On Wednesday Social Media Today hosted an hour-long, interactive webinar, "The Art and Science of Forming Successful Online Communities." I moderated a panel which included Gina Bianchini, CEO and Co-Founder of Ning, Rohit Bhargava, Vice President Interactive Media of Ogilvy 360, Julie Wittes Schlack, SVP for Innovation at Communispace, and Craig Cmehil, Evangelist of SAP's SDN.
Source: Can Passion and Authenticity be Duplicated? Follow-up Questions for Webinar Week
Me as you can see I took part, the panel was quite interesting and held the attention of well over 200 folks logged into the website (I think even more were simply dialed in via telephone). It was quite an interesting chat and I have the feeling we had a wide range of attendees from those new to the ideas of "social media" and "social networking" to those who live it daily.
Some of the questions though we were not able to get to so I decided to take a few minutes today and pick one of those questions and try to answer it.
"How can the online communities be best used to diffuse negative news stories on your company?"
Now I work for SAP, large and international and there always seems to be somebody out there saying something and occasionally those things are "negative".
I recall one case at the end of 2005, where the blogosphere exploded with comments of how a SAP board member was quoted as saying they were against Open Source. The quote was taken a bit out of place but within 24 hours (impressive for this crazy thing called blogging right) it had gotten to the point that the board member needed to make a response. Now with all the resources out there and all the places one could make a statement about this topic, the board member (Shai Agassi) chose to respond to everyone with a single blog entry posted to the SAP Developer Network, entitled "I LOVE Open Source---Really!".
Now that was just one case, but there are plenty out there and not just in our community but everywhere. The presence of an online community, especially one around a particular product, suite, platform, company, etc. tends to be your best spokesperson for the job. They are the ones passionate about your topic and therefore the most credible people to respond about your topic.
This of course does not just happen though, you need to first enable them to do so with the proper technologies and second you need to ensure that they can do it, not everyone is ready to pick up the banner and run into battle some need motivating to get them ready while others need a simple nod of the head so to say "go for it!"
Once your community starts to talk it does not matter how many people continue to talk about the negative item those who are active and interested in your community will know the truth and move on to the next interesting item.
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