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?

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?