by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: November 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 29, 2011

More and more business are using Social Media Marketing to increase their levels of engagement with their customers and reach new audiences. Lacking a Social Media strategy can harm business that are unprepared to deal with situations such as viral negative comments on Twitter or Facebook or misleading blog posts and turn term in their favour. The fact is that people are going to talk about your brand, and they are going to do it whether you actually talk back or not. Not having a Social Media strategy of any kind can harm business in many ways, from lacking information about what is said about the company to being unable to react to negative Social Media messages.

Social Media is key to brand management on the Internet. When people search about your company name on the Internet, maybe in preparation to actually purchase your products or services, what would you like them to see there? Would you like the first 5 results being blog posts from people complaining about your Customer Service lack of response? This can easily happen when a company doesn't monitor what other people say about them on the Internet, and are unable to react to it. This is what happened for example with Dell, when a well known blogger started posting about how dissatisfied he was about their customer service in what is known popularly as Dell's Hell. Suddenly, thousands of potential customers were having the first engaging dialogue about the company... and it wasn't a positive one at all. Specially when followed by plenty other people complaining about the company.

The Internet is not a place for censorship, and of course it's not possible or even advisable to try and remove any negative thing ever said about your company. Doing so will probably just get more attention for said comments, in the form of other people complaining about your bad practices or directly making fun of you. That content you didn't like may end up being linked from other hundred blogs, stored on the search engines indexes (Who won't remove a website just because somebody doesn't like it) and becoming popular on Social Bookmarking websites. However, a business with a good Social Media strategy can control the damage and even turn it into an advantage.

Monitoring your Internet presence beyond the traditional news outlets and editorial sites means that if there's anything wrongly said about you, your Social Media team can actually follow it with a comment explaining why it's inaccurate. If Dell had actually paid attention, the customer dissatisfied with the bad customer support could have received a call from a representative actually taking care of their problem. Tweets from people who have a problem with your brand can be found, and answered in a way that shows to any third party reader that your company actually cares and that it was just a big misunderstanding. And negative posts about your brand can be buried under tons of interesting and relevant social media content posted by your company and spread out by your users.

By failing to have a Social Media presence, companies are not only missing a great way of engaging with potential customers and become fuller members of the Internet, but they are also suffering the negative effects of uncontrolled mentions on places that millions of readers check every day. For this reason, not having a social media strategy can harm business, big or small.

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