In this age of instant gratification and the viral spread of news, what can you do when your company’s reputation requires a hit from negative social media? On line media monitoring is key in keeping unfair criticism in check.
Instantaneous criticism – on blogs, in tweets, through Facebook or featured on YouTube – are altering the face of public relations and corporate communications nowadays. Regular journalists are bound by specialist ethics the want to write articles that are fair, balanced and effectively sourced and legal standards that assure people and businesses have recourse against libel and slander. But today’s “citizen journalists” frequently never follow these requirements, and as we’re seeing more often, they think the rules never necessarily apply to them. Quite a few of them have their own agendas to market and freely write about subjects without the need of having to present an unbiased point of view.
Take the recent story in Reuters about how Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are becoming “but another front in beleaguered airlines’ public relations battle.” Rather of writing letters, sending e-mails or calling the airlines, unhappy travelers are venting their aggravation by means of these channels in actual-time -whilst stranded at the airport or stuck on a plane, exactly where their rage is fresh.
So how can a firm – like an airline – combat negative mentions from each and every corner of cyberspace? One particular strategy could be online media monitoring. Even though you may perhaps be aware of Google and Yahoo! totally free news alerts as tools to take the pulse of what is getting said about your organization, these search solutions are not complete as you may well will need them to be. health and Yahoo! alerts catch only a fraction of the content on the internet these days, leaving you at threat to remaining oblivious about postings that could have a devastating effect on your enterprise.
To assure you happen to be not missing any mention of your business, you ought to look at working with an web media monitoring service, which gives comprehensive monitoring of all classic media and social media mentions. More importantly, nevertheless, an on-line media monitoring service should consist of actual-time reporting and evaluation capabilities that will help you get a much better understanding of what is becoming said, exactly where and by whom. Having this data will allow you to immediately formulate messaging to react to unflattering references and to better prepare proactive messaging and firms practices that will head off criticisms and damaging press in the future.