Social Monitoring And Why it’s Important.

Written by 5ivecanons Staff

How can a brand lose all of it’s credibility in one day? The internet. Cue Domino’s Pizza example showing ignorance isn’t bliss; especially in the digital world.

It’s actually chaos. A video camera, two employees and a booger destroyed a well-established brand reputation in a matter of hours. But what’s really important to learn about this PR disaster, is the recovery.

As a brand wounded by the wrath of a youtube video, they turned to their ad agency for a life raft. The solution – communicate the corporate pizza chain as a digital brand, monitoring the social world and making changes to it’s product based on user response.

Has the turn around been successful? Not really. Their stock is lower today than the day after the “disgusting dominos youtube video” hit mainstream media. Most importantly, ask yourself… when was the last time you ordered from Dominos?

A more recent example of a company poorly handling social media, is British Petroleum. Every 14 seconds, someone is talking about BP on the internet. They seem to have their communications covered on Facebook, given the consta-spam that’s stacking up on their wall but they’re clearly losing the battle to quell the rhetoric on Twitter.

A mock account [@bpglobalpr] has gathered almost 200k followers versus the official BP twitter account which just broke 17k. The author of the mock account has been pumping out content that would make any business owner cringe. Some posts are witty and clever, others are extremely offensive and you won’t see them quoted on the nightly news. What can BP do about it? Nothing. It’s too late. They’ll have to ride it out and hope as the oil gets cleaned up, the content does too.

The lesson to learn from these examples is simple. Know what people are saying about your business. It only takes one video on youtube, a picture on 4chan or even a tweet inside your office – to ruin your brand equity and reputation.