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.

Customer service should be easy, shouldn’t it? It’s just common sense, right?

But there are many different interpretations of what constitutes common sense – my common sense might not be yours and vice versa.

Take an example that we will all have been through or seen at some point of a young child throwing a tantrum in a public. There are lots of books and experts that will tell you what a parent should do if this happens.. but which one do you follow? Walk away? Get down on the floor with them? Pick them up and hold them till they stop? Give in so they stop embarrassing you?

While all of these methods will have a sound rationale behind them the most important thing you need to do is know how this child responds and what will most effectively stop the tantrum while maintaining boundaries.

It’s the same with customer service. Not every customer will react the same way – sometimes you just need to band-aid the situation and sometimes you need to be a little flexible.

With that in mind, help your staff to help your customers and therefore you:Clearly define outputs – what does “finished” look like?

• Usually along the lines of a satisfied customer.
• Clearly define expected behaviours – what you should and shouldn’t say to a customer.
• Allow staff a little discretion – give them a little leeway for the individual touch.

Now, think about in this social media terms… if you phone a call centre, there is every chance that the person you are talking to is being treated like a drone and they’ve been given a script to work from.

The promise of social media is to remain human

If you Tweet and someone replies from the company in question, how many companies have got as far as preparing social media scripts. Not many I would bet and also hope – the promise of social media is to remain human.

So, what companies need to be thinking about for making this stuff work in Twitter or Facebook (yes Nestle, I’m looking at you) is to make sure there are savvy staff in place that have been well trained and briefed.

If you are a company and you want to make this work, stop reducing customer service to the lowest common denominator or treating it as a cost centre.

Tell your staff clearly what finished looks like, what behaviours are expected of them and then let them go. It’s easy, it’s just common sense…

Anyone who has ever hired or managed staff will tell you that common sense is a rare commodity – where do you get your supply?

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?

Advertising ain’t what it used to be.

Sales people are paying for the sins of estate agents, spivs and double glazing reps.

PR has suffered bad PR at the hands of, ahem, PRs. Spin is a dirty word don’t you know?

And marketing is doing it tough – the boss wants more for less, and you’d better make it all accountable and transparent…

What are you going to do about it?

Happily in digitalmud land it’s not all doom and gloom. We have an answer to the conundrum above. And it’s a simple answer:

Be yourself. In social media that is.

Customers don’t want you to be nameless, faceless organisations that will only talk to them if your people can read from a script. That’s not being authentic, and social media values authenticity above all else.

“93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present, but also interact with its consumers via social media.”

So reported the Boston Globe about a study conducted in the US in 2008, and which showed the appetite of consumers for interaction with companies in online social spaces.

Great, so jump on Twitter and start selling your heart out. NO! Do that and you will be ensuring disaster.

The important statistic from the survey above is that only 25% of consumers want companies to market to them in online social spaces, so leave your best sales patter at home as no-one wants to hear it.

In fact, the Cone survey quoted above suggests 56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

So, what’s a business to do? Listen first – find out where your customers are and what they’re saying. Then get involved, but remember to be authentic to who you and what your brand is. If you are a firm of accountants, you probably shouldn’t trying talk street or slang with your community.

When you are part of the conversation, be helpful, be remarkable, be quick, but above all be human and stop trying to sell.

Can social media make you money? It’s not an unreasonable question given the way that social media is capable of hyping itself up.

The answer – yes and no.

Some of the spambots, internet marketers and multi-level marketers on Twitter and the rest of the web would have you believe that it is simply a matter of gaining a truckload of followers or traffic, and suddenly money will start magically appearing in your bank account.

Well, spammers are bammers and are guilty of clogging up the web with nonsense. Money won’t magically appear in your account if you have lots of Twitter followers.

But if you use Twitter to find interesting people to follow, you engage with them in a useful, meaningful way to develop a relationship, then you might make some money.

Take the example of Mackenzie Morgan Aerospace Consultants. Managing director Malcolm Cox (full disclosure – Murray’s brother) started dipping his toe in the social media water at the start of 2009 and can point to the positive difference it’s made to his bottom line.

Malcolm took his time to learn about social media before making a splash by following interesting and relevant people in his professional world. And as one of the first aerospace consultants to embrace social media so fully, he has managed to talk to – and win business from – people he would not normally have been able to access.

But here’s the rub – social media hasn’t made him any money. Malcolm has made the money by being good at what he does. He has simply used social media as a tool to develop new relationships and offer value to his professional community in a strategic way.

At the other end of the spectrum, Dell is the cause célèbre of the social media digerati by attributing $US3m in sales to Twitter. How did they do it? Have a look: http://twitter.com/delloutlet And effectively, it boils down to offering Twitter-exclusive offers, Dell Outlet deals and Outlet-specific information. Could you do the same?

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?