1. Don’t get caught snoozing. Marketers, you may get the weekends off, but bloggers don’t have that luxury. In fact, often their busiest times are the weekend. You need to have alerts set up about your brand’s presence in the blogosphere (and on social networks), and be prepared to respond quickly when they’re triggered. The folks at McNEIL-PPC were caught snoozing while their Motrin brand was circling the drain one weekend after a new marketing campaign offended the mommyblogger crowd and all hell broke loose on Twitter. They had no backup plan in place, no dark website ready to light up, and ended up taking the site down for more than a day while they figured out what to do.
2. Don’t be afraid to apologize. The good news is that the Motrin folks apologized. The bad news is it took them too long. When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.
3. Take your campaign door-to-door. Another very smart thing that Matt did was respond directly to each Twitter (and a lot of the bloggers) who had called him out (he responded to my tweets, and even agreed to get a picture taken of him wearing the shirt I made him) but I’m still waiting for him to chime in on one of my blog posts).
4. Silence is deadly; you cannot not communicate. This is communications 101, folks: silence speaks volumes. In my old days as a social media consultant for a PR agency, a client approached us that had been called out for astroturfing. Apparently some well-intentioned junior marketing folks thought it was a good idea to reply to a negative post about their company and defend the product. They did so anonymously, representing themselves as users. The blogger smelled something fishy, checked the IP addresses and called them on it in an even bigger and more negative post. They asked us if they should respond. I said it depends on how influential the blogger is. Turns out, his blog post was on page one of Google searches for their name. That’s influence, my friends, even if you’ve never head of this blogger before. So I encouraged them to respond, and execute on an SEO campaign. They never responded, but they at least got the SEO campaign going.
5. Don’t fake it. You’ll get caught. My client did. Coke got caught, and so did Sony and Wal-Mart.
6. Don’t be afraid of controversy. Do you have a crazy but incredibly brilliant person in your office who may not always walk the company line, but who’s also very smart about your product, or one application of your product? Don’t keep that person chained up in the basement like another client of mine did—I guarantee they’ll get a readership. Why? Because crazy is authentic. Nobody talks like marketers do. Be real. Let the guy do three posts about your product and one post about Japanese sword fighting and its relevance to cloud computing (don’t know where that one came from).
7. Lawsuits are great publicity—for the people being sued. Think twice before you send that Cease and Desist letter. A former client got one from Apple and got tons of (overall incredibly positive) publicity around it. When T-Mobile’s parent company threatened to sue Engadget over its use of the color magenta, all hell broke loose online. Guess who came out looking like the loser?
8. Staff up. When Target became the target of a blogger’s ire, their response landed them in the New York Times, and not in a positive light. Why did they diss this blogger? Because, ultimately, they complained that they just weren’t staffed to deal with responding to every blog query. Folks, pony up the dough to get a few social-media savvy people on your marketing and customer service teams. Comcast did, and they’re now the heroes of corporate social media responsibility. Worth every penny!
9. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Have an outspoken critic? Bring them into the fold. Don’t ignore them—they’re passionate and will probably keep on blogging. Don’t sue them—that just gives them more to blog about. Reach out to them on a personal level, invite them into your organization to understand how things work. Your most outspoken critics can also be your biggest advocates—get them to think about you differently, and you’ve turned a critic into an ambassador… Or at least quieted them down a bit!

Here’s a quick 10-question test you can give your company/client to see how social media savvy the brand is:

SOCIAL MEDIA SAVVINESS SCORE

Score one point for each completely affirmative answer:

1. Web Traffic Test: Using Alexa, is traffic to your site trending up?
2. SEO Test: Searching for your brand on Google, is the first page of search results entirely positive or neutral in tone?
3. Blog Interactivity Test: Do you have a blog, and if so, are people commenting on it regularly?
4. Blog Authority Test: Using Technorati, do you have a registered blog, and does it have high authority?
5. Content Syndication Test: Does your blog or website have RSS feeds available?
6. Multimedia Content Test: Using YouTube, does your brand have its own channel set up, and is it being fed?
7. Social Bookmarking Test: Using Delicious or Digg, are pages from your blog or site being heavily bookmarked?
8. Brand Visibility Test: Do you have a branded presence (an account in your brand’s name or a well-known brand evangelist) on Twitter, and is it being updated regularly?
9. Social Networking Test: Does your brand have its own page or group on Facebook or MySpace?
10. Wiki Test: Does your brand or product have a Wikipedia entry?

Add up your YES answers—you have to answer YES to every part of multi-part questions like #3, #4, #6 and #8—to get a score between 0 and 10. Where do you stand?

• 10 – FTW! Great job! But make sure you’re using all your channels. Don’t join something just to be there.
• 8-9 – w00t! Your brand is social media savvy. People probably think that you get it. Make sure you’re using each channel effectively.
• 5-7 – HTH! You’ve got a good start on things, but are probably missing some important elements of your social media strategy. Maybe we can help?
• 3-4 – OMG! Where have you been? You need to get started. It’s not that hard. Really. Yes, it will take time, but it’s time well spent, both for your career and for your brand.
• 1-2 – WTF? Get yourself and your bosses trained on this stuff. NOW! The sky isn’t falling, YET, but you need to know this stuff!
• 0 – YT? Hello? Is this thing on? Wow… How’d you even find this post? Call me.