There’s No Hiding in Social Media

Whether it’s an embarrassing video of one of the NBA’s leading players getting dunked on, or the trailer for a highly anticipated movie, some leaked videos should remain…leaked.

When brands try and control social media (which goes against the whole idea), they can end up hurting their brand image, and the two most recent social media blunders were no exception. For the record, this does not mean companies should let libel/slander/copyright issues abound on the web.  But recently, there were two instances where videos surfaced that Nike and Disney didn’t want anyone to see, and their curmudgeon-like responses sparked some intense brand dissonance (we’re writing an entire blog entry on it, for goodness sakes!).

When cameras caught  Xavier’s Jordan Crawford dunk on LeBron James a few weeks ago, Nike made sure to confiscate the footage (as rumored, per request of LeBron). As LeBron is a huge endorser for Nike, obviously they didn’t want the Nike image to be damaged by the superstar’s slip-up.  Of course, two phones with the capability to take video caught the dunk, and the video got out anyway.

Sweeping an error under the rug does more harm than good in the age of social media. Instead of a quick laugh about how the LeBron got dunked on by a college player, the talk was all about how Nike (or LeBron) tried to hide the video. Now both reputations are tarnished. Honestly, most people (myself included) don’t even think the dunk is that big of a deal. I only saw the video because of Nike’s response; I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Nike wasn’t the only one to generate negative buzz by trying to hide video content. When video leaked from Alice in Wonderland, Disney forced YouTube to take the videos down. The videos were already creating an immense amount of viral buzz, and could have really pumped up promotions for the movie. As the end-user, I wouldn’t have heard of this debacle if Disney hadn’t chosen to play big brother. It just made it harder for me to find the trailer online (booooo).

In social media, the best thing you can do is roll with the punches, take whatever you’ve had thrown at you and work with it. The worst thing you can do is try to eliminate a problem by pretending it didn’t happen. The word will always get out, because it already did!

Because Disney pulled the trailer, it missed out on days of momentum building for its new movie. Basically, Disney sabotaged it’s own WOM campaign. Nike may not have gotten a lot of promotional use out of the LeBron video, but by the time Ben Roethlisberger was making headlines, every one would have forgot about LeBron’s debacle anyway.

Google Trends, or Cop Without a Badge, or Xbox Live

With a title like that, you might wonder what the heck this blog entry is all about. But if you have ever used Google Trends, you know that I’m simply focusing my blog entry on timely topics to increase my search engine optimization.

Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see the current top 100 searches in Google. This is useful for blog writers, news columnists, and sometimes even stock traders, because it is shows what people want to know.

Now there are certain ways to optimize your post without breaking an unspoken code of ethics in the blogosphere. For example, if I were to write a post about our Twitter expertise, it wouldn’t make sense (or help our audience) if I peppered the entry with “danielle staub” or “xbox live” or “cop without a badge.” If I’m writing about Twitter, I should just be writing about Twitter (and maybe including Twitter trending topics like “Sotomayer”). Luckily, since this post is about search engine optimization, tagging this post with the aforementioned phrases is completely ethical

Alternatively, if I were to write a blog post about the Real Housewives of New Jersey and comment on the word-of-mouth that spawns from each episode and probably contributes to the success of the show, well, that’s just good blog writing! The key is to give your audience what they want – information on the topics that they are searching. Usually you can do this easily just by doing some quick research first.

So my tip is this: when applicable, keep your posts in line with what people are searching for. Want some tips? I’m happy to help. If they don’t like it, they can always click the “back” button. But don’t try and artificially optimize your post if it doesn’t have anything to do with the keywords you are using. After all, the worst thing you can do is piss off the people on the internet.

Twitter Gets Spammed

As Twitter rapidly grows, people are making more concentrated efforts to take advantage of its traffic. In some cases, this means spamming it by creating a “trending topic.” According to Mashable, these trending topics are fairly easy to create, and once you start a trend it shows up on every Twitter homepage.

A recent trend today is “#twitterpornnames” or “Twitter Porn Names” which is a silly game where you find out what your porn star name is by combining your mothers maiden name with the street you grew up on. According to PC World, this might actually have been an attempt to gain sensitive information from Twitter users. After all, what are the questions you usually need to answer when you forget your password?

A further problem is that instead of creating some trending topics, spammers can also just include the trending topics in their tweets, and it’s like free advertising. Anybody that clicks the trending topic will see their marketing message.

If Twitter can help filter out the spam, then legitamite topics will more easily rise in popularity, making it a more honest and representative tool. This is our shout out to twitter, hoping that the problem gets fixed. (ps – also a large thanks to Mashable for keeping us posted about these updates)

Transparency is King

Belkin’s recent screw up reminds us that transaprency is king. What separates word of mouth most from advertising and PR is that WOM is natural, organic, unpaid, and comes from the consumer.

Not only does unethical WOM hurt the credibility of the industry, but get ready to be exposed. One of the best things about word of mouth is that anything buzzworthy can spread like wildfire.

Once The Daily Background broke the Belkin story, the post was submitted to Digg, where it eventually made the front page and was read by tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands of users.

Belkin has since issued this statement apologizing for the event, but is it enough? Probably not. Here’s just one more reason to keep things on the up and up. If people like you’re brand they’ll talk about it. Consider giving them the tools to do so, rather than hiring people to fake it.