Professional brands have always been subject to attack in the media, but until recently there have not been too many options for creating your own news channel to use as platform for staging complaints. A few days ago Robert Mark from JetWhine.com covered “United Pilots give Tilton a Kick” based on United Airline pilots launching a blog asking for the termination of the company’s CEO Glenn Tilton.

United Airline Pilots - “We’ve started this web site because we’re tired of seeing the Tilton organization play the blame game”

Robert does an excellent job of defining some critical elements of the pilots site:

“Although the anti-site is not new, this well-organized site is quite a clever tactic. It’s easy for anyone to choose a juicy topic from the menu like Tilton’s “Operational Failures,” strategic blunders, financial or even employee and customer service screw ups like, “Only 38% of United employees are proud to work for the airline.” Ouch.

Something Tilton is just going to love is the convenient message form tied to Mr. Tilton’s e-mail so anyone can send him a comment. My guess is that mailbox is going to fill up pretty quickly.”

Looking away from the GlennTilton.com site, this is a coordinated effort to destroy a professional reputation (and I must add, it is a pretty well-thought effort too.)

If you search Google for - Glenn Tilton, there are 113,000 documents.

The first result is a Wikipedia entry that has already been edited to mention the GlennTilton site launched four days ago:

“The Air Line Pilots Association has long been a critic of Tilton’s management style and airline experience. On August 11, 2008, ALPA launched a website calling for Tilton’s resignation at www.GlennTilton.com.

Tilton has also been a vocal proponent of mergers in the airline industry, dating back to United’s bankruptcy days. Tilton attracted much scorn for his views on mergers, until recently with talk about consolidation among US network carriers.

Upon exiting bankruptcy, Tilton received compensation valued at $39,700,000, mostly in stock options that vest over several years, and this caused unrest among the airlines labor unions.”

The second result is an article form the Chicago Sun-Times, “United Pilots want CEO Glenn Tilton to resign.” which clearly covers a statement made by the Union “the United chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association said United needs new leadership. It launched a Web site to draw attention to what it says have been Tilton’s failures since he took over as CEO in September 2002.”

“‘‘This is not a personal attack on Glenn Tilton,’’ Wallach said. ‘‘These dismal numbers speak for themselves. They are a reflection of his inability to lead, his incompetence as a manager and his failure in virtually every category that can be measured. We have tried every conceivable way to convince him to invest in, and maximize the goodwill of, his employees. He has failed miserably.’’

Aside from Glenn Tilton, the bigger picture for online reputation problems extends to the overall United brand as well. On a search for United Airlines, one first page result is a wonderful article from Airsafe.com titled “Fatal Events Since 1970 for United Airlines“ (if that isn’t a bad brand line, I don’t know what is.)

The second negative result is a site playing on the same letters as United: Untied.com. The brutal items to assemble information against United are well assembled into brand problems that would rock the most hardened company:  The worst airline — ever, Legal Action Time, Form Letter Time, Mishandled Minors, Joining Lawsuits are all examples of categories of information there.

According to Compete.com, Untied receives roughly 11,000 unique visitors a month who read that information. Assuming that an average ticket is $300 to $400, how many of the 11,000 unique visitors a month to Untied.com are either prospective United customers or current ones? Even if only 5% are (500 monthly unique visitors) the monthly brand damage by this one site can be estimated at $150k to $200k in lost revenue. Unfortunately I would estimate that the actual percentage of possible/current airline clients is in the 25% or higher range ($750k to $1 million monthly brand impact.)

If you are aware of other brand issues online and would like us to cover some of the ramifications or solutions to the situation, please drop me a line at barry.hurd@123socialmedia.com. Our team is always looking at these issues and examing how they are affecting business. FYI- we like hearing about positive social media brand impacts as well!

The team at 123 Social Media wants to reach out and say “Thanks!” for a warm welcome. In one-hundred days since our launch we have grown to July being at almost 10,000 unique visitors thanks to our readers from around the world and a lot of effort on our team.

As we have grown, a good portion of our business readers ask a dominant question:
“What makes 123 Social Media different than an search engine optimization company?”

A lot of things make us different, but the main difference is quality information and an expert perspective. Unlike a lot of “SEO firms” with ugly landing pages and bad sales pitches that scare you away… our site’s roughly 10,000 visitors in July were here for an average of five minutes and forty-three seconds. That equates to roughly 57,000 hours of readership in July.

Needless to say, that helped our brand just a little bit.

We aim at giving quality content revolving around the very important topic of business social media. We try to let you peek inside our brains and share the information as we receive it (or sometimes even create it!) That often means looking at strategic ideas and asking the big questions, from ethical media consulting to social media fundamentals, to tactical analysis of corporate social media and social media training.

Some highlights that happened to us in our launch period was receiving honorable mention from two different social media groups:

The Biglist is maintained by TopRank’s Lee Odden. It is a list of 400 blogs that cover search engine optimization, social media, public relations, and online promotion (Thankfully we are all 4!) Two fundamental requirements of being on the BigList: Your blog must cover search marketing and it must post weekly at a bare minimum. Other considerations include, blog design, usability, writing style and quality. Thanks to Lee for putting us on the list. We promise to keep things interesting.

We also made it into the Top 20 of Alltop for the Social Media category. “You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that Alltop is trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

The one strange evolution of this site and our readers is a slightly interesting one- our business readers like to pick up the phone, send us a regular e-mail, or shake our hands at real world networking events… and our online marketing peers have conversations with us all over the net.

That makes a few articles here that missed some great conversation, so we hope that you join in and begin chatting with us a little more. For our less savvy users, we are encouraging you to take a look at joining our MyBlogLog community (join here) and signing up for a Gravatar account (see the images near our comments and the sidebar, that could be you!)

One of our biggest goals here at 123 Social Media is helping business decision makers understand that you do not need to use every Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, or Yelp out there… you just need to have a strategic understanding of how those services interact with different business needs and how you can tactically use them to reach your goals.

If you just like keeping “all those fancy things” out of your head, you can also subscribe to our RSS feed that currently has about 400 readers in it.

We do we go from here?

We have some hefty goals to produce more quality content, participate in the conversation affecting millions of professionals and thousands of industries, and to grow as a resource for businesses looking to understand social media.

Our navigation will be influenced by a great shifting tide occurring around us, however we promise to keep a positive outlook, ethical professionalism, and our problem solving mindset finely tuned.

So many corporations are jumping into the social media space that a small few are defining exactly what you should (and should not) do. Today we are going to look at ePerks.com, a real estate web site that is a lead generator for real estate agents. Looking at the overall reaction that has occurred over the past few months, this will probably be a case of how social media killed the corporation.

From the beginning of June 07, ePerks went into a fairly aggressive campaign of traffic building through various sponsored posts in the blogosphere. To start off this wonderful story, lets take a look at some amazing quotes currently floating around about ePerks:

” Sleazeball lead vendor ePerks.com (corporate motto: “We don’t totally suck because we can’t get anything right!”) has found a great new way to respond to criticism: Censorship.” ~ Gregg Swann, Bloodhound Real Estate Blog.

Beware of ePerks- “Wow, now here’s a company to avoid. I found an ad on Craigslist for real estate Broker help. I know I should have known better, but I want to share this with you so none of you make the same mistake.” - Dennis Pease - ReMax Real Estate

One of my favorite bloggers Mary McKnight created this list of posts which includes hundreds (if not thousands) of comments:

• Ruthann Macklin: Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks
• Kevin Wilhelm: Spreading the word about Vlad Zablotskyy and his battle with ePerks
• Susan Goulding: ePerks & Freedom of Speech?
• Sean Giorgianni: Zablotskyy the Scrivener
• Aaron Mallo: Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit
• Hunter Jackson: E Perks Sues Blogger Vlad Zablotskyy
• Mitch Argon: ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger
• Dennis Blackmore: Why Real estate Agents are Bailing out of ePerks
• Barry Cunningham: Real Estate Radio
• Aaron hoffman: Nominee for PR Blunder
• Felipe Cook: ePerks and Freedom of Speech
• Don Reedy: Stop ePerks and get sued
• Debra Davis: Atlanta Homes and Condos
• Colleeen Kulikowski: How ePerks, Wake Up
• Gregg and Denise Tomlinson: Eperks using questionable tactics
• Benjamin Ficker: Spreading the word about e-jerks
• Ginger Sala: ePerks vs Blogger: Is free speech at stake?
• Scott Schang: Vlad Zablotskyy - A Martyr for Reputation Management
• Andy Beard chronicling the story
• Greg Swann starting up a fund to help the blogger (Vlad)
• Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson calling them out as EJerks
• Inman News which covered Vlad’s legal problems in March.

Looking at a partial list of 25+ industry bloggers in the real estate industry giving negative reviews, we can now ask the question:

What does that type of publicity do to a company?
Well… it doesn’t help it. That is for sure!

Starting in January, ePerks traffic took a staggering impact as it went from 165k a month to 50k a month within sixty days. After the decrease ePerks never came out of the tailspin.

The reduction in visitors in January of 2008 was just a signal flare, which could have been foreseen by a simple analysis of how the site was performing months beforehand. After the service launched in July 07, ePerks pages per visit (and visit duration) took an identical route straight to the bottom. The site apparently converted very little from an outside perspective since its creation. (keep in mind that the June/July 07 numbers below are artificially inflated as the only people visiting the site those months were employees, developers, and beta users who had a reason to stay on the site.)

The outrage created in the social media blogosphere was simple: dozens of unhappy customers came out and said that they had paid for leads and saw no return. When the social media space errupted, hundreds of negative reviews quickly submarined any attempt to buy more traffic. Spending more and more budget to market a business was simply driving more prospects to turn to the blogosphere and inquire about the quality of the product they were about to spend thousands on.

The impact of the reviews appears to be a rather brutal shot at the bottom line of ePerks. Taking a look at the paid advertising driving a majority of traffic to ePerks, online budgets quickly went to zero (data provided by SpyFU)

At this point in time, searching for the name ePerks on Google takes you to result #3, a proud entry saying “ePerks- A Scam or A Gem? | Go Beyond MLS” which is the original post by Vlad Zablotskyy that may have been the spark that lit a corporation soaking itself in gasoline.

The whole situation highlights some root problems for companies:

1. Make sure you have a quality product and grow your company at an acceptable rate to provide value to your clients.
2. Never call a prospective client an idiot (this was done here.) It will come back to haunt you.
   
3. Never, Ever, EVER, turn your social media relations over to a lawyer.
   

What is your perspective on companies experiencing negative/positive impacts from social media? Does anyone else see this as an increasing trend?

Per Wikipedia “Defibrillation is the definitive treatment for the life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. Defibrillation consists of delivering a therapeutic dose of electrical energy to the affected heart with a device called a defibrillator. This depolarizes a critical mass of the heart muscle, terminates the arrhythmia, and allows normal sinus rhythm to be reestablished by the body’s natural pacemaker, in the sinoatrial node of the heart.”

I was recently thinking on this topic. Why is social media such a hard thing to wrap your business head around? Probably because we use so many terms trying to shorten our ideas and concepts into statements that area not only hard to understand, but as non-sexy as you can get. Like good health, social media tends to push novices into a dark spot where they do not understand the lingo and vocabulary. By pushing them into unfamiliar territory, they retreat and ignore the basics of getting healthy to improve their life.

If you are trying to understand social media, you are probably realizing that it has more in common with our body than you could know. Unfortunately many of us treat our bodies very poorly (FYI- if you want to treat your body better and get healthier, I suggest talking to Jamie and Meagan at Kinetix Living)

Take consistency as a point. Like a strong heart, a social media campaign has a regular beat to it. Unfortunately social media tends to be comparative to sitting in the bleachers of your favorite sports game and being trampled by the star player as they make a dive for the game point. One minute you are at rest, the next minute you are subconsciously dealing with information overload.

Those instant “ups and downs” created by communities reacting to your online presence (or lack there of) can be mitigated by having a healthy check-up and having a regiment of flexing your social media muscles.

Too many companies simply rely on one aspect of an online presence to mitigate one freak instance from doing irreparable damage. Sure you may have a website, but do you YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter, or simply converse with your own clients?

Having a presence on different services may not impact your brand today, but it can help mitigate and defend your brand tomorrow. There are three parts of understanding why having a healthy social media and online brand is good for you:

1. A strong body stays healthier, longer. If you keep fit, your body (aka personal brand) will take care of you in some rather tough situations. You can jump higher, move faster, and manage to turn heads a little more often.
2. Healthy brands, like healthy people, have dedicated friends. While a presence on Twitter or Facebook may not work for every company, having an established group of supporters and evangelists is in your best interests. If you had a heart attack in real life, do you really want to experience it alone… or do you want to be surrounded by a community of trusted supporters who know the right person to call?
3. Knowing the right person. Regardless of how good your personal network is; the “network effect” multiplies the number of people available on a ten-fold level. (I.E. Your 100 contacts give you access to 1000.) Would you rather turn to your immediate personal contacts and rely on one of them to perform open heart surgery on you, or open up the search to a few connections away?

After thinking about it, take a moment to browse the links below and give yourself an education on terms used in social media and steps that will flex your social media brain.

A good portion of online marketing is understanding how your professional brand is being influenced online. At some point in time, any company will be subject to having good (or bad) press coverage, customer commentary, or industry debate. Knowing that the conversation is occurring is the first part of winning the long-term battle of having a strong brand. For most companies, the knowledge to be aware of this information is mostly free (you just have to know it is there). For that reason, we will take a quick look at how to setup Google alerts for things that are important.

The simple description of Google Alerts is this: a simple e-mail notification that notifies you with the latest and most relevant website pages, blogs, videos, and news feeds found by Google’s search engine relating to particular search terms topics. The e-mail can be automatically set to arrive in your inbox at whatever frequency you need (daily, weekly, monthly.)

Why do you need to use Google Alerts?

This is really answered by a simple question: do you really want to be the last one to know that other people are talking about you?

There are dozens of topics (keywords) that involve you professionally. Your company name, your name, slogan, employees, products, location, competitors, clients, customers, etc.

When you write them all down, you could perhaps have hundreds of keywords and topics that would make you a more efficient business professional by being informed about things as they happen, rather than after they have happen.

Think about situations like:

• A past client post a bad review of your services- do you want to strategically respond?
• Your biggest client gets a commendation in the news- do you want to reach out and congratulate them?
• An employee posts information about the last after hours company party- should they really be publicizing some private moments?

All of this information can be incredibly valuable, you just have to condense it into a usable and friendly format.

An easy first step:

1. Visit www.google.com/alerts.
2. In the “Create a Google Alert” box on the right, insert your keyword in quotes, i.e. “underwater basket weaving training”.
3. Select the Type of alert (news, web, blog, video, etc)
4. Select your desired e-mail frequency.
5. Enter your e-mail address and you’re done!
6. Continue adding more alerts: enter your next keyword phrase, i.e. company name, competitor, employee name, etc.

Intelligence Data is the Most Valuable of all business tools

There are many ways this information can be leveraged for you professionally. Thinking a little out-of-the-box when browsing information about your business is a great way of finding niche areas that you can maximize results with.

• Manage your online identity
• Keep an eye on your industry
• Keep tabs on your competitors
• Join relevant conversations
• Expand your expertise & knowledge

If you want to delve into using Google Alerts a little more strategically I suggest you also read these articles:

• Online Reputation Control
  
• Social Media Measurement
• Can the Web Destroy Your Business?
• 10 Steps of Online Branding and Reputation Control