“What Women Want.” That’s how Ford did it.

Getting bloggers involved. Prominent, well-known women bloggers. And get instant buzz in the process. It’s focus groups at work in the new social media space. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not a new trend. Pepsi did it in their Pepsi rebranding campaign. The Air Force is doing it in their Air Force social media push. And you remember 3M’s Post-It Note Carjacks? Now Ford is doing it with refined social media skills. But really, bloggers watch out, you may be part of a bigger PR machine without realizing it.

Check out any of these Ford YouTube videos. Here are some samples of blogger reviews.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU-A6kCnbTA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDC1sBQY038

Ford describes the event in an article titled “Ford Wants to Know: What do Woman [sic] Really Want?” which included breakfast with a Ford executive, a day packed with hands-on tours, test drives and roundtable discussions, and I’m sure schwags. By the way, the event was conducted during the 5th Annual BlogHer ’09 Conference, July 23-25, 2009. Quite timely and convenient.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always advocated that businesses need to get more into social network marketing and develop strong new media strategies. But there’s a grey area that both companies and bloggers need to be careful not to cross. In this case, to me anyway, if Ford really wants to get women’s input to help design future cars, the company probably won’t get them just from this narrow group of women demographic. But they will get a lot of free blog posts and discussions out of it, that’s for sure.

The final score: thumbs up for Ford marketing, a “huh, what were you thinking?” for the bloggers.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers
• Online Marketing Success: Don’t Forget the 45-and-Older Demographic
• SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for managing many aspects of your organization’s online marketing. One of the least use of SEO, but also one of the most important, is online reputation management.

A simple search for your name and keywords associated with your name and products will reveal things about your company that you may not be aware of. There will be things that you can easily fix, while others are harder to resolve, but more often than not, all can be managed. If you’re already doing SEO for your website, then the technique is directly applicable for reputation management. The only major difference is normal SEO is a marketing and sales function. When applied to reputation management, you add public relations (PR) to the team.

Here are few ideas to get started. 

• Know what’s out there. Do a thorough search of terms related to your business name, products and services, like you’re doing a keyword analysis. Be sure to pay attention to the blogosphere and social networking sites. These are the places where you’ll find people discussing and sharing their own experiences about your products and services, both positive and negative.
• Know your battlegrounds. You may find sites and blogs where your reputation is being discussed in positive or negative lights, and you’ll also find sites and blogs where there’s no discussion about your name and products at all. These are both valuable sites to get involved in, as your team will need to not only create marketing and PR campaigns to deal with (or take advantage of) the conversations, but also to create presence where there is lacking.
• Know your online social etiquette. Whatever your campaign goals are, you must adhere to proper social networking etiquette and mind your online social manners. Be yourself, be truthful, be honest, be helpful, and above all, be respectful and understanding of the public’s viewpoints. There are many ways to tell your story, and it’s much better to take the join-and-conquer approach instead of going in with your guns blazing.
• Know where the action is. If you can join a discussion to tell your side of the story or to do damage control, by all means do it. This will allow you to head off a problem straight on, or prevent an issue from blowing out of hand. By doing this, you’ll be seen as part of the solution, as you are actively managing your reputation at the same time. Additionally, you’ll leave a trail of written communication representing your company’s viewpoints around the web. This means when these discussions are found in search results, then your company is also found. This is effective SEO at work. 
• Know your first rule of SEO: content. Applying other SEO techniques such as writing keyword-rich content in comments, responses, blogs, forums and chat rooms will further help get your story found in relevant search results. Make it a habit, no, a policy, to always be helpful to the group with good and useful information about your company, products, services and industry. Doing this without being and sounding pushy will get your content found by your potential customers.

Actively managing your reputation through SEO and social networking will bring back immediate and measurable benefits. Reputation management should be an ongoing process. Don’t wait until you really have to manage your reputation, but manage it before you need to. Your name, and the reputation tagged to your name, is so important, you need to start managing it with the utmost urgency. After all, if you don’t care about your reputation, why should your customers?

So what are you doing to manage your reputation, online and offline? Whether you have a campaign or plan in place, try adding SEO and social networking to the mix. And don’t forget to share your experience with us in the comment below. We need all the help we can get. Thanks.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools

Related posts

• Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• How to Write Relevant Content by Understanding Search Behaviors
• Social Media: Who in Your Organization Should Own It?
• Use Meta Description Tags to Improve Search Engine Marketing Results
• One Secret to Successful SEO, If You Don’t Do Anything Else
• Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect
• How to Ensure Google and SEO Friendly Page Title
• Social Media Done Right: U.S. Air Force
• Who Doesn’t Want Inbound Marketing?

Need a little help to kick-start your social media marketing? Here are some tips from the Air Force.

From a post by David Meerman Scott on WebInkNow, the U.S. Air Force is now Armed with Social Media. The Air Force apparently now has a team called the Air Force Emerging Technology team, led by Capt. David Faggard of the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon. The group is responsible for “developing strategy, policy and plans for an ever-changing communication landscape for communicators worldwide”. This includes their main mission of using “current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public”. By any name, this is social media marketing at its core.

It is refreshing to see such a large organization committing and embracing social media as an important communication and public relations tool. This serves as a good example for private corporations who are still on the fence or even “not sure” on how to proceed with social media. When you are committed and do it right, social media can be one of your best marketing and PR friends. In the case of a global organization like the U.S. Air Force, what did it take to pull this off? I’m sure it was not easy flying. In Capt. Faggard’s words, “There has been resistance; but the leadership of the Air Force is very supportive of what the expert communicators say are the best ways to reach people”, especially young people.

Here are a few tips we can learn from the USAF on getting involved in social media:

• Encourage, empower and employ all your human resources as communicators for the organization. The problem is not that people can’t represent their companies properly. It’s the lack of training and guidance from upper management on corporate policies governing such communication channel. Employees are always good resources to advocate for the company. For the Air Force, the program’s goal “is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.” So what’s your corporate goal?
• Again for the Air Force, the focus is on “Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media).” So if you’re not sure where to start your social media program, as a starting point, just replace “Air Force” and “Airmen” in the statement above with whatever appropriate for your organization. It’s totally applicable.
• Capt. Faggard explains “counter-blogging” as when “Airmen counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the US government and the air force.” Well this sounds 100% applicable to corporate marketing and PR to me.
• According to Capt. Faggard, “We educate people in the Air Force about security of social media to make sure that people don’t expose secrets via Twitter or Facebook…” Again this is totally applicable to private corporations when running a social media campaign. Inaction is not a good option. The key is proper education and guideline must be provided to your team to carry out the mission.
• “Besides Twitter, Capt. Faggard writes The Official Blog of the U.S. Air Force; has pages on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; helps publicize a Second Life area called Huffman Prairie; contributes to iReport (user name USAFPA); and is on Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Newsvine, Reddit. There’s Air Force widgets. And there’s even a video mashup contest for high schools to show school spirit sponsored by the Air Force.” It’s a pretty impressive list of social media channels. However, it would be not be fair to expect a new corporate team to try doing all these things at the start. Just pick a few in combination that you’re most comfortable with and add new channels as you go. The important thing here is to get started.

Finally, courtesy of David Meerman Scott’s site, below is the detailed Air Force blog assessment flowchart shared by Capt. Faggard. It provides a visual representation of what social media work is all about. It’s obvious that you don’t have to be in the Air Force to understand and use it. We actually paid for this and I hope you’ll find good uses for it. I know I will.

In the end you don’t have to be a large organization to employ social media in your marketing mix. The Air Force is really using the resources it already has, and so can we.

Click on image to view larger version (172KB).

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Social Media Done Right: U.S. Air Force

Related posts

• Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising
• Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success
• Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark
• Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy
• Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz
• Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team
• How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team
• Twitter’s Achilles’ Heels May Be Its Biggest Challenge
• Marketing and Customer Service Are Really One and the Same to Customers
• Online Marketing Success: Don’t Forget the 45-and-Older Demographic