Blogging from the Server Side

Tech Crunch's Brian Solis has a detailed writeup and analysis of a panel discussion at CrunchUp on Real Time Business that was held last week, and it's worth a read if you're wondering what businesses have to do to succeed at real-time reputation management.

One of the key messages that emerged from the article is that monitoring and responding requires coordination across the company.

Social Media is, for the time being, tuning-in new channels of influence to incorporate into the brand and marketing mix. While it takes a station manager time to receive the signals and in turn, coordinate outward broadcasts, it is the divisions within each organization that will need to shift from an introspective support mode to an extrospective group of proactive collaborators.

But as Ross cautioned businesses and eager social media teams, “Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves.”

If responsibilities and workflow isn’t established and most importantly, if guidelines aren’t drafted and disseminated company-wide, the intention of helping influential customers and advocates can quickly transcend into social, and very public, chaos.

We need rules of engagement.

Why is this important? The chaos that Solis describes comes from different portions of the company responding with inconsistent, if not contradictory, messages. Nothing undermines confidence in the public eye more than a business whose right hand doesn't know what its left hand is doing.

The content control aspect of Compendium Blogware can help your business stay on message when it comes to blogging because posts don't go live prior to administrator moderation.