The only thing that spreads faster than good news on the web is bad news – as management at Nivea towers have discovered.

Nivea is just the latest in an increasingly long line of companies that have seen their reputations come under fire from empowered consumers using social media tools to give vent to their feelings.

And no wonder in this case. The company’s “Look like you give a damn” campaign was surely ill-advised to even hint that black people aren’t civilised.

The print ad which kicked off the debacle features a clean-shaven black man grasping the longer hair on a bearded mask of his own face, getting ready to throw it away. The phrase “Re-civilize yourself” is emblazoned over the image.

Unsurprisingly the company has taken a beating, and moved quickly to pull the advert. I can’t believe it made it live in the first place.

Regardless, what’s interesting here is the speed at which the whole thing has unfolded given that this started from something appearing in a monthly magazine.

Facebook user Monna Morton appears to have kicked it off on Wednesday evening at 2221 with a scathing post on Nivea’s Facebook page. See the image below.

And then Septembre Anderson Tweeted to Nivea spokewoman Rihanna about the advert, CNN became aware of the story and it was really on.

Of course, mainstream media still wields enormous power over the C-suite – rightly or wrongly – and it is that crossover from social to traditional media that nearly all companies fear when a reputation issue blows-up.

Nivea has issued an apology on its Facebook page, but it isn’t engaging or entering the fray in anyway at the time of writing. Perhaps they’ve seen the trouble that Nestle got itself into and has decided it’s already done enough damage.

At the time of writing there has been 993 Tweets about the episode, which according to mathematical wizardry courtesy of the good people of Sysomos means it has reached 3.1million Twitter users. The story hasn’t run its course yet, so that number is just going to keep increasingly… of course, that wouldn’t be a problem if it was a good news story.

This case raises questions about how companies can protect their reputations in the social media age? The answer isn’t anything to do with social media – the answer is to run the best business possible with maximum integrity at all times. Take customers seriously, strive to do things better every day and do something of value.

Nivea has suffered a common-sense breakdown, and it makes me wonder if the company is striving to do its best and act with integrity? But what about the agency that produced the ad? Surely someone in there must have had doubts about the direction of the campaign?

If we go back to the question about how can a company protect itself… Let’s assume the basics are covered, which means the firm needs to have a well thought out social media strategy with risk management and escalation procedures in place.

And even more importantly, while companies will spend a fortune on getting their message out very few spend enough on listening to the return message – they should.

Social media monitoring isn’t a nice to have in this day and age, it’s a necessity. It won’t stop a crisis like this, but when you see how quickly these things can unfold getting the heads-up about a problem even just a few minutes earlier is surely worth every penny.

Your brand is not in your hands anymore – it’s an unpalatable truth for many businesses, but it is the new reality of the information age.

Once businesses get over the shock of the new they will start to see it as an opportunity… but many would probably rather go back to the pre-internet days when you had control of the message you gave to your customers.

Everyone is a critic

If you wanted to find out what your customers thought about your brand you would conduct some market research or tap into the local grape vine. It was all pretty straightforward.

But these days your brand is also in the hands of people who talk about you online, and they might not even be your customers. The democratisation of media with tools like Blogger, WordPress and Twitter has meant anyone can find or create an audience.

What this means is that the clippings agency you are paying to tell you what is being said about your company might be missing damaging material – particularly when you remember people are more likely trust other people like them than they are the newspapers.

Do your media people report back to you on negative reviews posted at ReviewCentre or Qype?

Listen up

In pre-internet days you had the luxury of time to solicit feedback, but now damaging content can trash your reputation in a matter of hours.

Scary, huh? Not necessarily.

There is a burgeoning market for sophisticated software to track your reputation right across the web. Some of the systems are better than others, but what they are all promising is almost real-time tracking of the mentions of your brand. That’s a great start for reputation protection.

Why might it be useful to watch what people are saying? As a company you may not want a Twitter strategy or have time or staff to constantly update your blog, but it is important to look at what is being said in the wild.

Imagine the value of early detection of problems with your customer service or products. Or being able to harness the wisdom in the feedback of hundreds, even thousands, of customers.

Ignorance was bliss…

There is much more to recommend reputation monitoring than a defensive stance against scandal.

Today’s business is very different from 20 years ago when I worked in my parent’s bike shop. We prided ourselves on our customer service, did an occasional advertising campaign and made sure to be present at local bike events.

We were happily ignorant of when people were talking about the shop (either good or bad) and as long as the people came at Christmas time to get their kids a bike or came back to us if they wanted an upgrade or needed a service we were happy.

Customers today have a wider and stronger voice than ever before – think how often you’ve had a 45 minute wait to speak to a call centre and then failed to have your problem fixed. Now imagine you several thousand people following you on Twitter and you decide to start badmouthing company X….

People are going online to complain when they have a bad experience, and it’s not unreasonable when you remember they are helping to pay your wages.

The warm fuzzies

But it’s not just customers you need to worry about. What about the things your staff are saying or doing?

Someone in your own business could play an ill-advised prank that spirals out of control like Domino’s Pizza where the brand suffered serious repercussions within 24 hours from a video posted to YouTube.

By monitoring your brand online you can see what people are saying about you – and believe it or not, the talk is not always negative. It can leave you feeling warm inside to see your business getting a virtual pat on the back.

Have you had any experiences with online reputation management? How did you find out what was being said?

How good are you at listening? Really listening?

And what if we separate you the person from the company/body/organisation you work for?  Is your company hearing what its customers are saying?

These might seem strange questions, but social media means it is becoming an incredibly important skill for companies and organisations to master. And quickly.

Let’s look at some examples where customers are delivering a very clear, uncomplicated message, and where it seems the companies involved are failing to listen to learn.

It’s probably a cheap shot to single at an easy target to single out the finance sector – but it’s fun and having done some work in the finance sector in recent months I recognise how sensitive these organisations are starting to become in the post bailout world.

So, please step forward Marbles and Thomas Cook.

I remember the Marbles credit card being popular back in the 90s, but when I went to Review Centre it became clear why it might not be as popular as it once was. If you were in charge over there, how happy would you be about this?

Can you feel the love customers have for this brand?

The attentive among you might be wondering why I am classing holiday company Thomas Cook as a finance institution – well, like so many others, they have extended their brand to a credit card for customers. It’s just a shame the customers rather seem to wish they hadn’t bothered!

How does this help the Thomas Cook brand?

Put yourself in the place of the brand managers at either of those institutions – how would you feel if you saw that? What would you do about it?

Well, Marbles and Thomas Cook seem to have chosen to ignore it, which means that awful customer feedback is sitting there unmoderated, radiating nastiness and negativity towards the brands. Not ideal.

Of course, you don’t need to respond to every piece of criticism of the web, but it would certainly be wise to be aware of it.

The reality, of course, is probably that neither company is aware of the ill-will being sent in their direction because they probably aren’t listening. And that’s a shame. Think how many people will see that over time and have their buying decisions swayed. Think how that will negatively affect the money these companies will be spending in other areas such as good search engine optimisation.

While the unvarnished opinion of customers might be unpalatable, surely it is better to know what is being said and to start feeding that information back into the business. And as marketing guru Seth Godin rightly points out, the most effective time to make acustomer service intervention is when that customer is not happy.

In another post we can look at how you can assess the relative authority of any website, how much traffic it might get (in crude terms) and whether you should pay attention or let sleeping dogs lie. Alternatively, give us a call and we can help you now.

So you’ve got a corporate website, a PR company on a monthly retainer and a marketing team.

If you’re lucky, you might also have a search agency making sure Google knows how to find you.

You might also have a media buying agency, a PPC agency, an advertising agency and a creative or design agency on the books too.

Surely then social media would be covered by that phalanx of experts?Unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily follow… because social media potentially cuts across all of those disciplines while adding something extra to the mix.

Put the technology considerations aside for the moment, go back to first principles and remind yourself social media is about people and conversations.

Conversations require you to listen, and advertisers are more used to blasting – in a previously effective manner – messages at people.

Conversations demand authenticity, and PRs have given themselves a bad reputation by spinning stories and manipulating the court of public opinion.

Conversations take place in what can be thought of as earned media space, which can’t be bought by your buying agency.

Conversations can be more powerful then SEO… like the following screenshot shows:

Affinion is a faceless corporation that markets “value added services” to finance companies and the like. It ran a scheme called Leisuretime that companies like Barclaycard gave their name to, much to the chagrin on their customers.

But what this example really shows is that you piss off customers enough – or equally please them – then the money you’ve spent on everything else in your marketing mix can be negated.

At digitalmud we are neither PRs, or SEO gods or media buyers – we are chatters and doers who specialise in social media. What that means in reality is that we have first class knowledge of all these inter-related disciplines to help you make a coherent picture out of your marketing jigsaw pieces.

By putting in place a strategic social media plan and building social media capability inside your company you can tie these various pieces together to build your digital footprint and dazzle your customers with your responsiveness.

What steps are you taking to nurture and protect your digital footprint?