Some of you might have seen the news yesterday that Centaur, our publisher, has been restructuring to form three core business groups: one covering legal and financial sectors, one the marketing and creative industries and another engineering and human resources.

Thankfully, heritage brands new media age and Design Week will both keep their online presences, but sadly Reputation Online will be closing. The site will remain live however for you all to use as an archive.

As digital PR becomes more important to the broader marketing mix, it will be integrated into both Marketing Week and new media age’s editorial offerings. The former is even set to launch a quarterly special that will focus purely on this area, in conjunction with the PRCA.

The Reputation Online awards in September, as well as this Friday’s Live event will not be running, but those that have already entered or paid will be contacted and refunded their fees as soon as possible.

We’ve also had to cancel the launch tonight of our biggest project to date  - The Reputation Online Top 100 PR Agencies guide –  but you’ll still be able to pick up a copy with this week’s final print edition of new media age. There will also be coverage on nma.co.uk (including a PDF version) tomorrow morning. I’ll be personally sending out copies to all of the agencies included in the guide later today.

A huge thank you goes out to all of our writers, supporters and readers over the past two years.

Of the six brands for which detailed findings are provided (B&Q, Easyjet, John Lewis, M&S, Santander and Vodafone), John Lewis receives the least specific and general complaints and also the least direct requests for help on Twitter. Therefore its relative inactivity, responding to only 5-10% of mentions, around 50 tweets a week, can be put down to the fact that it has less to respond to than others.

Compare this with another British retail stalwart, M&S. Ranked 24^th on the list M&S also responds to only around 5% of mentions on Twitter but positive sentiment for its brand is far lower (20%). It receives a greater number of complaints and direct requests than John Lewis but it does not respond to either on Twitter. In fact the 70 tweets a week M&S sends are solely in response to general news/PR.

Vodafone and Easyjet are the most active of the six brands. Vodafone sends around 900 tweets a week, Easyjet half that; both respond to around 30% of mentions and have decent rates for replying to direct requests. There is a noticeable difference in Twitter tactics though. Vodafone responds to 100% of general praise but only 25% of general abuse, Easyjet appears to prioritise the latter, responding to 50% of general abuse and only 35% of general praise.

Along with B&Q, Vodafone is the only brand with a dedicated presence on forums, a real missed opportunity for others as all are being talked about on forums. B&Q’s response rate to direct requests on Twitter is also worth mentioning: 100%. However, Easyjet, B&Q and Vodafone all fall below M&S in terms of overall positive sentiment, ranking 28^th, 29^th and 45^th respectively.

The larger proportion of negative sentiment for the three brands may well be because they have actively embraced Twitter as a customer service channel. While people do complain about M&S on Twitter, those looking for a response must by now have learned to contact the brand in another way. In this sense the rankings do not provide an accurate picture of overall customer satisfaction.

It is also plausible that M&S’s core offering is superior to the likes of B&Q, Vodafone, and Easyjet. This certainly appears to be the case with John Lewis. Social media is there to amplify and improve a core service; if the product is shoddy no response rate will help. But, given Twitter’s older demographic correlates with M&S’s, the retailer would be wise to engage fully with negative sentiment online.

Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson talked about this idea herself recently in an interview with Clickz. She argued that the Pages which do well on Facebook are those which are “customised to the local environment [and] optimised for the experience”.

Engaging fans in all markets

Creating a brand presence on Facebook is still a maturing concept and, therefore, many brands have until recently, measured success based simply on the number of fans their Page has gained. However, with content proving to be such an important dynamic in any brand’s social media activity it is now becoming clear that the number of fans is not the best indicator of the success of a Page. It is about interaction, the willingness to recommend the Page and the brand and, most importantly, key monetisation metrics.

The worth of your brand’s Page is closely associated with the benefits you offer your audience. It’s a value exchange where content relevancy, timely interactions and customisation are key to building an engaged community. Brands need to consider how to respond to market and cultural differences, including cultural sensitivities, differences in time zones and language requirements.

Glocal social media strategy

Whether you adopt a local or global approach it’s crucial your Facebook strategy is aligned to your brand’s objectives. You must establish who your target audience are and how and why you want to engage with them. From this you can clearly set out your key success metrics which will enable to you achieve social media objectives.

Companies need to ask themselves what they are trying to achieve with their social presence and set out KPIs before deciding whether implementing a local or global strategy will best help them achieve their objectives.

With over 3.5 million followers globally Nokia has implemented a hub and spoke strategy with a global Page which is both the international hub for their brand and the facilitator for sending fans to localised Pages. A tab on their global Page has links through to 69 local market Facebook Pages.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to such an approach. For a global brand such as Nokia with huge resources it allows them to run localised promotions, produce customised content and create highly targeted ads. However, it also poses challenges – for example, you must ensure key brand messages are consistently communicated through each of their local Pages.

Nokia’s approach is just one course of action. Your brand’s strategy needs to be tailored to meet your unique objectives. This will be dependent on available resources and the most scalable and effective strategy for your brand.

The challenge for global brands is to ensure that programmes meet the needs of all audience members as well as staying true to the brand’s key messages. Achieve this and the result is social media success, both locally and globally.

Joel is founder and director of agency:2. Image via TechTremor.com.

That an event concerned with external perception focused so heavily on internal engagement might seem strange, but the point reiterated time and again by speakers was the importance of getting employees on-side. Rupert Younger, director of Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and chair for the day put it neatly: “You can’t manage reputation as you don’t own it; you can engage reputation through influence and behaviour strategies”

In other words, control what you can to influence perception. Employees are a powerful potential advocate base, under engaged and under utilised by many companies at the moment. Claire Cater of Bell Pottinger, group lead on the Big Society and Behaviour change project believes the balance of spend for internal comms/external comms should be 60/40 in favour of internal. She suggested companies profile staff in the same way they do consumers to better assess how to engage them.

Not only do employees carry a brand’s reputation while at work, they do so out of work too. This is particularly apparent in the online environment, where an individual staff member’s reach has grown exponentially over the past decade. Ensuring that employees are privy to important information and aligned with the brand narrative means they can act as reputation protectors online, sensing discontent and quelling crises before they get out of hand.

Younger also questioned the idea of talking about reputation in the singular.“There is no such thing as generalised perception, companies have multiple reputations; a reputation for something with someone.” He used the example of Goldman Sachs, loathed by many for putting profit ahead of morals yet it need only post a small job advert on its website to get a flood of CVs, such is its reputation as a recruiter.

That we each perceive companies differently and that our perception is largely contextual is common sense, but often overlooked. The take home messages from the presenters tacitly assumed the contingencies of reputation, although Sandra Macleod, Group CEO of Echo Research talked of gauging the financial value of reputation through a ‘reputation dividend’. Broadly speaking, though, all presenters agreed companies must be open and transparent, and do rather than talk about doing.

The second point here is really an extension of the first, and both boil down to one thing: authenticity.  The more authentic a company is the more cohered peoples’ perceptions of that company will be regardless of context. If a company is consistent in the way it talks to its staff and to the public, and in what it says it will do and what it does, then its reputation(s) will benefit.

Celebrities with large, passionate fan-bases have always sought ways to communicate with them and grow their community. The clubs and newsletters of old have simply been replaced with official websites, and social media profiles.

The problem is, by creating an official space online for fans to meet and share, celebrities have taken on a certain level of responsibility to not only safeguard themselves and their brand from attack, but to protect their fans while they are on their pages. Incidents such as those that confronted Demi Moore, where her Twitter followers helped her track down a tweeter that threatened suicide are extreme examples of how people try to reach out to their idols via social media.

It’s not just the fans that celebrities need to worry about either. Those in the public eye are now under 24 hour online scrutiny, a celebrity only has to share an ill-judged joke with a friend on Twitter to create a storm which can negatively impact their image, brand and career if the subsequent outrage is not responded to correctly and in a timely manner.

VIPs and their social media teams will often find that online fan behaviour can be challenging. Sitting in the comfort of their homes, fans feel protected and able to say what they wouldn’t dare to in the offline world.

A Facebook page could be managed and run by the VIP’s branding team and never be visited by the celebrity at all, and yet some fans will think that the page is a direct link to their idol asking them questions, responding to wall posts as if the question was directed at them and them alone, expecting a reply of some kind. More troubled fans may post unsavoury comments or use the profile as a platform to threaten the celebrity themselves. There has to be a clear procedure in place to deal with these emergencies: robust escalation procedures which need to be effective, day or night.

Left unchecked, a VIP’s social media profile can become a hotbed of spam, trolling and obsessive fan behaviour. Although the major social networks are supposed to be for over-13s only, there’s no real way to police them, and underage fans often end up following or ‘liking’ their favourite singer. Whoever manages the page for the VIP needs to be aware of this possibility and ensure official content is safe for all to view, as well as making sure that fan-created content is not offensive – neither to the celebrity nor fellow fans.

So, how should a celebrity or VIP manage their social media presences? Whether or not the celebrity is directly involved in posting to the page, they should be transparent about who is making the posts. Celebrities will usually have an individual tone of voice and fans are likely to be insulted by a team of imposters. Better instead to have named admins of the page – people ‘close to’ the page owner, privy to the intimate details of their lives – and then the odd, exciting post by the star themselves, publicised and guaranteed to be a traffic-driver.

It’s unrealistic to think that a single person can manage a community of thousands, which is really what these social media profiles are. Ideally, the VIP should have a team of people posting on their behalf, even in different languages. The team would establish an editorial calendar which would be co-ordinated with the PR team to keep the profile relevant and up to date.

But in the wild west of the web, no matter how strong the community is, there will be people posting offensive remarks. A page with effective community management will have clear guidelines posted for fans to see, which outline behaviours which will not be tolerated and the consequences of breaking the house rules (which could range from deleting offensive comments to responding with legal action if necessary). Criticism should be tolerated – abuse should not.

Ultimately, reputation is the bread and butter of VIPs and celebrities and they need to ensure that their social media profiles reflect their carefully crafted image or risk the reputational damage that could ensue.

Tia is communications manager at eModeration which has just published a new guide to managing Facebook for VIPs, celebrities and high profile individuals. Images via love getting dressed and Times Online.

From July 1st, his job will be to connect the agency’s strategic & creative ideas with a forward-thinking digital consultancy for clients. This will include putting into place a solid platform for digital planning, measurement and evaluation, and developing a framework for services to compliment the core practice with a view to harnessing opportunities across all platforms.

“Freud works with so many outstanding brands that have digital at the heart of their world-view,” said Quince. “So part of my goal will be to establish how the agency most effectively fits into the holistic game plan and provides consultancy that develops in line with the changing landscape.”

Quince, who will be reporting to Freud’s creative director Paul Melody, also said that the agency’s goal isn’t to develop a standalone digital practice, but to harness the momentum and enhance the effectiveness of their work across the board. “It’s to ensure that we ‘plug-in’ to digital in the right way for clients, partners and the media,” he added.

Following consultation with the PR community, FeaturesExec has introduced a sector search, as well as functionality that remembers search results – allowing you to navigate away from results and back again in an instant.

The database has also launched ‘recently viewed’ and ‘most viewed’  tabs that provide dashboard-based quick links to favourite data.

Of course this then opens up that classic can of worms: how to measure social relations online? How do you know if you are actually any good at maintaining relations with the public and, most importantly, how do you demonstrate this to clients and bill them accordingly?

Monitoring solutions appear to be the answer at the moment – every day it seems a new one appears in the marketplace. But there is a danger that the sheer abundance of solutions now available is going to confuse the matter even further, in the short terms at least. The real problem is not being able to measure conversation; it is agreeing on which metrics actually matter.

Many companies offering monitoring solutions are playing up its role in customer service. This is understandable. There is a history of companies using call-handling metrics in complaints departments and relating these to ROI. And analysis of total number of complaints, repeat enquiries, and speed of response give a pretty decent picture of how effective customer service is at a company compared to investment.

Engagement is another matter entirely. To be meaningful to the recipient is the ultimate aim of all brand communications online, but what is meaningful to one person is meaningless to the next. Some would argue companies should focus on their own business plan, get the product right, produce the right content and people will be engaged. This is all true but doesn’t solve the problem of how PRs can demonstrate the value of their work to clients.

Sentiment tracking is a feature on most monitoring solutions; some use humans to gauge sentiment, others algorithms. So immediately there is a disparity. The various sentiment analyses are then taken by those in the industry and used alongside a raft of other online KPIs. The truth is that most savvy professionals could find a KPI to prove their point, whatever that point happens to be at that particular time.

Data from interactions online can build up an effective picture of consumer preferences but the sheer volume of data means it is too easy to pick and choose metrics that show work in a good light and ignore those that do not. The sooner an industry standard is reached, even if it is only a working benchmark, the sooner those doing a good job of maintaining public relations online will be able to demonstrate and monetise their value to clients.

Image via opensourceway

The agency was awarded Best Charity Campaign of 2011 and Best Integrated Campaign Led by PR of 2011 for its work with the Royal British Legion.

The Legion asked the agency to promote its support of serving and ex-service troops, positioning the company as modern and relevant to a younger audience.

Burson-Marsteller UK leveraged the ‘2 Minute Silence’ concept by recording a completely silent single, and releasing it alongside a celebrity-packed video for Remembrance Sunday 2010.

The song charted in the UK Top 20 with over 23,000 copies sold as well as receiving over 35,000 Facebook likes in just 3 weeks and being watched over 200,000 times on YouTube.

Both campaigns are led by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) and the Institute for Public Relations, the organisers of the Summits.

Delegates voted from among 12 issues, and rated how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of public relations as the most pressing (with 89%) followed by the need to create global standard for social media measurement (83%), measurement becoming an intrinsic part of the PR toolkit (73%) and client education around the measurement of outputs, outcomes and business results from PR programs (61%).

Solid outcomes can be found in the form of the Valid Metrics for PR Measurement document, which provides a one-approach fits-all methodology.