 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Every business must serve a social purpose”. These are not the words of a social campaigner or a politician; they are the words of a banker, Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Retail and Business Banking at Barclays, one of the world’s largest banks. Barclays has been involved in at least one major trading scandal and holds the dubious honour of the most fined bank in Britain. There will be some people who will treat his words with understandable cynicism but that would be to miss the point.
The point is not whether the words are sincere or not – it is that they should have been said at all. Banks are concerned with the control of money, why should they concern themselves with any purpose beyond that? The reason is that society is demanding they do. When banks first started they fulfilled a social need in the community, to enable ordinary people to fund their ambitions. Over the years banks forgot that purpose and focused most of their efforts on funding their own ambitions through obscene profits, often at the consumer’s expense. The bubble burst in spectacular fashion with the downfall of Lehman Brothers in the US and RBS in the UK.
It isn’t just the banks that have lost their way. Now it’s critical for any business to demonstrate it has a purpose before, and beyond profit; that it seeks to improve the lives of its customers as a primary goal. Failure to have such a purpose, to be clear about it and to ensure it directs everything you do, will lose customers, employees and ultimately business value....
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is gone. But on his way out the door, he described the company’s massive, deliberate fraud on his customers and the environment as an “irregularity.” That’s bullshit.
Here’s what happened: Volkswagen jiggered the software in 11 million of its diesel cars to conceal how much they polluted. “Clean Diesel” is a pillar of Volkswagen’s marketing. (My link is to a cached copy; for some reason, the original Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” page is no longer visible.)
Here’s an English translation of the video statement from Winterkorn, made Tuesday before he resigned under pressure. Bold italic indicates questionable terms and passive voice; the text in brackets is my commentary:...
The New York Times published a brutal takedown of Amazon culture this past weekend. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent around an internal email to deny the charges. But Bezos’ reply is so weak, it makes you wonder if his heart it is in it.
In a week that’s seen South African brands take a beating on Twitter, Pick n Pay should probably have known better than to ask someone to remove a tweet linking to a blog post that criticised a new sale campaign by the company.
The post in question, written by Celeste Barlow of the Reluctant Mom blog, takes particular issue with a promotional gift the retailer recently started giving out for purchases over R150....
Reputation monitoring for your business or brand is a critical part of your online marketing strategy.
You need to know whether people are using your brand name or talking about your company on the Internet.
You also need to keep up with the social activities & mentions of your competitors.
In this post, we're going to look at the top 10 tools under $100 a month that you can use to monitor your brand & your competitors on social media....
What do you do when your business has a poor reputation online or received a poor review?A lot of businesses and individuals often wonder how they can better their online reputation.
First, let me tell you how NOT to address negativity online. Don’t create fake reviews. Fake reviews, especially the kind that are paid for, are easily identified by your potential consumers and that will break their trust in you. In addition to being caught by potential consumers, you will likely be caught by site owners and/or Google. For sites like Yelp, they have publicly shamed businesses that they have caught....
People who don’t understand PR tend to conflate it with media relations. While earning media coverage is just one of many PR activities, the profound changes shaking the news business are good news for public relations. There’s hardly an online news outlet that hasn’t taken steps to offer native advertising. The decimation of the ranks of paid journalists means more opportunity for brands to influence what gets coverage. The ability for companies to go directly to their audiences, bypassing the filter of the media, has reduced reliance on hostile outlets to tell company stories.
If you think all this presages a rosy future for the PR business, think again. As PR becomes an increasingly potent force for shaping the news people see, practitioners will need to be at least as accountable to the public as they are to their clients. The time has come to take the “public” in public relations seriously....
It might not be obvious to everyone, but it is true: the more that posts are tailored to specific circles in a social world, the less risk there is that they will cause offense or embarrassment. Thus, for anyone willing to invest the time and effort, we recommend a more sophisticated strategy, the Custom strategy, in which social media users manage both their audience and their content.
This is what Google+ was designed to facilitate. We also found people doing this on Facebook by creating two lists, one personal and another professional, and posting different content to these lists. Thus they safeguard their professional reputations while still maintaining an honest and lively Facebook identity. Custom strategies tend to be employed by journalists and public figures, who often set up distinct accounts to make absolutely clear when they are and aren’t speaking in a professional capacity.
We come away from our study with a belief that most professionals would be best served by a Custom or a Content strategy. A Custom Strategy allows for richer relationships to be forged with peers through the sharing of information that goes beyond the strictly professional. At the same time, it saves the boss from seeing too many party and baby pictures, and spares friends all the job-related content that means nothing to them. However, you must have the capabilities to execute this Custom strategy effectively or else it could backfire. A Content strategy is the next best alternative that requires fewer capabilities, but may allow you to connect with a broad audience effectively....
People often ask me, “Will customer reviews help or hurt my business?” Several months ago, I advised readers not to panic over customer reviews and to claim their accounts on Google Local, Yelp, and other sites that list businesses and accept reviews. Since then, I’ve come across a mix of opinions regarding customer reviews, and I still think that good, honest businesses benefit from reviews, even if they aren’t always full of praise.
Recent research shows that consumers who post reviews not only refrain from being overly negative, but want reviews to be balanced and informative. This is really good news for honest business owners like you....
The idea of becoming a thought leader is a nebulous andconfusing concept to grasp. Every leader’s approach is different, and there’s no secret formula to success.
Becoming a thought leader doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time — not to mention a willingness to share the “secrets” of your success — and the right mindset to master. But once you understand that it’s not about your ego or selling people on your company, you can start to unlock its true value.
To put the cycle of successful thought leadership in perspective, here are five distinct phases that need to happen...
A few years ago, my team and I were launching a leadership development program for a client. Just before we launched the pilot program, the company was hit with a high-profile scandal. A couple of rogue executives were caught playing around with the company’s finances and millions of dollars went missing. The ensuing scandal rocked this once-great company, leaving its reputation in tatters. The executives were charged.
When we kicked off the pilot session a few months later, the scandal quickly became the elephant in the room. It was clear the participants needed a forum to express their personal views on those events. We could feel their deep-seated anger, and we realized we had to bring it out into the open.
What needs and priorities define the contemporary American consumer? The Future Foundation took a look as at some key trends shaping modern life, and using its findings, selected four startups the research firm feels will appeal to these consumer needs and desires.
“They all skirt the boundary between the real world and virtual world in ways that suggest that very boundary is breaking down. They all help people take control of their lives and its objectives, and they all propel real trends. That’s why we’re watching them with keen interest,” said Meabh Quorin, managing director of the Future Foundation. “When a startup addresses actual changes in consumer behavior, it’s not just an innovation; it’s a solution.”...
No, we're not talking about Apple or Amazon or Big Data or the Marketing Cloud or Programmatic Buying.
Chevy’s Rikk Wilde “looked down at his notes often, spoke haltingly and explained to the pitcher that he'd like the Colorado” —Marketing Daily’s Karl Greenberg has the skinny today on its new “inner truck guy” conventional campaign — “because it has ‘class-winning and leading, you know, technology and stuff,’” James R. Healey reports in USA Today.
“The nervous Wilde was assured this morning he still has a job,” Greg Gardner and Alisa Priddle reported in the Detroit Free Press last evening. “And in fact he appears to have garnered millions in free publicity for the Chevrolet brand, which has received at least $2.4 million in media exposure from the unconventional presentation, according to Front Row Analytics. Bloomberg reports that is six times more than the $392,000 it would have brought in with a more polished performance.
”It did not take long for #technologyandstuff to pop up on Twitter with GM president North America Mark Reuss (@GMdudeinNA posting, “It's what I've been saying for years.....#technologyandstuff,” Gardner and Priddle report....
|
No matter how on message anyone is, there still may be a difference between what a company or brand says about itself and its reputation, and what consumers say about them. FleishmanHillard calls this the “authenticity gap.”
Every year, the company uses research and data to see which companies are on the right track, and whether they are focused on the things that matter most to the audiences that are most important to them. Last month, a group gathered in Toronto to discuss the authenticity gap and how it applies to them. Below is a broad overview from Nick Drew, FleishmanHillard’s Canadian head of research, of the data turned up in 2015....
See if your data's out there, shut down old accounts, send self-destructing messages, and more
.There’s nothing wrong with having a high profile on the web, but too much of a good thing can lead to plenty of bad things. These tools can help you get stuff done without revealing too much to hackers, marketers, and other assorted snoops....
Burger King took out a full-page, open-letter-style ad in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune this morning, calling for a truce with McDonald's and suggesting they join forces to create a "McWhopper" burger.
But McDonald's is having none of it.Burger King's idea was to "get the world talking" about the Peace One Day charity, which is lobbying for September 21 to become an official Peace Day. Fernando Machado, the fast-food chain's senior vice president for global brand management, said it wasn't just a PR stunt and that BK was hoping McDonald's would agree to sell the hybrid burger September 21....
“Many companies are showing greater willingness to take public stances on controversial issues,” said West. “While the vast majority of consumers in our study said they are likely to purchase from companies they agree with, only 3 in 10 have actually done so.
This makes me think consumer behavior hasn’t quite caught up to this new environment in which companies take stands on controversial topics.”
But the risk is evident—and ultimately begs the question: From a company perspective, is it worth it?
“The overwhelming majority of consumers in our study agreed they are more likely to buy from companies they see eye to eye with, and almost half of consumers said they had already stopped buying from a company over a difference of opinion. This tells me that consumers are willing to vote with their dollars,” said West. “But there may be more danger for many companies than opportunity—especially if you serve, as most companies do, a market with diverse political views.”...
We all know that social media plays a huge part in building and boosting your personal brand in the digital world, but do you feel lost sometimes with all the different social media channels and are not sure where to start?
There are tools that can help!Here are 9 cost-efficient social media tools that we recommend to help make your personal branding efforts easier.....
The 'Reputation Complex' is a moving combination of various reputational factors, components and drivers that are linked in a close and complicated way. This combination brings with it, for all organizations, equal risks and opportunities – the first to be managed and the second to be exploited in the right manner.
MSLGROUP's SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, Pascal Beculer shares his thoughts on the fast transformation of Reputation Management, everywhere in the world, and what it means for our clients and for us....
Within the last couple of years, you are now starting to see actual companies sharing their revenue numbers and many other things (likeemployee’s salaries). Often times, these sorts of posts are the most read. It attracts readers of all kinds, not necessari,ly just potential customers.
Some of the companies doing this are venture backed, and some are bootstrapped. It’s what makes them fun to read. You see a diversity of tactics and strategies being implemented based on what stage they are in.Here is a list of companies providing regular revenue reports that are worth the read, along with a quote from their founders about why they do it....
Justine Sacco is in the news again. Not that she wants to be. She’d like nothing more than to fade from the spotlight. But today, over 15 months after she launched the tweet that just won’t go away, she’s still the poster child for career ruination via social media. The recent revival of Justine’s story came before the release of a new book by Jon Ronson, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”
If you’ve never heard of Sacco, I’ll recap quickly. Just before boarding an 11-hour flight to South Africa, in what can only be called a monumental meltdown of discretion, she tweeted this: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” This touched off a social media feeding frenzy looking for Sacco’s blood. The world waited for her to land (#HasJustineLandedYet? became the top trender) and meet her righteous retribution.
Oh, did I mention that she was IAC’s corporate head of communications? Yeah, I know. WTF, right?...
The Marketing Society defines marketing’s primary role as follows: “To create sustainable growth by understanding, anticipating and satisfying customer need”.
We invest serious resources to probe, sense and respond to customer needs, yet we disregard the fact that well-being is just as much a consumer need. Not addressing it could potentially drive down demand.
Well-being goes beyond the individual to the community and all the way to the planet that we inhabit.If we overlay this with the fact that concern for a consumer’s well-being is one manifestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), it becomes apparent that marketers have a reason to be actively engaged in CSR...
Since it is almost impossible to monitor every website manually, having a social media monitoring tool or tools is an absolute must in today’s digital world.
Besides the reputation management angle, social media monitoring tools have a tremendous amount of additional benefits and value for a business. Here are a few to be aware of...
I once wrote a blogpost about JK ROWLING’S TERRIBLE BRANDING MISTAKE (AND WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM IT), which criticized her choice to publish a depressing, drug-infused family tragedy right after finishing her last Harry Potter book. The new book, titled The Casual Vacancy, was torn apart by hardcore JK Rowling fans who bought the novel for their little kids, expecting it to be a children-friendly story. But instead of friendship and magic, they found heavy cursing, murder, and rape.
In my opinion, which I expressed in the post, this was a bad branding choice on JK’s account, but oh my, the world thought otherwise.
The post discussion quickly escalated into a sh!%storm. The comments piled up by the dozens within hours. I even got hate mail, telling me to take down that post because how dare I tell a successful person what to do. For me, it was simply a post about branding, but many turned it into a controversy about power and gender....
Search engine optimization experts share tips and tools to help you manage your company's online reputation.
A handful of companies offer free and paid online reputation management services for consumers and businesses, including Reputation.com and Brand Yourself. In addition to using these services, or in lieu of them, both small and midsize businesses and enterprise digital marketers can take strategic steps to ensure their companies' online reputations are solid.
The following 15 tips and eight tools are all valuable and effective ways to help manage your organization's corporate reputation online....
|
![Pick n Pay shows the world how not to deal with online criticism [Update] - Memeburn | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/dbtOMJPGtYlv_ULj8ufE5zl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
This is a thoughtful post about what it takes to be a purposeful brand. Barclays Bank and Volkswagen need not apply lhough there is a long list of others that don't measure up!