Why employer brands should listen to online conversations - Guardian OBO vs. British Gas

We're often talking about the need for brand owners to 'listen to the conversation' and to develop cogent online reputation management strategies. Why? Well, if you don't know what people are saying about your organisation, how can you respond? For corporate recruiters, if you think of the internet in terms of a long tail of opinions and experiences, how do you begin trying to ensure that the prevailing view is positive?

It's not always easy however to articulate why - and how quickly - social media conversations happen, so I thought it might be interesting to consider this example from the Guardian's over by over ( OBO ) coverage of the recent England vs. India test match. To give this some context, the Guardian 'commentator' is watching the game on Sky TV and providing a loose overview of the action, whilst engaging in email banter with readers. It mightn't sound very compelling, but it's actually quite a social / engaging way of following the game. Anyway, Mike Adamson was reporting on this session; England are in trouble at 94 for 3, but - most importantly - Mike is not happy with British Gas. The entire session is basically taken over by participants giving BG a kicking, and it graphically illustrates how fast bad news spreads and how willing people are to dive in with their experiences, which are then in turn commented on and shared. These kind of exchanges happen in real life all the time of course; but it's not recorded ( and searchable ) as internet conversations are. And the audience to this little exchange is likely to run into 000s. The same treatment, of course, is also meted out to brands as employers, whatever the industry. ( One of the most visceral has to be the Professional Pilots Rumour Network which has a forum "...the beancounters hoped would never happen. Your news on pay, rostering, allowances, extras and negotiations where you work. Let others in the industry make educated choices on where the grass is less brown" )

So, a good reason for brands to take notice therefore. The question in this case is - have British Gas? In the 18th over Mike prints the following:

I'm going to open the floor up to Chris Armstrong all the same: "I'm going to incur the wrath of every other OBOer here, but I'm afraid I can only report good things about British Gas and my HomeCare 400 policy, they've come quickly (OK, within a day or two), phoned me half an hour before hand so I know they're coming, and fixed the problem and s*dded off." At least you can say this session of the OBO now contains a balanced arguement. For once.

So what's happening here? Has a real person bothered to write an email to defend British Gas??? Has Mr Adamson suddenly been gripped with a desire to be even handed?

I don't think so. I think what we're looking at here is BG moving fast to ring alarm bells at GU towers, and to organise the intervention of 'Chris Armstrong'. The use of light swearing suggests someone trying a bit too hard to be *real*, but the real giveaway has to be the precise use of policy name and exact capitalisation in 'HomeCare'. 

What do you think? And whose clients / brands have suffered at the 'hands of crowds' like this?

Comments

[John Whitehurst]

I have seen this a lot ... not just in the form of chat but also the information held on companies.

- Great examples can be seen in the graduate marketplace. The forums on doctorjob have created many debates and upset adverisers.

- I also had a very upset client at PowerGen once. Their top listing on Google was a 3 year old news story saying how they were closing all their UK Call Centers. We were running a PPC campaign at the same time recruiting for the Call Centers.

Companies can not control their brand as they did in the past - they need to learn how to talk with people (not at them).

Also forums/chats tend to control themselves. Enage with the audience, listen and then you can turn the negative into a positive.

J

ps. The story was on the powergens own site and we popped in a no-index tag. All was fine.

[Matt]

I thought this was an interesting development http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/15/wikipedia.corporateaccountability

[Matt]

It terms of these things staying on the web for a very long time.....I contributed a few comments to the Guardian OBO well over two years ago and they still come up fairly high in the results when you put my name into Google! British Gas are going to coming up in a negative way in people's Google searches for a very long time to come