Communication Tools
Social Media Solutions: Monitor, Engage, and Bulletproof Your Brand
Digital and social media has fundamentally changed crisis communications in the 21st Century. Where companies once had days or even weeks to deploy their response plans, today they must face the immediacy and viral nature of the Internet. Increasingly, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube dictate the headlines of our newspapers and the lead story on our nightly news.
Right now, bloggers outnumber traditional journalists 100 to one. Facebook has more than 240 million active users – most of whom are over the age of 30 and many of whom spend more time on Facebook than they do watching television. Eight hours of new content is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. And, according to a recent report in the New York Times, 14 million people visited Twitter nearly 100 million times in March 2009 alone.
This new reality means a company can no longer afford to wait for the stone tablets of traditional media to alert you to crisis. When your brand and reputation come under attack online, you must be ready to act at a moment’s notice.
Do you know the high-authority bloggers that cover your industry? Are you vigilantly monitoring what they are saying about you? Have you identified potential supporters in the digital media space who can serve as third party brand ambassadors when criticism comes your way? Are you leveraging the power of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to not only market your products or services, but to bulletproof your brand in times of crisis?
These are the fundamental considerations that are the difference between winning and losing in the modern media environment. Levick Strategic Communications possesses the knowledge and expertise to transform a social media space that is fraught with peril into a valuable tool that can:
- Prepare your organization in advance of a crisis to fully understand your online reputation and to build online communities of support – brand ambassadors – that will respond at the first sign of a crisis in greater volume and frequency than any single corporate communications department could ever hope to on their own;
- Actively monitor the online space in real time to serve as an early warning system ready to alert you to a crisis at the earliest possible second;
- Enable you to shape the online dialogue with bloggers and online journalists before the narrative is set by the mainstream press; and
- Bulletproof your brand by building an online bank of trust with your most vital audiences before a crisis dictates their first impression of your company.
Crisis communications battles are being fought in an entirely new arena. Levick Strategic Communications understands the critical importance of integrating online and offline campaigns to ensure your brand’s reputation is protected in the online marketplace and that your organization is set up to win in the Court of Public Opinion.
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