Its often difficult to explain to clients the importance of monitoring their reputation online and justifying time and money spent on online communications can be a challenge.

This example will help!

On Monday, April 13, 2009 a couple of Dominos employees took it upon themselves to post this video on YouTube

Within 2 days the video had over 690,000 viewers and was shaping up to be a real social media nightmare for Dominos

On Digg - the video was favored by over 5,000 viewers

… causing a twitter storm!

And here’s a snapshot of Google News results for

Dominos Pizza…

Apart from the obvious  - Dominos problem was they allowed the video to gather attention for 48 hours before responding with this statement

The moral of the story?

This could happen to any one’s brand - we know that.  What is key is to constantly monitor social media and respond immediately! A global franchise like Dominos simply can’t afford to ignore what’s being said about it online.  Dominos have learned that the hard way.

But its not just global brands, we all need to keep an eye on what’s being said about us online.  This is the new ‘crisis communications’.  If somebody is going to say something negative about you or your brand they are most likely to say it online.  If you are not monitoring the internet, like Dominos, you could have over half a million people knowing the bad news before you do.

So here are some tips for small businesses…

• regularly ‘Google’ yourself
• set up Google alerts to monitor your company name, brands, the names of key personnel
• set up a Twitter account and get int the habit of searching for your company/brand names
• respond to any comments about you as quickly as possible, interaction and communication can work wonders!