Franchise Update Magazine Issue II, 2011 | Page 29

an online reputation
management strategy?

Ed Waller, CertaPro
Vice President, Customer
Relations Management

It is essential for brands,
especially franchise
brands, to have a reputation management strategy for the Internet. It
has always been the role of the franchisor to promote and protect the brand.
In the Internet age there are new challenges online that must be addressed
appropriately. In the old days, you put
up a website and you directed people to
go there and learn about you. You probably had a way for them to send you an
email and maybe you had a coupon to
print or detailed request form to fill out.
Those days are gone. People no longer
want to see what you are saying about
yourself on your website. Web 2.0 and
social media have changed all that. The
Internet is now all about individual content and peer-to-peer interaction. People
are no longer reading your website, they
are reading what other people are saying
about you everywhere else. There are
conversations about your brand taking
place online—conversations you may or
may not know about—and you need a
strategy to deal with them.
Your brand core strategy needs to deal
with three things: 1) finding the conversations, 2) inserting yourself in them, and
3) living with them forever. Finding the
conversations is relatively easy. You can
contract that out, subscribe to services
that will find them for you, or assign
the task to someone in your organization who is web savvy and lives online.
Inserting your brand in conversations is
a little trickier. When you find a conversation about your brand, think of how
you would react to it if you were all at
a wedding reception and you overhead
the conversation next to you. How would
you act? What would you say? That is

how you need to act online when you
are inserting yourself in a conversation
about your brand.
Last, whatever you do, be prepared to
live with it forever. Diamonds are forever,
and what is put up on the web is a real
close second. Worry as much about how
your words will read in the moment as
they will a year or two from now.
You can never start too early, and you
can almost never say too much. Don’t
wait for the conversations to come to
you, go start some. Facebook, Twitter,
and Blogger make that pretty easy.
Wendy Odell Magus, Kiddie
Academy
Vice President of Marketing

We have a multifaceted
reputation management
strategy. We believe it is
important to know what
people are saying about
our brand so we can be smarter about
how we communicate to our customers,
and so we can proactively address opportunities that arise. We encourage and
empower all brand stakeholders, whether they are employees or franchisees, to
constantly monitor for coverage of our
brand and to bring that intelligence back
to the marketing team.
The marketing team, including inhouse staff and our agencies, uses several
different platforms and methods to aggregate coverage of the brand. We track
all of the mentions and assign values to
each: positive, neutral, or negative. We also
track resolution of negative comments.
When coverage is negative, we engage
the associated franchisee in responding. A variety of tactics are used, all of
which abide by a high level of transparency. Ideally the person originating the
negative comment is engaged directly in
a one-on-one discussion to address the
concern and rectify the base problem.

The discussion should take place “off
line” rather than in a public forum. Our
goal is to have the negative mention removed or updated with an explanation
about the resolution. At the same time,
we work with the franchisees to ask their
happiest customers to balance anything
negative with positive input. We have a
very good success rate with this strategy,
though the tactic is intensive.

Grow Market Lead

CMO
roundtable: Does your brand have

Marci Kleinsasser, PuroClean
Vice President, Marketing

Our brand is one of our
most important assets.
We leverage our brand
and our reputation in the
digital world as we do in
the offline world with the ultimate goal
to drive business to our more than 300
locations. We do this through our SEOoptimized website, blogs, social media
marketing, and an integrated PR strategy. We then monitor and measure all
of these efforts daily through both Google
Analytics and our “listening” strategies
on each social network. Should we discover consumer-generated media or
posts, we will first investigate the facts
and determine the best course of action:
1) Is the post true or a competitor
spreading rumor, etc.?
2) Provide an honest response, always
taking the higher ground.
3) Offer a resolution personally, and
continue the discussion offline as necessary.
4) It is critical that a member of our
Franchise Support Center engage in the
discussion or reply to the blog post as
soon as possible, even if it was a post to
a local office.
At the brand level, we have a