Perhaps some false information or negative comment has been said about you, your company, your brand, your products or your business. It might be your competitor launching an attack or a customer complaint that has generated a lot of controversy.

In order to cope with an online brand attack, you have to understand that your brand can been attacked. Even President Obama’s campaign was attacked and they had to set up a site to Fight The Smears and build their online reputation.

Here are 10 rules to recover from an online brand attack.

1. Humility

Before you can recover from an online brand attack, you have to be aware that your brand can be attacked – no matter how big it is or how untouchable it may seem.

2. Listen

Once you have a clear understanding of the scope of the possible effects of an online attack and are committed to maintaining a good reputation online, you’re half way there. Next you’ve got to understand how the process of consumer complaints has evolved. Then, use this understanding to guide your actions.

3. Respond

One of the easiest ways to solve the majority of brand attacks is to respond quickly. A brand that shows it is listening and does indeed care will go far when it comes to ensuring a solid online reputation. A conscious reaction is the only way forward – acknowledging what has been said and reacting accordingly.

4. Confirm

If the mention of your brand is factually incorrect, you’ve got to provide evidence that the information is wrong. Ask for removal or retraction of the entry, and offer to keep them informed of future news. If what they are saying about your brand is true, learn from the “Dell Hell” phenomenon. If the mention is negative but true, then send your own side of the story and try as hard as you can to take it offline.

5. Keep

Keeping more people from reading negative things about your brand is imperative. What you can do is knock them off the first page of the results with basic SEO topped with some social media page setups such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace or forum posts. Keep adding pages and links until you’ve forced the offending pages out of sight.

6. Participate

If you aren’t an active member of the online community, it tends to be a little harder to recover from an online attack. If your company doesn’t have a blog, start one. Participate in industry forums and communities. Build genuine credibility as a member of these communities and you’ll find that people will have more respect for you and your brand.

7. Engage

Keep your brand in the face of consumers by engaging in the conversation. This could be done by making use of blogs, communicating with customers and being as open and honest as possible. Engaging in, and leading, the conversation allows you to build an authentic voice. If a crisis hits, you will be well placed to respond in a way that is authentic.

8. Care

If you truly care what your customers think then most of this will come naturally. That’s all people want. They give you their money; they just want some good service and respect in return.

9. Prepare

No brand is immune to an online brand attack. The best brands have strategies in place to immediately identify a reputation crisis and respond to it quickly enough to stop the negative word of mouth spreading. That was something the Obama campaign was very good at.

10. Apologise

If everything else you’ve tried fails, apologise and move on. However, focus on rebuilding an online reputation for your brand or company.

Note: These rules have been sourced via: Quirk eMarketing, but have been modified.

In this series of posts, I’ll be discussing how companies today can build their online reputation. But before then, let me share with you the benefits of engaging with and listening to your customers, especially if your company has huge brand awareness.

Recently, I wrote a review on some of MTN Nigeria’s latest products that were launched at the MTN Innovation Day. One of the products/services, Google SMS Search from MTN, generated a lot of negative commentary, because it was generally believed that it could be offered as a value-added service for choosing the MTN Network.

Following this, I forwarded the review to the MTN Customer Care email address to find out their reaction or to get a response, at least. Unfortunately, the customer care agents that emailed me back showed that they were less concerned about consumer responses to their products, as I’m sure any MTN employee reading this might just be.

Here was my email to MTN Nigeria customer care:

Hi there,

Just thought I should bring your attention to feedback from Nigerians
about your product – MTN Google Free SMS Search. There are over 30
comments about the service.

You can find it here:

http://www.startupsnigeria.com/2009/04/mtn-nigeria-unveils-googles-free-sms-search/

Cheers,

Loy

Here was the response:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for contacting us at MTN Customer Care.

Kindly click on the reply button when replying our mails so as to enable us follow up on your issue.

If you are talking about how to get to the Google SMS through our website, please follow this link:

http://www.mtnonline.com/products/googlesms.aspx

Thank you for choosing MTN.

Regards,

Rayo

Evidently, the customer care response showed that MTN Nigeria probably doesn’t have a listening culture and/or a policy for getting involved in conversations surrounding their company, brand, products and personnel. Worse still, the customer care agent didn’t sound like he even read my email.

As a result, they risk their online brand reputation and even though they are have built a brand awareness and are the leading mobile telecommunications operator in Nigeria (in terms of subscribers), those negative responses show that they are not engaging with their customers and may lose them, if they don’t.

Since customers are simply not using the channels or are hardly getting the right answers to their requests in the channels that a company has chosen to communicate with them (usually via email or telephone), they (the company) should follow the chatter online in the channels that customers have chosen via blogs, online forums, and social media sites.

There are some great ways that you can listen to what your customers are saying on the Internet, using search tools and RSS feeds that can help you access information as quickly as possible and in one place, without visiting several websites, communities or blogs.

A great tool is the Google keywords search which allows a company to track what is being said about its staff, its products, its industry and its competitors or just about anything that is relevant to the company.

This may include tracking common misspellings of relevant words related to the company. Also, tracking the names of key people in a company can highlight and protect brand attacks.

However, to avoid monitoring or tracking too much, you can identify those keywords which may indicate that a comment or article has little or nothing to do with your company.

Another great tool is Google Alerts which allows you to filter your search keywords and deliver them as updates to the email address you have specified or via Google reader. Therefore, if MTN Nigeria were to use these tools to track their online reputation, they might consider some keywords like “MTN Nigeria”, “mtnonline.com”, “Ahmed Farouk”, MTN Caller Tunes, MTN SIM Backup, etc.

Listening to and engaging with existing and potential customers online is very critical to building your company’s web reputation. Granted, you may still be skeptical about adopting new tools for communication, but if you develop a policy and strategy, your company will become more successful with customer relationship management.

If you would like to learn how to develop the right social media policy and strategy for your company, kindly email me via speak [at] loyokezie.com

Today, many smart companies are moving from (high-cost) mass advertising to (low-cost) direct marketing which puts the company and their products in front of their target markets via Marketing 2.0.

Marketing 2.0 is based on building conversations and interactions with customers via the Internet with a view to generating sales leads. This means that customer relationships or service (whatever you call it) should not only be driven by telephone contact centres or face-to-face contact, but also via corporate blogs, online communities as well as email and instant messenger (IM) platforms.

In addition to traditional marketing channels, companies need to adopt social media marketing tools (a.k.a Marketing 2.0 Tools) such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, etc in order to engage with their customers and build their brands both locally and globally.

Since customers are seen as the most important stakeholders in a business’s success, engaging with them via these Marketing 2.0 tools is the best way companies can show they are customer-focused and customer-driven.

Launch. Social. Network?

Companies that claim to be customer-driven should at least have an online community that fosters interaction and participation with customers. It won’t hurt, really. For example, you can setup a mini-social network for your company, and let your customers become the primary focus of your business. Their participation in the community is somewhat similar to being part of other social networks they naturally use such as Facebook, Myspace, Perfspot, Hi5, Orkut and Ning.

An example of a customer-centric approach and strategy is Zain Nigeria’s central station (http://www.centralstationng.com) which is an online community of Zain mobile subscribers in Nigeria that allows users to connect with other people, share information and participate in competitions. This ever-growing community has attracted a lot of youths, other users and fans of the Zain mobile network.

Thus, if your company has a large customer-base or is looking for new ways to increase their customer-base, an online collaboration using the company’s social network would provide the opportunity for finding high-value and meaningful contributions that could provide key information critical to resolving customer-related issues.

What. Customers. Want?

More than ever before, customers value a community where their views and opinions can be heard by the company and they are most likely to stay on your website and support your product brands when their opinions are appreciated by the company. Their opinions, either negative or positive, tend to add value to the company’s business as well as its products and services.

Customers also like to participate in a community that allows them to interact easily with other potential customers. That’s exactly what some of the social media tools provide – an excellent way of using and sharing information via blogs, discussion forums, RSS feeds, bookmarking, etc.

How. Companies. React?

Companies can join in the discussion and get right into the heart of the conversations in a way to connect with their customers. By providing tips and advice on how customers can use their products and allowing for instant feedback from them through the company blog or Instant Messaging (IM) platforms integrated to their websites, they can respond to quick questions from customers about their products or services.

I’ll be discussing how building a corporate blog can help companies to build their company brand in a future article.

Image via Flickr by Fred Cavazza