Don't Just Manage Your Reputation, Respond to Your Competitor's

I've done a fair amount of speaking and teaching about online reputation management in the last two years. After all, you can't effectively play in the social media and search engine optimization fields without an understanding of how to respond to negative mentions. Most of the time, businesses seem to want to learn about the best way to address (or avoid) negative press. Often, I find myself reminding them they should also be focusing on how to address or respond to their competitor's negative press.

How many times have we seen it? A major player falls flat on their face and the news gets splashed all over the Internet. The Kryptonite bike lock scandal, the PriceRitePhoto fiasco and the infamous Dell Hell posts at BuzzMachine all come to mind. Generally, when these types of problems hit, the blog world and PR world focus on how the company can dig themselves out of the mess.

What I'd like to see is more companies stepping up to the plate with creative marketing when their competitors stumble.

Back when I wrote my ten part series on Making Link Bait and Viral Marketing work, I mentioned the need to capitalize on your competitors failure. In the article, I looked at the brilliant response Caribou Coffee had to a Starbucks PR crisis.

Starbucks emailed a coupon for a free iced coffee to it's Atlanta area employees and invited them to pass the coupon on to their friends and family. As you would expect, the coupon spread far and wide and Starbucks soon found itself handing out free iced coffees left and right. Since they'd failed to plan for scalability, Starbucks pulled the offer, claiming that it had spread "beyond the company's original intent."

The press picked up the story and blogs began buzzing about Starbucks decision to cancel the promotion and the damage it might do to customer relations. A short while later, rival chain Caribou Coffee decided that they would honor the Starbucks coupons at their own store. They issued a press release to that effect and a short while later both news outlets and the Internet were buzzing with news of the offer.

I often find myself wondering what I'd recommend to competing companies when I see this type of thing happen.

For example, last fall Delta found itself in a mess of hot water with breastfeeding moms when one of their flight attendants kicked a nursing mother off of a plane for refusing to cover up with one of the airline blankets. The mother went up the chain of command to seek resolution and was told by Delta that flight attendants had final say over what happened in the airplane cabins. Word began to spread online and more than 800 mothers and babies gathered at major airports around the country two days before Thanksgiving to protest the treatment of this mom.

While Delta sat around waiting for the negative publicity to pass, I sat here wondering why none of the other airlines were taking advantage of the situation. If I'd been consulting for, say JetBlue or American Airlines, I would have been blitzing popular mom sites with an ad campaign. Can you imagine the potential impact on Christmas travel if one of these airlines had put together ads that said something to the effect of "We would never dream of asking our passengers to eat with blankets on their heads" or an ad with an image of someone sitting in an airplane bathroom with a tray of food on their lap and the word "RIDICULOUS!" across the top of the ad?

That's why I was pleased to see the new Nokia campaign on the heels of so much grumbling about the Apple iPhone.

Running with the tag line "Open to anything" the campaign takes a pointed, yet subtle swipe at the anger many have over Apple's refusal to allow the iPhone to be used on networks other than AT&T and over their resistance to third party apps. In fact, the text on the Nokia site says:

We believe the best devices have no limits. That's why we've left the Nokia Nseries open. Open to applications. Open to widgets. Open to anything. So go ahead and load it up. What it does is up to you.

With the tech world buzzing about Apple's latest iPhone software update reducing hacked phones to useless paperweights, Nokia's sales pitch is timely.

Saul Hansell at The New York Times writes:

On Monday, Apple had issued a press release warning of "irreparable damage" to iPhones that have been modified or unlocked from the AT&T network. It also threatened users that "the permanent inability to use an iPhone due to installing unlocking software is not covered under the iPhone's warranty."

This caused a scurry by hackers to develop software that will relock iPhones before software updates.

In fact, Jonathan Seff reports that Apple is indeed refusing help to iPhone users who have modified or hacked their system.

I went to an Apple Store this morning and had to wait a long time for a genius, so I made an appointment for the afternoon. Went in, showed them my phone, and the guy said "it appears that someone tampered with the software on this phone" and said there's nothing he could do. I asked him to restore it, and he said he tried, but nothing changed. He then pointed to the notice in the store that says not to hack the phone, and told me the only thing I could do was buy a new one.

Granted, iPhone users DID purchase the product with full knowledge they could only use it on the AT&T network. That means Apple is well within their rights to "punish" phone hackers and to force them to buy new ones when the old are rendered useless.

However...on the public relations front, it's a bad, bad move.

Nokia offers several new phones that surf the web, play audio and video files and include most or all of the same functionality the iPhone has. Marketing their product in a way that plays off the "flaws" of a competing product is a pretty standard marketing tactic. In the world of social media and online reputation management though, it's always smart to take it a step further. Personally, I'd love to see Nokia ship some free Nseries phones out to bloggers who are posting about their now useless iPhones. It seems like a perfect way to get a competing product in front of users who are probably open to alternatives right about now.

When it comes to managing your own online reputation, the question is not simply how you respond to criticism about your own product or services. These days, you need to be tracking the reputation of your competitor and thinking about how you can capitalize on their failures. If you're one of the few companies that has positioned itself well enough that criticism is rare, then start being proactive in terms of building that reputation even stronger.

Setup alerts on your competitors names. Take the time to read their reviews at sites like Amazon, epinions, Yahoo Local, Yelp and so on. Find out what consumers don't like about them and address that issue with your own products, services and marketing. When appropriate, contact these unhappy customers and find a creative way to introduce them to your own product.

Unhappy customers are going to go looking for an alternative. Why wait for them to find you, when you can meet them at the exit?

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