If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to work Twitter into your online brand and reputation monitoring efforts. While you’re at it, you may want to think about actually using Twitter as a way of engaging your customers.

Not so long ago Twitter seemed like it might be a passing fad. Recently, the service has matured to become a nearly indispensable social media tool. With Twitter’s regular outages (mostly) a thing of the past, usage is skyrocketing. As a result, the service is branching out beyond alpha-geeks and into the general population. More and more regular people are embracing Twitter as a way of communicating with friends and expressing their opinions to the masses. Frequently, those opinions involve complaints of some sort — some of those complaints may even be about your brand.

A few companies are starting to realize the value of monitoring Twitter. When TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington tweeted about his frustration with his Comcast internet service, a company executive contacted him within 20 minutes attempting to resolve the problem. Comcast apparently tracks Twitter as part of a comprehensive effort to monitor the social media space.

(Read more of Twitter and Your Brand)

As the importance of the monolithic corporate website wanes, blogs and social networks have emerged as critical tools allowing businesses of all sizes to connect with consumers in a more direct and meaningful way.

The best companies will use these tools as an opportunity to engage consumers in a dialog while respecting the social media ecosystem.

However, simply setting up a blog and sending your employees to dive into the deep end of the social media pool isn’t enough. Without a firm understanding of how social media works, the results can be lukewarm, at best, and disastrous, at worst.

Just how bad can a corporate social media campaign be? The following case study analyzes the unfortunate social media campaign of the DuroSport corporation. If you’re involved in planning social media strategy for your company, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to learn from DuroSport’s many mistakes.
(Read more of Worst Practices in Social Media Marketing)

Do you have a clue what your customers are saying about your company online? Do you follow the leading consumer blogs that discuss products and services in your industry? Have you given any thought to the sort of damage a disgruntled employee or unethical competitor might inflict on your company with an angry blog post?

Do you have an online reputation management strategy?

Unfortunately, for many businesses online reputation management is an afterthought. It’s only after something major goes wrong that businesses begin thinking about the issue, and by then it can be too late.

A recent New York Times article (via Pronet Advertising) documents some of the pitfalls that can occur when angry customers take their grievances to the web.

So, what’s a business to do? Here’s a checklist you can use to start developing your own online reputation management program:

(Read more of How To Protect Your Reputation Online)

It’s no secret that news cycles are shrinking. They have been ever since the advent of 24 hour cable news. The Internet only serves to shrink news cycles further. At some point in the near future the Onion’s 24 second news cycle won’t seem quite so funny.

Traditional media outlets have been struggling to adapt their formats in a world where their audience already knows the news. Meanwhile, communications professionals of all varieties are trying new strategies for disseminating their messages to audiences facing information overload.

While media organizations have been focused on competing in a world of increasing competition and decreasing audience attention span, a complex social media ecosystem has emerged to present us with an entirely new type of news cycle — the viral news cycle.

Blogs, social news aggregators, podcasts, and web video have proven to be a highly effective platform for propagating news, in a manner that couldn’t be more different from traditional media. While traditional news cycles offer a top down dissemination of information, viral news cycles have emerged as the result of news audiences sharing and filtering news directly with their peers.

In many respects, the viral news cycle exists in an entirely different dimension from the traditional news cycle. Traditional news cycles are linear, viral news cycles are jagged and unpredictable as stories work their way through a complex mesh of social media nodes.

(Read more of The Viral News Cycle)

In the old days, gadflies would show up at city council meetings and wait through excruciating discussions about arcane public policy issues, in exchange for two minutes at the podium during the pre-appointed time for public comments. These days, most gadflies can’t be bothered to leave the house for a two minute rant at the end of a long council meeting. They’re all too busy updating their blogs.

According to a recent LA Times article, more than a few city officials are finally waking up to the fact that large corporations have been aware of for a while now: When your customers/constituents have a problem with your organization they are increasingly inclined to tell the world about it on their blog.

The old rules of public communications are being turned upside down in the new era of conversation-based media. For city officials who haven’t bothered to keep current on the latest trends in the blogosphere, this news comes as a startling wake-up call.

The problem is that many government agencies have Web 1.0 tunnel vision, and are not ready for a Web 2.0 world. From the beginning, government agencies have used the web as a low-cost one-way publishing medium. In some cases they’ve developed eGovernment initiatives to streamline labor intensive processes and provide better constituent service.

Very few agencies have used the web as an opportunity to engage their constituency in an ongoing discussion about the issues of the day. Blogs make this engagement unavoidable. Citizen bloggers are having these conversation whether or not city officials choose to participate. Simply avoiding gadfly bloggers won’t make them go away.

(Read more of City Hall vs. the Blogging Gadflies)