12 or #15 can jump up to the first page if they are linked to from an authoritative page on your website. And a natural extension of this idea is to hire a PR firm if you can afford to, and create press worthy content that gets mentioned in the press, then link at it from your “in the press” section.

Does your company have any logical reasons to have a subdomain? One for investors or business partners? Free tools, a forum, or perhaps video content? Most brands should own at least one strong subdomain, and more if it makes sense. Currently a search for eBay on Google shows a YouTube video and Wikipedia page on the front page of the search results. Everything else is from Ebay.com.

Q: A company can have information about its brand spread across multiple social media web sites. From an SEO perspective, how do they all relate to each other? If you interlink them all, are you not creating your own network and will this not cause you problems with Google at some point?

Aaron: If you are using 1,000 cheesy social sites to linkfarm across them it might not be the best way to use your time, but many brands are expected to have a Twitter page, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, and a YouTube page. In some cultures and languages there are other sites that are just as popular as the above 4 are. If you say “connect with us” and link to those sites from your official site then many brand fans may subscribe which will lead to lots of internal links from those authoritative sites promoting your brand page and helping it rank well.

Q: Somewhat related, but is there any SEO benefit to owning your brand name and/or company name across a wide variety of social media sites like MySpace, Squidoo, Delicious, etc?

Aaron: In the recently leaked Google quality review document they stated:

“it is not uncommon today for individuals to maintain various types of personal pages on the Web. Homepages, social networking pages, and blogs have become increasingly popular. Some individuals have more than one blog and/or more than one homepage on a social networking site (e.g. myspace, facebook, friendster, mixi). When these pages are maintained by the individual (or an authorized respresentative of the individual), they are all considered to be Vital.”

From that I would say that Google expects to see these pages rank for brand related queries, and it is a great idea to promote your brand on these sites. Some of the more well known sites are probably worth putting more effort into than the smaller sites for 2 reasons

• many of the smaller sites are inundated with spam AND many of the official brands do not exist on them (both of which make Google less likely to want to promote pages from those sites)
• the larger networks have more members, which puts your brand in front of more people.

Thanx again to Aaron for his time and insight on using the SERPs in fighting negative stories about your company or brand.

When I ask a company how they monitor their reputation online the most frequent answer I hear is that we use Google Alerts. Google Alerts are ok, but they don’t give the complete picture about what people are saying about you or your company, and because they are email based, the information is difficult for multiple users within a department or company to use simultaneously.

Aaron Wall blogged recently about how you can use iGoogle or Google Apps to create a web site that allows multiple members of your team to easily track brand mentions on blogs and other active parts of the web.

On Aaron’s example page he has over 10 sources that he tracks for comments about himself or SEOBook.com ranging from Technorati to Bloglines to Google News.

Setting up a page for your company and your main competitors using iGoogle is extremely easy to do and will make your reputation monitoring efforts much more effective.

Within an Investor’s Business Daily editorial last week was a great example of how to respond to negative information in blogs about your company. Reputation Management is an area of concern to many corporate executives, unfortunately many of them do not have plans in place to respond when negative news breaks.

Luckily microwave popcorn maker Pop Weaver did have a plan.

Back in September the Lighter Footstep blog wrote an article about the harmful effects of diacetyl, an additive in microwave popcorn that provides a buttery taste, the story started snowballing. The post was quickly picked up by pumphandle.wordpress.com, a blog that fashions itself as a water cooler for public health, and youarewhatyoueat.tv, which covers healthy lifestyles.

Though the article never mentioned Pop Weaver, Cathy Yingling, managing director of Young & Laramore, a public relations firm that represents Pop Weaver knew that the article was potentially damaging to her client.

Within hours after the story broke, Yingling wrote a note to the editor of Lighter Footstep’s. Since Pop Weaver has removed diacetyl, Yingling was able to argue that it was just as healthy as organic popcorn.

The PR efforts did not stop there. Within days of the story first appearing, Yingling and her team wrote comments or letters to about 100 blogs that had republished the story or wrote follow-up articles.

Cathy Yingling explained her approach this way:

“We wanted to correct any misinformation.  Someone who is interested enough in the chemical makeup of their microwave popcorn would want to know they have an option out there.” In fact, Yingling considered Pop Weaver’s removal of the harmful additive a competitive edge that she wanted to capitalize on.

Chris Baskind, publisher of Lighter Footstep, reviewed Yingling’s note and added it to the article, which triggered several reader responses. He liked that Yingling identified herself; many PR agents write anonymously, a practice Baskind finds dishonest.

Baskind said that Yingling:

“didn’t argue the substance of the article and didn’t attack our integrity. Her company had a case to make.”

Why put such an effort into responding to something that never made it into the mainstream media?

“We see blogs as equal to mainstream media. It could be argued that some blogs aren’t as credible as the New York Times,” Yingling said. But most consumers don’t differentiate between mainstream writers and bloggers, she says.

So did the efforts work? Its sales have stayed constant while overall microwave popcorn sales are down, Yingling says. “I’d link it to how we handled issues and were proactive about how Pop Weaver didn’t use these chemicals,” she said.

Pop Weaver had a good plan to respond to negative news. In this case, the negative news was not about them, but involved their industry. As a result of the execution of the reputation management plan, Pop Weaver has been able to grab market share away from its less nimble competitors.

Last week’s reputation management post brought several emails about how to go actually go about implementing a reputation management program. With that in mind here are five steps that you can take to manage your reputation online (and control the search engine rankings also).

Create and manage a profile on all the major social networking sites
You do not need a profile on every social network, just on the more prominent ones. Reprise used 13 social networks and I think that is a good number to start with. Two things to keep in mind when doing this. One is to use the name of your brand/company/product as your profile name. The second is to make sure that the profiles are linked together to create your own reputation network.

Build a Wikipedia page
Anything on Wikipedia dominates the SERPS at the moment. Build out a Wikipedia page for your company and link out to positive resources about your products and services. Not sure how to do this? Here is a quick guide from Search Engine Guide. Conversely, if you already have a page on Wikiepdia you should be actively monitoring it to make sure it is not being changed.

Use your media assets
If your company has video assets, then go ahead and create a YouTube channel. If you don’t use video, then create the equivilent on Flickr. With universal search you will see more and more search engine results include videos and pictures from sites like YouTube and Flickr. Having a visible presence on these two sites will help push negative content about you further down the page.

Participate in active discussion boards and blogs within your industry
Yes this is not a Web 2.0 solution, but it still holds true. If you are active in discussion boards and blogs within your industry then you will have a forum (for lack of a better word) to tell your side of the story if any negative news arises.

Build a company blog
A well developed blog that is full of new content is one of the best defenses against negative comments. A blog should be the cornerstone of your online reputation program. It can link out to your Wikipedia page, social network profiles and YouTube video’s.

A good reputation management process works best when all five of these tactics are employed. Think of reputation management in social media as an interactive extension of your overall public relations strategy. Damage control is one aspect of this strategy, but it is important to note that reputation management is most effective as a proactive measure rather than a reactive one. Being heavily connected to the social media landscape is a great way to put your brand in a position of control, as opposed to the ad hoc approach of chasing after and squashing various dissenters.

You would have thought that after the public relations disasters that companies like KFC have had that most companies would have a reputation management plan in place, ready to get implemented at the first hint of negative news coverage. Well a new study by BtoB and Eric Mower and Associates shows that that is not quite the case. Fully 57% of companies surveyed said that they do not have any type of plan in place.

Of the 43% of companies that do have a crisis plan in place, over 10% worry about their ability to implement it, and only half have trained spokespersons.

“If companies choose not to be prepared for a crisis, they and shareholders will pay the price, because crises have a way of twisting and turning till they do serious bottom-line damage,” said Peter Kapcio, director of reputation management services at Eric Mower and Associates and head of that agency’s crisis communications practice. “In most cases, it’s not the initial trigger of the crisis that causes the damage; it’s what follows a botched response.”

Kapcio added “It’s downright professionally irresponsible when b-to-b marcomm people allow their companies to operate unprepared. What if your brand new corporate headquarters building burned down, and it was discovered later that your facilities manager had `neglected’ to buy fire insurance? It’s the same thing when b-to-b companies invest millions in building their brand or company reputation, and then do nothing while it’s all at risk from the next potential crisis.”

So what is the risk to not having a reputation management plan in place ready to go? When asked how long it takes a brand to recover its reputation after negative publicity:

• 23% of respondents said it took three months to a year for their brand to fully recover from a crisis
• 13.3% said it took more than two years to recover
• 17.7% said they have yet to recover after two years.

Even those who have taken the time to put together a reputation management plan, are not fully confident that their plan does enough. According to the survey, among those companies that did have a crisis plan in place, 29.3% said it protects the brand sufficiently, 26.3% said it protects the brand somewhat and 20.2% said protection cannot be anticipated.

My question is, if you have a plan in place that does not protect your brand, then what kind of plan is it? That is like saying that you have a plan to protect you if you get sick but the protection cannot be guaranteed if you do actually get sick.