The journalists have been looking for relevant news while the PR dept of various companies are trying very hard to provide relevant news to the journalists and to keep to their companies’ advantage.

Though a nice luxurious meal may end up with a front page coverage, the journalists have to refer to their contacts for their daily front page covers! They don’t always get to have a nice meal and yet be able to get their relevant news. The journalists have a lot of topics to cover.

Just imagine what they can do to tackle new topics which they don’t have contacts?

That’s where social media comes into picture!

Thanks to the common media which everyone of us are on. If you wish to find out the latest conversation about the topic you want to cover, there’s twitter search for you! If you need to be on your heels on certain topics, there’s google news alert to inform you if someone blogs about it, or there’re relevant news out there.

When you have a news to cover, there might have someone writing or rambling about it already in some parts of the world. You may find them in forums, blogs, mashups and even in social bookmarkings.

And if there isn’t, most likely it’s still not newsworthy anyway.

These are companies out there who thought they can interrupt any of us by email with an unsubscribe link below.

That is so interrupting, especially when they are your familiar brands. They are ruining their reputation.

These brands have been doing really well in other media such as TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine. They have definitely created their presence, and made an impression in their potential customers.

At the same time, they are using the same methods on the internet as the offline media methods. Anybody will also understand that you can’t use the same method on radio with tv.

When have we really subscribed to your e-newsletter??

It’s official. More and more people are using this term “social media”.  But do you really know what social media means?  It’s so commonly used that I really wonder who on earth really knows what this means.

Who says that social media means a media which has to do with online?

From my understanding, social media is basically means the websites which are utilizing publishing technologies to create a pull of information from interested parties.  For example, if you have a website which can contain various feeds of related information, the visitors will be very glad to find out more from you.  And those releated information are made available using the publishing techologies which is basically in the form of an RSS and ATOM feed.

(Ok, here’s the meaning for social media from wikipedia)

But do you think social media an overused buzzword?

Social media is becoming more and more aggressively used by many people out there. But do you think social media an overused buzzword? I thought so!  A lot of my friends are using it like nobody’s business.

Who is right? Who is wrong?

I think it’s not an issue here anymore.  Why?

Because we must all understand that there’s no such thing as the real standard anymore.  (For example, pluto is no longer part of the planet.)  We are all human beings.  A standard will be formed if you are able to spread the news fastest to everybody’s attention.  That’s the “real standard”.

More and more blog stars are born. They do not need to go through the endorsement of the media companies.  All they need is an Internet access.

Social media is a place where you will exchange more ideas than ever before!

Every website owner will want to earn more money.  It’s as direct as that.  And when you are stucked with the same consistent amount of traffic everyday, what do you do to create more traffic else where?

You probably have a certain amount of conversion rate for all of your traffic in one website.  You might want to think of how to increase the conversion rate by doing some landing page optimization.  You might want to add more varieties of potential income generating widgets around your website.

But how do you look out for more sales, other than just tweaking your own website?

Selling the same product again and again

If your website is selling the same product consistently (such as Pepsi), you might think of new product launches such as “Vanilla Pepsi”.

But other than adding varieties to your own product, what other ways you can do to remind people to buy your product?

• You could be doing more advertisements to disturb people “Ermm excuse me, this is our product. Please remember to buy”.
• You could be creating a new facebook page and gather all your fans, reminding them to “buy” your product again and again.
• You could be paying money to sponsor people to play soccer, reminding them “We paid money to make your sports event successful! Remember to return favors”.
• And many other ways so that you can create more eyeball impressions…

After you have done so much, is that the reason why you want to pick this brand over others?  Chris Brogan has some thoughts about the small talks of all brands.

Selling new products again and again, discarding the old ones

This seems very common in many companies.  They are always launching new products, and making the old products end-of-life.  They keep on making new versions, and making the old ones obsolete.

This is one way how they can find a reason why they need to talk to the same crowd again and again.

• Some paid huge money, talking to the same crowd because they don’t own the database.  TV advertisements, radio advertisements, newspaper advertisements and online advertisements.  All these are owned by the media companies.  They have the database (both identified as subscribers as well as unidentified as strangers) to speak to every moment.  They leverage on the crowd that they have, to sell to the big companies who don’t want to manage the crowd.
• Another way, is to create your own media and communicate to the same media.  You are your own sponsor and you talk to the same people again and again.  Your database is growing.  And you are saving a lot of money.  But it really depends on which media you have chosen, and how sustainable this media is going to hold.
• Big companies have already identified the usage of facebook.  More and more of them are jumping onto this ship and enjoy the bandwidth that they can reach.  They can probably

So what do you do to sell more?

image credit: tripleoptix

While jobs are lost, personal branding becomes important because that is the key selling point for potential customers to buy in. 

Social media remains personal because it is something which belongs to you alone.  It’s personal.

MNCs don’t stand a chance to be any more personal in social media than you.  That’s because they come in a team. Huge team! They have to go through a lot of consensus before they can proceed.  And don’t forget, they are on paid salary.  The employees yearn more for a job security than anything else.  Most will not dare to take the bold step to change the world, although it is easy for them to do so.

Personal branding is the way for the individuals to sell to the world, leveraging on the social media.  Social media is so powerful because human beings are finally more united through the Internet.

Individuals have no choice… But to become unique and change the world.  Their “job security” depends on their uniqueness and to communicate in the social media.

For the first time in my life, I can see how helpless the MNCs are when it comes to broadcasting their message to the world through this simple tool called “social media”.  

What do you think?

As the brand guardian of our own companies, we have to manage our companies’ reputations.

It is interesting to note that offline reputation tends to be easier to protect.  That’s because our customers don’t have the tools that we have to spread the news of our own reputation.  They don’t have the money to spend on advertisements in TV, radio, newspapers or magazines.  That’s too expensive for them.  When any of our customers have problem with us, we can manage them in silo.  We can try to keep them as happy as they can be with our customer service.

However for the online reputation, our customers have exactly the same tools as us to create websites, to spread the word in social media, in search engines and even affordably in online advertisements!  It’s a total different way of managing online reputation when you have the same power as your customers in spreading the message.

What’s the key thing in managing online reputation?

Online reputation speaks about being real with your customers, and always to improve your products and services.  If your products and services have certain flaws, you may have to admit it and to improve.  Failure to listen to your customers online, will tend to open up more people talking about your problem, causing your business to deteriorate easily.

And what’s the key thing in managing offline reputation?

Offline reputation speaks about making your unhappy customers to become happy.  You got to have a dedicated customer service department who can cater to their needs, hoping that they will not spread bad news to their friends (or even through the Internet although your online presence is very little!).

Maintaining your quality of your products and services

Whether it is online or offline, it voices down to maintain your quality and to become better!  That’s because as of 2009, social media is confirmed to stay and is on the rise with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and even more.  Every webware online is becoming social in one way or another.  That’s because everybody wants to care and share with one another in this world!

What does this mean to the offline businesses?

It is as good as saying that you are losing competition to your competitors who have presence online.  No matter where you are, whether you are in Asia where people tend to say that online store don’t work, or whether you are in a rural country where the Internet is very scarce.  Social media is here to stay.

Will this become another Internet bubble burst like in 1997?

This time round, the bubble has become bigger than ever.  In 1997, everybody are so excited about setting their own online portal.  Investors are rushing in to give their money.  One-stop shop seems to be ideal in the online world.  Although not many people can get the idea that one-stop-shop website is as difficult as building a business with multiple businesses (like Courts and Ikea), many people have started to build a website with a single focus.

Online store like Amazon is not easy to start actually.  It involves a lot of hidden agendas to work with.  Internally, you have to manage inventory, externally you have to handle sales.  Unless you have huge amount of targeted traffic, it is probably not going to work.

Today, the websites have become very smart to research, build and measure so that they can be very useful.  The bubble is definitely going to be bigger because this time round, people are spending money and we will never know where it will head into.

Conclusion

Online reputation is a very different ball game from offline reputation.  You cannot use offline tactics to handle online, and vice versa.  Many businesses are evading social media because they are not in the capacity to be “exposed” for their trade secrets (which can be easily googled).  Businesses are definitely clear that online is the new way to go, but they are not willing to “let go” since they have been working in this way “efficiently” for many years.  We’ll see how long they can still survive without hearing the people’s crying voices online…

Recommended reading:
Radically Transparent: Monitoring and managing reputations online