This is a particularly important question to social media marketers because customers are increasingly turning to social media channels for customer support as much as for interaction. On a daily basis we witness our clients’ customers reaching out to Facebook, Twitter and blog comment areas to offer new product ideas, propose business partnerships, and yes, air grievances when traditional customer support channels aren’t responsive enough.

Heads should explode when customers post things in Facebook like “I see you here every day but you still haven’t fixed my software,” yet these posts go unattended for hours, days and weeks. I think this happens for two primary reasons:

-There’s nobody home. Companies buy into creating a presence on social channels, but still don’t fully understand how much of the communities they build shape their public image.

-There’s somebody home, but they don’t feel that dealing with customers within their job description. Marketers don’t view customer service as core to their job, and they don’t bother contacting someone in the company who is.

What we need to realize is that customers view social channels as fully integrated entities – a direct line to the company’s major decision makers. To some, this may be just a cute delusion. But it shouldn’t be. It should be a wake-up call that companies need to spend less time in traditional channels and look at social as more than just another place to issue press releases.

Facebook's new 'like' button

The game-changing feature, however, is the new ability for Web publishers to add the Like button to virtually any piece of content on any Web property. For example, let’s imagine that you operate a music blog, and you’ve posted a video reviewing the new MGMT album. You also add the Like button to this video that is associated with a subcategory “MGMT” on your site. Anytime someone comes to your site who is also simultaneously logged into Facebook, that person can Like the video. When they do this, it will show up as an item in their news feed, enabling their friends to find your content from Facebook as well. In addition, using the new plugin, it’s possible to view anyone else in their network who has liked that content without even going to Facebook (they’ll be able to see it from your music blog).

Using our example, when important news about MGMT comes out again, you could push a message into the news feed of anyone who Liked the original video and potentially drive them back to your site. They would of course be able to unsubscribe to these messages, so it will be extremely important to stay 100% on message. In other words, this enables you to send users who Liked MGMT content only that content, as opposed to also sending them content about Bob Dylan, Brahams and Ke$ha.

This is a total revolution for both market segmentation and permission-based marketing. It’s difficult to imagine, two years from now, many Web marketers who would still prefer to manage dozens of targeted email lists when it’s possible to allow Facebook users to opt into an unlimited number of topics and digest them anywhere on the Web. This is a critical addition to the social media optimization toolkit.

While embracing these concepts is important, it’s important not to get too locked into any single piece of SMO strategy or functionality in the near term. Facebook will no doubt be making many adjustments and wholesale changes to these new tentacles as they essentially focus test these on its more than 400 million users and the thousands of Web publishers that will no doubt jump in with both feet right away.

For years, search marketers have been utilizing search data trends to make predictions that help calculate the probability that certain marketing messages might connect with audiences. As one small example, you have no doubt noticed an increase in Fortune 500 companies using the term “Cloud Computing” as of late. Although this term is still somewhat esoteric to some, search strategists began noticing a sharp upward trend among certain geographic regions – notably in parts of India and the San Francisco Bay Area – back in 2008.

“In the cloud,” domineers began snapping up cloud-based domain names, and search strategists began optimizing Web properties for related terms. Suddenly, as journalists began decoding the term for small business audiences, it became nearly common vernacular.

Now there is a second measuring stick that may prove to be nearly as useful to business: Social Search. While there aren’t currently any widely available tools that accurately measure social search (but there are plenty that look promising), HP Labs analyzed nearly 3 million Twitter updates that mentioned 24-major releases over a three-month period. The researchers factored in the date of a movie’s release and the number of theatres where it opened, predicting ticket sales with 97.3% accuracy. By measuring sentiment (e.g. customer reviews), they predicted the following weekend’s returns with 94% accuracy.

As an example, the researchers predicted that the new film Dear John would earn $30.71 million on the first weekend ( actual: $30.46 million). For the film The Crazies, the firm predicted $16.8 million (actual: $16.07 million).

We’re following up with the researchers to find out more about how they sorted the data (presumably from the Twitter API) and what common tools they used, if any, to make their measurements. Social search has come a long way in the past 9 months, bolstered by Twitter and Facebook deals with Bing and Google), greatly enhancing our insight into social network sentiment and chatter. Free services such as SocialMention offer a hint of what may be available in the future to help marketers prophesize which concepts will resonate with consumers.

Banning social media from the workplace doesn’t only create resentment and a feeling that management is operating in an old business model. It also deprives the business of valuable exposure on social networks and also limits employees from creating valuable relationships with company suppliers, contractors and potential clients. Since many small businesses and services are placing their primary emphasis on Facebook and Twitter, rather than into traditional Web sites, it also impairs your employees from doing the type of research and due diligence that will make them competitive.

This is to say nothing about your current employees’ ability to refer new hires into the company. With an average cost of $8,000-$12,000 to make a traditional hire (add it up – creating job descriptions, posting ads, doing interviews, management time, etc), the money you’ll save when your employees are maintaining relationships online is considerable. Not only will it be easier for your current employees to help you fill positions using their network on LinkedIn or Facebook, but it’ll be far easier to land those candidates (note to overzealous IT Director: you’re scaring away the best candidates by not letting them log into Facebook at work).

Rather than distance your business from the future of business communications, create a smart, pro-business and pro-employee social networking policy as a permanent part of your company handbook.

Step 1 – Define Company-Sponsored Messaging Guidelines
Make a clear distinction between company-sponsored usage and personal usage, and create different guidelines for each group. Your employees that are blogging, tweeting, networking or posting on behalf of the company need a clear set of guidelines so that your brand and corporate image is always consistent, regardless of the channel they use. Focus first on the most likely potential areas of friction:

• Publishing schedule – Are employees obligated to create a posting plan in advance that will be reviewed by managers, or are they free to wing it?
• Authorized posting topics – Should your companies stick to company-focused topics only, or will you give them room to improvise?
• Non-authorized posting topics – Which topics should never be addressed?
• Authorized profile images – May employees use their personal profile pictures? If so, what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable?
• Participation policies – How to handle others that comment on your post or tweet, and define whether your employees are allowed to comment on other social sites on behalf of the company)
• Handling negative sentiment – Define how publicly visible negative comments about your company will be handled by your social media-focused employees.

Step 2 – Define Tools and Objectives
Define a common set of tools (social media management software) that will be adopted by the entire group doing social media on behalf of the company. This will make it much easier to share knowledge and be more productive. You should include at least one Facebook/Twitter management tool, such as Seesmic, as well as a social media monitoring tool, such as SocialMention. It may also be prudent to define how you will measure success. Do you care most about Fan/Follower acquisition? Retweets? Commerce derived from certain social campaigns? Traffic from social properties to your main Web site? Be clear.

Step 3 – Define Rules for Networking with Clients, Suppliers and Partners
Deepening connections with business associates can be the best thing for your business. However, it can also lead to a tremendous amount of anxiety and friction. For example, it can be extremely awkward when clients “Friend” your employees in Facebook or other sites; your employees’ first worry is that something on their personal social space might be harshly judged and cost your company business or relationships. These fears are completely legitimate.

You need to state clearly that you are fully supportive of your employees’ right to ignore or accept a social networking invitation from a colleague, client or partner. It’s their choice. You can also provide them with ideas for handling circumstances with finesse. In Facebook, it may be acceptable to Friend a client but also limit their access to less personal content. Another suggestion is to re-route the connection to a business-focused site such as LinkedIn or, in some cases, Twitter.

Step 4 – Define Rules for Limited Personal Use
This is actually the easy part, where most issues are black and white. Here are the major friction points you’ll want to address:

• Limited personal use while at work (during breaks, or at lunch) – acceptable.
• Airing grievances online with the Company or other employees (even in a closed personal network of friends) – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive company matters – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive Client information – unacceptable.
• Accepting a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.
• Ignoring a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.

As a final step, it may be wise to encourage employees to explore filtering techniques that exist within Facebook and LinkedIn so that they can handle their social networking with some degree of nuance. An example might be organizing their contacts into groups so that some more sensitive groups (clients, partners) are limited from some content.

After six years, Facebook is still gathering influence. The company estimated earlier this year that out of its 400 million users, 175 million log into Facebook every day. Many users enthusiastically interact with brands and artists in Facebook as well as other Fans of those communities. Remember that all of this is indexable content, and everything you do in this realm can play heavily into your future SEO strategy. The increased emphasis on fresh content in search may also play a heavy role in search ranking.

Here are the three most important building blocks to consider right now:

Regular and Relevant Content Updates – your Facebook posts will be contextualized though image tags, keywords used on your Page, your page title and other relevant content. The more focused your posts are topically, the more likely they are to help your overall SEO strategy.

Jump-Start Fan Growth – there are many reasons to want to create a critical mass of Facebook Fans (commerce potential, for one). But knowing that Google search is increasingly personalized, increasing your social network in Facebook may prove to be incredibly important down the line. Already, Google’s social search serves up content that your friends logged into Google social products have published or interacted with, much in the way that Facebook’s post quality now partially determines the “Top News” in your Facebook news feed. It’s completely conceivable that the same effect may start happening with Facebook Pages in Google down the line.

Facebook Connect – start looking for ways to introduce Facebook connect to other social and non-social Web properties you operate (blogs, Web sites, community areas). It’s unknown how this might affect your overall search ranking over time, but it’s a good idea in general to begin weaving your Facebook presence into your other properties.

On the other hand, Tweets are mostly public statements shared by anyone with everyone. Tweets can be loosely summarized into 4 categories: Personal, Business, Spam and re-Tweets. Many simply contain links that reference sites elsewhere. That’s all good and well with Bing and Google. Search engines aggregate, sort, route, categorize, streamline, bundle and deliver information straight to the user, then sell PPC ads against it. But the question remains as to how they will utilize Twitter live stream searches to satisfy users’ queries for products and information. Bing already has a live Twitter feed, but it’s unclear how it will evolve over time.

In the meantime, here’s what brands need to do right now:

1. Flood the Twitter channel with consistent brand messages. What current tweet search applications categorize very well are those that have distinct, recognizable names and terms—in other words, brands. And because there will be added exposure to tweets associated with your brand name, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your own brand is articulated the same way each and every time you tweet.
2. Use hashtags to associate your tweets with the right business vertical(s). Search engines will undoubtedly face many problems sorting out and categorizing tweets using hashtags. It’s not a guarantee that Google and Bing will use them, but until it’s clear how they will be handled, it won’t hurt you to add them.
3. Maintain a strong business-customer relationship within Twitter by vigilantly monitoring tweets that mention your brand. Twitter live stream searches will become an invaluable part in online reputation monitoring for any type of business or service. For now, you may need to use a 3rd party tool to do this, but it’s likely that very soon you will be able to utilize free tools within Google or Bing.

# 1 – Thicken Thy Skin. Dealing with public consumer feedback from a multitude of channels is now a fact of life for any organization. If customers don’t find you on Sidewiki, they’ll find you on Twitter or on blogs. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but do create guidelines defining when to respond to legitimate brand or service issues in a timely and effective manner. Also, be open to constructive feedback and how it might be used to improve your organization.

#2 – Post news. There’s nothing stipulating that you can’t use Sidewiki as yet another channel to communicate with your customers. Assign someone from your staff to post the news there that you would normally post on your Web site or social media pages. This allows your organization’s voice to be heard just as loudly as your customers’.

#3 Monitor it. Include Sidewiki in your daily sweeps through Google News alerts, Twitter, Facebook and other Web monitoring that you may be doing. But don’t spend much time on it. There are likely far more people talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, news sites and the blogosphere, so accordingly, you should put 98% of PR & monitoring efforts there. If Sidewiki’s popularity grows, then ratchet up your efforts as needed.

# 4 Vote. Ask your valued clients and friends to vote on comments. If your Sidewiki falls victim to haters (see the Guardian’s article “Why Framing Your Enemies is Now Virtually Child’s Play”) those associated posts can be voted down rather quickly.

# 5  Put it into perspective. A tiny portion of the Web population is using Sidewiki so far. You might be surprised with how few comments are publicly displayed on some highly trafficked Web sites so far:

• Apple.com – 20 comments

• Salesforce.com – 9 comments

• WhiteHouse.gov – 2 comments

• GoIsrael.com – 1 comment
  

Besides, you might be surprised at how nice some of the comments actually are. In our informal survey, any site with at least ten comments has at least one scathing one so far, but in many cases the comments are quite helpful.

No, this isn’t a direct quote from a legion of tech-savvy consumers. But it expresses the fears of businesses everywhere since Google debuted Sidewiki as a part of its browser toolbar several weeks ago. Just as soon as the press release hit the wires, we began hearing from our clients. Was Google really allowing anyone to make public, uncensored comments in the browser right alongside their Web site? Could any hater with a grudge and a Gmail account really sound off without any moderation whatsoever?

The simple answer is yes. Google is not simply “allowing” this. They are enabling it and even encouraging it.

The feeling that corporations were no longer in complete control over their brands really began in the 1990s, when anyone with a Web site could post whatever they dared. Then came community forums, bloggers, Wikipedia and a certain type of restaurant diner that Tweets or Yelps about anything that approaches poor service. This chart demonstrates a chronology of online sites or tools, with relative corporate anxiety in correlation to each.

Sidewiki: Should We Care?

To put Sidewiki in perspective, the only reason people care is that it is produced by Google. It isn’t a replacement for Twitter, Yelp, Facebook or a multitude of crowdsourcing applications. It just isn’t that great.

For consumers, Sidewiki has no real advantages in interface design, features or community participation than any other open medium (unless you really are a grudge-holder, since it does provide immediate gratification similar to spraying graffiti on a store front that one can’t get from Twitter, Yelp or vertical directories). For business owners, it is not a useful medium with which to communicate with customers openly. Those tools already exist elsewhere. It is in fact incredibly inconvenient. Corporate customer service and PR departments already have their hands full monitoring Tweets, Yelps, blog postings and every other possible channel.

So why do we need to pay attention? Because the Google toolbar makes Sidewiki accessible to anyone using Internet Explorer or Firefox to browse Web sites. While the majority of Google’s myriad products do not achieve mainstream success – and consumers may end up not liking it – Google Toolbar gives Sidewiki a solid delivery channel. We’re not betting that it’ll be the next Twitter, but it shouldn’t be ignored.

In our next installment, we’ll offer some tips for monitoring Sidewiki and managing expectations around it.

The suite is designed to move companies toward a community-based approach to customer service in which ideas, concerns and product development are dealt with in an open forum.  The Twitter app enables companies to search and locate customers talking about their brand on Twitter. While this in itself is nothing new – there are many such social media monitoring services  – the tool takes the idea a step further by creating customer service cases within the Service Cloud itself, ensuring that issues can be properly tracked from inception to resolution.

Other Cloud Service products include Salesforce Answers, a crowdsourcing solution, and Salesforce Knowledge.

Although Google Bomb is aimed at individuals, its lessons are just as relevant to businesses. Much has changed since Scheff’s attacks in the early 2000s that leave businesses open to online slander.

Consider these 4 points:

•       Google Dominance – Just when it looked like Bing was ready to make serious inroads on the search market, comScore measurements show Google actually pulling away from its search competitors again (Bing still appears to be primarily taking market share from Yahoo). At least for the near term, Google’s version of relevance about your business will likely be taken as “the truth.” It’s important to monitor the first two pages of search results regularly.

•       Google is Your Home Page – Depending on the industry (and who’s conducting the study), between 55-67% of Web users begin product or service research at a search engine. This fact alone illustrates just how much Web users trust Google to serve up relevant and accurate information.

•       Business Directory Dominance – It’s very difficult to beat a good quality directory on search terms, meaning that customer reviews on such directories can create a first impression can make or break a sale. In many cases, negative reviews are viewable in Google search results without a user needing to click through to see them. It’s important to monitor reviews on major directories on a regular basis. In many cases, contacting angry customers through these services can lead not only to the diffusion of the situation, but also to the removal of the negative review.  Real-world examples of companies doing just this were published in a recent New York Times article.

•       Social Media Dominance – At the time Scheff was victimized, she could actually find most of the abuse by using standard search engines. That could never happen today. Considering the hundreds of millions of users creating much of their Web conversations behind password-protected social networks each day, it’s much tougher for an average business owner to stay on top of their online reputation.  Specialized software or services designed specifically to monitor and report on social media networks are needed.

For businesses seeking to improve their online reputation, the most frustrating aspect of online reputation management for businesses may be the concept of Web site “authority.” Authority rankings are critical to search engine ranking for popular key terms and are derived from a number of different factors, including the age of a Web domain, the number of other authoritative sites that link to a specific page, the anchor text used during that linkage, and much more. When a Web site with a high authority ranking displays a negative review or comment from an abusive critic, it can be very difficult to overcome.

The real problem is that “authority” often has nothing to do with “expertise,” which can lead to a lone abuser’s sharply placed comments leading to trouble. Until around 2005, it was relatively easy to solve a reputation management problem by creating or optimizing a number of competing Web sites or pages and quickly pushing them to the top of search results, thereby burying the negative content.  While these questionable tactics were useful for reputation management purposes, they damaged the overall search relevancy for everyone (this is just one reason not to engage in tactics that attempt to “trick” search engines).

Today successful online reputation management involves a multi-pronged approach including direct contact with the abuser and/or Webmasters of problem sites, enhanced social media profiles, Web content optimization, PR, domain registration and many other tactics. If an abusive online situation gets bad enough, there’s often no choice but using an attorney, or an SEO firm, or both.