People are talking about you. No matter who you are or what you do, if you’re in the public eye, someone is talking about you. In a perfect world, they only have good things to say, but the hard truth is that at least some percentage of what’s said about you (or your company) at any given time will be bad.

Sometimes very bad.

This year, GoDaddy ran yet another oversexed Super Bowl ad, and some viewers were once again offended. But thanks to the instant “zeitgeist tracking” that happens using social media tools like Twitter, people were not only sharing their displeasure, but GoDaddy competitor Network Solutions was able to use all that negativity to their advantage, urging current GoDaddy customers to shift their hosting duties to Network Solutions as a (profitable) sign of protest.

And, as others noted, all of this happened right under GoDaddy’s nose, even though they employ someone named GoDaddyGuy to monitor their company’s reputation on Twitter. Whoops.

So what’s a company to do? How can you manage negative publicity when social media allows messaging to travel so wide and so quickly?

Join them.

When Dell was getting trashed by Jeff Jarvis due to their horrible customer service, they got the message and, as part of the solution, created a blog to better connect with their customers (and help stave off the ill effects of Jarvis’s negative tidal wave).

ComcastCares is how Comcast uses Twitter to answer customers’ questions (and manage customer expectations).

Ford’s one-man social media machine, Scott Monty, personally corrects and rebuts any misleading or misinformed Twitter discussions about Ford and their vehicles by providing links to relevant info and statistics.

Even public servants are getting into the game. When ticket-holding visitors were barred from attending the inauguration during the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” snafu, they used Facebook as a way to rally and demand satisfaction — and at least one official who’s taking responsibility for that mistake actually joined Facebook specifically to apologize to the group publicly.

It’ll be interesting to see how this GoDaddy “snafu” shakes out, since one undeniable side effect of all the negative publicity is that people are still, for better or worse, talking about GoDaddy. But since you can also never truly control what people will say about your brand, the next-best thing you can do is engage those people who feel negatively about your brand directly. Find out what’s causing their negative opinion. Is it a problem you can fix? Is it a case of misinformation, or under-information, that you can improve?

Instead of arguing about why you’re right, use these instances as opportunities to learn what you or your company could be doing better. Because the only thing worse than people talking badly about your company is people not talking about your company at all.

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Twitter is a public instant messaging tool. It allows users to send updates or answer one another’s questions, but within limits of 140 characters (that’s numbers, letters, spaces, punctuation, etc.) per update. Thus, brevity is key.

So how could something so simple (and, some might say, so seemingly useless) become an increasingly important tool to help businesses engage with their customers? To answer that, let’s look at the way some businesses are using Twitter.

* ComcastCares is Frank Eliason, a one-man damage control unit for Comcast. If a Comcast customer has a tech support issue, Frank is often their first — and sometimes only — point of contact. He can personally diagnose the problem and often helps a person resolve the issue without having to spend precious hours on the phone. And what’s good for Comcast’s customers is good for Comcast.

* Adagio Teas uses Twitter to poll their customers about their tea drinking habits, offer tea tips, announce new products and flavors, and issue coupon codes that are redeemable in their web store.

* Mimobot is Evan Blaustein, founder and CEO of Mimoco, which produces stylish USB Flash Drives designed to look like outlandish cartoon characters. He uses Twitter as a way to keep in touch with his audiences, announce sales, promote Mimobot booths at trade shows and more. But he also hosts a series of daily contests designed to keep his followers (or “subscribers,” in Twitter parlance) paying attention; contest winners receive a free Mimobot.

* Huffington Post is the Twitter arm of the powerful political blog of the same name. Their Twitter account is an aggregator of all their authors’ articles; it sends out an automated update every time a new piece is posted. To them, Twitter is purely a promotion channel.

* Betty Draper is a character on the AMC original TV series Mad Men, which uses Twitter as a novel way to interact directly with their audience through the personae of their characters. (At least, that was the assumption; the reality of the situation is a bit more complicated…)

As you can see, there are numerous ways that a business can choose to engage their audience on Twitter. And judging by the number of followers each of the above examples has, their customers consider these companies’ approaches to add value to their web experience.

So… how could YOUR company use Twitter? (And, if you already are, what’s YOUR approach? If you’d like to see more examples, check out this list of the Top 40 Brands Using Twitter on Mashable — and, while you’re at it, follow us on Twitter!)

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Business Smart Tools founder Valorie Luther sat down last summer with MediaPost‘s Cathy Taylor to discuss social media — namely, who’s using it, how and why. Having reported on the media for over a decade, Cathy brings a unique perspective to her assessment of the social media landscape.

Among her observations:

* Twitter has become a “virtual water cooler” for telecommuters who crave social interaction but work from home.

* Companies are still slow to embrace social media, except as a means of damage control during a PR crisis.

* Before a company dives into social media, they’d benefit by first LISTENING to what their customers are already saying about them online.

If you’d like to hear more from Cathy, be sure to check out her blog (Adverganza) or follow her on Twitter — and while you’re at it, follow us on Twitter, too!

Last week, fellow Twitter user Mel Brooke raised the issue of companies taking up space on social networks without actually adding any value to those communities. Her comments included:

… if you join to push something and don’t immerse in the culture, I feel you are taking advantage.

and

… if meeting your own needs interferes with the community’s intent, a big problem arises.

Her point raises serious questions for companies seeking to join any online communities for purely promotional purposes: does your marketing create value for the users of that community, or is it just generating more noise and distraction (and, in the end, causing resentment of your brand)?

You can often infer this answer from measurable factors, like:

* Does the community respond when you ask a question / offer them information?

* Are a large number of the people you choose to “friend” or “follow” also following you back, or are they ignoring you?

* What are the people in that community saying about your brand?

If all seems well — and, if you’re truly conducting two-way dialogues with your community — then you have no reason to worry. But if the above factors are turning up overly-negative results, it’s time to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong AND how you can better interact with your fellow web users.

Long ago, that problem might have been solved by guessing at what the underlying issue might be, and then trying a new (and untested) approach. But in today’s age of increased business transparency, there’s another, more valuable solution available: ask the users. As irritated as they might be if they feel they’re being marketed at too heavily, some will appreciate your honest interest in finding a value-added middle ground, and they’ll be willing to help you set a tone / frequency / approach that more people will consider beneficial to their own needs.

Because you’re not getting involved in social media to annoy your customers — are you?

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How many businesses do you think are using Twitter? A few of them are listed here — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some of these businesses are using Twitter for personalized customer service. Some are using it as a bulletin board. And others are encouraging their employees to use Twitter all by themselves, rather than asking them to do so as the “official voice” of their company. (We do a little of everything.)

Is it working? Is Twitter paying off for these companies?

Ask Frank Eliason, who’s been manning the ComcastCares account since its inception — and who’s tackled hundreds of customer service issues in 140 characters or less.

Ask Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who mixes his Twitter business with pleasure — and makes his company seem all the more human while doing so.

Or ask Dunkin’ Donuts, who deputized one employee, “Dunkin’ Dave,” to serve as the company’s informative (and amusing) public face on Twitter.

If those three household names think Twitter is worth their time, imagine what YOU could use it for…

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With the arrival of YouTube came the advent of “viral” videos — clips that spread from viewer to viewer at an alarming rate.  Sometimes they’re funny or satirical, and sometimes they appeal to our deeper emotions and our need to connect on a personal level.  But they always involve something that other people WANT to talk about, which makes them easy to pass along, over and over.

Ever since “viral” entered the marketing lexicon, experts have been clamoring to teach businesses how they can create “viral” campaigns that will turn their products into beloved household names.  “Give us a product,” they essentially claim, “and we can craft a campaign that people can’t HELP but talk about.”

Which, of course, is a lie.

Any successful “viral” video catches lightning in a bottle.  It succeeds because it’s new, different, unusual or emotionally charged.  It rarely has anything to do with a product or service, and if it does, that product or service is often ancillary to the actual buzzworthy content of the video.  (For example, when Doritos solicits armchair videographers to create their own Super Bowl commercials, everyone who discusses the resultant ads talks about the creativity of the videos or the marketing campaign itself… but not the chips.)

Buzz happens because a product or service is worth talking about in the first place.  If you have to invest conspicuous amounts of money into an ad campaign intended to generate “viral” buzz about your company, you may want to ask yourself why your customers aren’t already buzzing about your products and services in the first place.

Social media isn’t about inventing buzz from scratch.  It’s about empowering your customers to speak more clearly and practically about the things they like (and don’t like) about your company.  Because one video in a million will become “viral,” but nothing spreads faster than the truth.

Photo by iba.

Long ago, advertising followed this timeline:

* You buy ad space in a newspaper.
* The newspaper runs your ad.
* You get additional business because of your single ad.
* Repeat.

The media may have changed, but the concept has remained the same: advertising is a one-time shot at getting someone’s attention. Thus, advertising campaigns were born, to ensure that the same ad has multiple chances to reach the same people, over and over.

But what happens on the internet, when everything is both instantaneous AND eternal?

Fellow blogger Chris Abraham thinks social media may be changing the timeline of web advertising into something that’s both longer AND multifaceted. Now, social networks provide web users with numerous ways to FIND your business online. And the “long tail” permanence of most web content means a video or blog post you created in 2005 is still being discovered anew by Google searches even today.

All of which means that YOUR company needs to approach social media not in terms of “what we need to say TODAY,” but rather, “what we need to ALWAYS be saying.”

So… which elements of your company are SO universal, they belong in EVERY aspect of your online presence?

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Last week, we mentioned the importance of being “present” in as many social media forums as you can handle, because you never know which one of them might help a new customer (or a hundred of them) discover your business.

This week, let’s tackle the nuts & bolts of HOW to be everywhere.  Because even though it seems like there’s an endless supply of social media tools to explore, your hours in a day are still locked in at 24, and you’d like to use a few of those for pursuits other than work…

The good news is, you can be everywhere using one of 3 basic approaches:

The Billboard

This is the least time-consuming (but also least personal) way to use social media: as a one-size-fits-all media outlet for your message.  This means you essentially take the same information you’d use in one format — like a blog — and repurpose that content everywhere else you “are” online — on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Same message, different outlets.

The upside?  Once you have your master blog post or ad copy designed, the rest of your time is spent copying-and-pasting, or otherwise rearranging that message to fit into all of the other outlets.

The downside?  You’re not really being “social” in this case, since you’re essentially using each platform as a one-way conversation — more like traditional advertising but with more distribution points.

The Funnel

This approach presumes that you have a “home base” — a website, web store, or some other central hub that you’d like all of your new visitors to end up at.  In this case, you can utilize as many social media tools as you’d like, but the purpose for each of them will be to offer bite-sized glimpses of the “full story.” If people want more, they’ll have to click through to your home base.

The upside?  Social media is not an arena that prides itself on long attention spans, so a bite-sized message or teaser is often ideal for a medium that lends itself well to skimming.  Plus, you can save the bulk of your time and effort for the visitors who are interested enough to click through to your hub, rather than spreading yourself too thin across multiple platforms.

The downside?  If you’re encouraging the bulk of your social interaction or customer involvement to take place in one (web) location, you may miss out on opportunities to engage people more fully throughout your additional outposts.

The One-of-a-Kind

Not for the faint of heart (or the short of time), this solution calls for a dedicated involvement on the part of you (or whomever comprises your “social media team”).  Here, you’re seeking to customize the delivery of your message AND the quality of your interaction with new (and existing) audiences within each individual social media platform you inhabit.  In this strategy, all tools are equal, and someone commenting on your blog post is every bit as important as someone who silently follows your photo stream on Flickr.

The upside?  Quality of engagement.  Instead of using social media as a bullhorn, this option truly allows you to invest a personal touch in your online interactions, and helps you discover “what works” for each audience on each platform.  That means your ROI will be much higher (but so will your invested resources).  AND, as an added bonus, you’ll learn much more about your audience because you’ll be listening, acting and reacting to them, as opposed to merely shouting at or shepherding them.

The downside?  A lack of time.  The nuances of each of these tools can be exploited ever more fully, but to do so might require a person to spend as much time online as they spend offline — if not more.

So which solution is best for YOU?  Honestly, you won’t know until you’ve begun to experiment with these tools and measured their impact on your business.  But, as in most things, time — and how much you have to share — will tell.

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Once upon a time, a company could make a healthy living just by advertising in one form of media.  Sure, you might invest a minimal amount in radio or TV, “just in case,” but if print ads were how most of your customers found you, then print ads were where most of your advertising dollars went.

Today, social media offers a nearly infinite array of outreach opportunities to help you find new customers — but how do you know WHICH one is where MOST of them will come from?

You don’t (yet).

That’s partly because these tools are still new, and therefore the TOOLS are still finding their audiences at the same time you’re using them to find YOUR customers.  It also means that the number of users for each emerging web tool might grow exponentially over the course of a year, and if you don’t invest at least some time and effort in maintaining a presence across multiple sites / tools / platforms, your target audience might flock to one of those services you’re not using — and then you’ll be playing catch-up.

So why get caught at the wrong party when you can be at all the parties at once?

If you’re mounting a social media presence, be sure to use the central, proven tools that are getting the most buzz (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.), but also set aside some time for the exploration of new services that are just starting to catch on with a wider audience (Seesmic, StumbleUpon, NING).  You don’t need to be active on each service every day, but you do need to have a consistent message across all of the platforms.  Because you never know when one of these new services or destinations might erupt into The Next Big Thing — and if you’re late to the party, one of your competitors will almost certainly be in your seat.

Next week: HOW to Be Everywhere at Once (Without *Actually* Cloning Yourself)

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If your company is using social media to interact with your customers, you presumably want to know what those customers think.  You WANT them to tell you how you’re doing, what they like (and what they don’t), and what they wish you would do more (or less).

But in order to maximize the use of any feedback you receive, you have to be able to ACT on it — and that means knowing WHOM to share that feedback with.

For example, Bigelow Tea is beginning to experiment with the microblogging service Twitter. In addition to driving attention toward some of Bigelow’s blog posts, Twitter has also enabled tea drinkers to let the company know what their favorite flavors are, how and when they drink their favorite teas, and what information (like caffeine and health benefits) they’d like to know more about.

All of which is great to know, but if the right people AT Bigelow don’t find out about this information, it would simply go to waste.

So as your company starts interacting with your customers via social media sites, make sure part of that process includes a gathering and reporting of any useful information to the departments that can actually make use of this information. Without that step, you might have a pleasant conversation, but it won’t lead to an improved experience for your customers or an improved bottom line.