Today’s guest thought leader post is by Ben Foley, Marketing Coordinator for Tracx.
As the leading social media listening and engagement platform for enterprises, Tracx helps brands to properly identify and manage their social influencers. By implementing a unified social business management platform, companies are able to align with the people of power that are most relevant to their brand or industry. Social analytics and engagement platforms allow businesses to partner with these people of influence and have them share positive messages and promote products. While the Influencer module within Tracx provides easy, intuitive, and powerful influencer identification and management capabilities, these functions can be harnessed not only for leveraging brand advocates, but also for locating and dealing with the people who have the potential to seriously tarnish a brand’s reputation. At Tracx, we call these people brand assassins.
In the same ways that social influencers inspire the spread of positive sentiment as they vouch for an organization’s product or service, brand assassins kindle a negative sentiment wildfire that can seriously jeopardize a brand’s reputation, both online and off. Some of the most common examples of this are cases in which “brandjacking” takes place. Brandjacking, by its traditional definition, is when someone (or a group of people) acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of a separate company for the purpose of obtaining that business’s brand equity.
The Rise of Brandjacking
Social media has made brandjacking easier than ever. Massive social campaigns can be overridden by determined and strategic individuals or groups to convey the complete opposite message that was intended by the organization launching the campaign. Further, viral hashtags can be initiated by brand assassins that are then misinterpreted by the general public as being generated by the organization under fire.
One of the most publicized examples of brandjacking to date can be credited to Greenpeace. Last summer, the non-governmental environmental organization targeted Lego for the brand’s partnership with Shell on a set of Shell-branded Lego products. The video below, which was instantly shared by millions of people on various social networks, features a Lego version of the Artic slowly drowning in a sea of oil. The juxtaposition of the easily recognizable Lego toys and the ethereal cover of “Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie resulted in an extremely powerful viral video. Ultimately, Lego announced that it would not renew its contract with Shell, proving that occurrences of brandjacking can take down megabrands even at the scale of Lego.
Brand Assassins Can Come from All Angles (Even Internally)
In one of 2014’s most gruesome examples of pure brand assassination, US Airways’ Social Customer Care team responded to a service criticism in quite possibly the most inappropriate manner imaginable. The airline replied to a customer’s tweet with a fairly scripted, black and white canned reply, which evoked another criticism from the same user…Then the correspondence took a nasty turn…Instead of linking the customer to US Airways’ review and follow-up page, a link to an extremely vulgar, aircraft-related NSFW image was attached, which in turn spread like crazy online. The offensive post remained live within US Airways’ Twitter feed for over an hour – practically an eternity in social media time. But how could this have even happened?
According to a Spokesperson for US Airways:
“US Airways was attempting to flag an inappropriate tweet that contained the graphic image. In doing so, the pic.twitter.com URL was copied as well. Then the graphic image was inadvertently pasted into a tweet sent to another user. While the two tweets were live they actually linked to each other.”
Internal governance checks and balances were clearly not in place during this process.
Be Quick. Be Responsive. Be careful.
So how can brands predict and avoid such staggering blows to their public image? Social media brings with it a high degree of unexpected and seemingly uncontrollable messaging, but brands can take precautionary measures to minimize damage from brand assassins. It starts with a clear social media strategy and a set of corporate social guidelines. These policies provide the framework that builds into an approval process, sense of governance, and an overarching plan of action for social media activity. From there, it takes the right training and technology put in place to intercept, route, and triage any negative social media content. Speed is critical.
The Right Tools are Essential
In Tracx’s influencer module, organizations see the social profiles of brand assassins surface in real time as negative sentiment begins to spread surrounding the brand. Such negative influencers routinely discuss subjects relevant to the brand’s industry, and often even call the brands out by name. Once these negative influencers are identified, brands can keep an eye on their social activity and engage with them head on accordingly. Brand assassins can appear relentless when their efforts are not responded to by a defensive corporation, but oftentimes once the organization fires back, typically through pragmatic explanation, the negative influencers ultimately cease and desist, or at least back down considerably.
Brands that implement a proper social analytics and engagement tool such as Tracx reap the benefits of customizable and process-optimizing workflows that result in smooth and efficient tagging and flagging of social content. This makes taking a proactive and real-time approach to dealing with crisis management inspired by brand assassins easier than ever before.
To learn more about how Tracx enables brands to not only manage, but leverage their social influencers, email info@tracx.com or visit www.tracx.com.
The post The Dark Side of Influencers – Dealing with Brand Assassins and Brandjacking appeared first on Actiance.