As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more. The first paper covers enterprise reputation management, a paper by Toby Bell from Gartner Research.

Toby does a good job laying out some of the fundamental ideas that organizations should be bringing to the table. As we move further and further into the information age, we will see more cases of companies using online reputation and brand control covered in the Gartner paper.

Two important bullet points:

• Time scales on the internet are more compressed and the implications of a negative event can be far-reaching. In many PR and communication issues, there are days, weeks, or months to analyze and create a strategy. Social media often leaves minutes, hours, or at best days to respond.
• Social media is an unfamiliar territory for enterprises, with very different rules for engagement. From our perspective, communication professionals and web savvy marketers need to plan for the change between business to consumer, small and medium business, and enterprise communication. Companies are treated differently in the social media environment- often leaving influencers within an industry to determine the fate of how media interaction occurs.

If you are in the media space and don’t read Gartner’s papers- you should consider checking them out “Policies and Procedures to Manage Enterprise Internet Reputation“.