What company doesn’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even a YouTube Channel? All of these can be great vehicles for conversing with customers and prospects and for building brands. They also offer easy platforms for those who want to sabotage your organization – current or former employees, disgruntled customers or people who simply want to tear down your company’s reputation.

Perhaps the most famous case was the YouTube video that showed employees at a Domino’s Pizza store in North Carolina doing some disgusting, explicit things in the kitchen. The openness of social media offers an easy ticket for social sabotage.

Your identity can be hijacked by a bogus Facebook profile. Comments posted in jest on a blog or in a Tweet could be easily be misunderstood to the detriment of your reputation. Or a disgrunted employee or customer could go on a profanity-laced tirade against you, your company or your product.

So what do you do when it happens to you?

1.   Monitor the social media space. There are online services that aggregate social media mentions of your company, people and products in real time — Technorati and Radian6, for example. Monitor those several times a day. Check your own Facebook pages, fan pages, blogs and YouTube Channels as well.

2. Delete offensive, explicit posts immediately and report them. If offensive material shows up on your Facebook page, delete it immediately and report the offender.  Each site has links to report fraudulent, offensive or abusive behavior. In the case of someone passing himself off as someone else, report it to the social media site immediately. You will likely have to block all posts from that profile until Facebook can remove the profile (and that’s a subject for another time).

3. In the case of false or explicit posts on another organization’s social media sites that are damaging to you or your business, contact the site owner and insist the offensive or false information be removed immediately. If necessary, contact your attorney. Libel laws provide the same protection to people defamed on blogs as they provide to people defamed by the New York Times.

Fixing social sabotage consumed Domino’s for weeks. The offending employees were fired and charged with felonies for adulterating food. Domino’s president posted a new video issuing a public apology for what happened and tried to reassure consumers that similar acts weren’t occurring at other Dominos stores. He also shut the restaurant down for several days and brought in a crew to sanitize it from top to bottom in full view of local TV cameras.

More importantly, why should I follow you?

This Twitter thing maybe the largest bandwagon in the world. Micro blogging about burritos, traffic jams, and mocha. Wooohoo!

There seems to be two sides to the issue. You love it or you think it’s the most worthless waste of time ever to hit a mobile phone.

I’ve been getting follow notices from the strangest places. A grocery store twenty miles away from me. A convenience store chain. A fishing guide in Florida. Even a competing ad agency! Okay, I admit I follow them.

I appreciate their belief that I have something intelligent to say in 140 characters, but do they really expect me to reciprocate? Where’s the strategy? Where’s the cross promotion? Where’s your boss?

Social media is a great way to “socialize your brand” and it’s also a great way to waste your time and to look silly. Have a strategy? Answer the question, “Why should anyone follow me?”
If you have an answer to that question, use it in your bio…maybe even your name. If the answer is “Great deals at the grocery store!” maybe I’ll follow to see how great your deals are. But if your answer is, “Because I’m trying to use social media so I don’t have to spend any money!” don’t waste my time.

You Google childhood obesity and the first image that comes up contains your logo. You can just imagine the blame every viewer of this photo places on McDonald’s. Is it McDonald’s fault? It is if they do nothing about it.

To McDonald’s credit they have taken some initiative by offering healthful substitutes to the french fries it offers in Happy Meals and if you happen to have your laptop with internet access while you’re ordering, you can get nutritional data for the meal you select.

By the way, did you know a Big Mac, large fry and a medium Cokes comes in at over 1200 calories?

I suppose that by doing more they would be admitting what is patently obvious to everyone else and that is that their food…along with nearly every other fast food restaurant….can make you obese if you eat too much.

Yet they miss an opportunity to do well by doing good. If they would provide people with encouragement to make good choices from their menu, they’d find people making more good choices from their menu. I’m guessing that the profit margin on a box of lettuce is at least as good as the Big Mac.

Imagine, if they conducted a social marketing campaign that encouraged parents to fight childhood obesity by bringing their children to McDonald’s and serving up fruit burgers. Then they would actually change the eating habits of a generation and firmly plant themselves and their franchisees at the forefront of the new way. Their profits soar, stockholders are happy and the government stays off their back.

Just a thought.

Remember the Borg?  It was a race on Star Trek that assimilated worlds into a collective intelligence to conquer the universe.  It used the thoughts of billions to outsmart the thoughts of millions.  They collaborated throught telepathy.  Well, substitute digitally for telepathy and you can start to wrap your brain around the collective intelligence of the Net Generation.

The Net Generation lives in a world where it can collaborate with its members spontaneously.  Want to know about life at a university, find a FaceBook page on the university.  Go to Youtube.  Look for student produced videos.

Insert any product that the Net Generation is interested in and you’ll find a collective intelligence about that product.  You’ll find ideas to make the product better.  And you’ll find members feeding off one another to brainstorm and develop better products.

If two heads are better than one, are two million heads better?  Maybe when it comes to creativity.  If you believe one creative thought leads to another, potentially better creative thought than maybe two million brains working on a problems is better than two.  Regardless, marketers can use this drive to collaborate to their advantage.

We’re doing market research using social networking sites as a platform to involve respondents and it’s working very well.  The involvement of our respondents is deeper than typical focus groups, we’re not bound by a 90 minute time frame and we don’t have to sit behind a mirror eating Peanut M&Ms.  We’re exploring brand identities, testing strategies and learning better ways to engage this audience.

If you’re selling to the Digital Borg, otherwise known as the net generation, they will gladly help you improve your product, communications or service delivery.  All you have to do is tap into the collective intelligence.  You may not immediately know what they’re thinking, but you can beam yourself in digitally.  But remember, Captain Picard always won.

Live long and prosper.

Five years ago, the winners in marketing were the brands that had substantial budgets, creative agencies and the ability to buy millions of impressions.  Then they would track those impressions to results and rebuild their marketing plan for the next year based on which impressions produced the best results.  How many times did we hear the words, “If we only had a bigger budget we could…?”

Enter YouTube and Julia Nunes.  Julia plays the ukulele and covers songs by famous bands.  She writes some herself.  I found Julia on YouTube a few months ago and became an instant fan.

Someone along the line sent me a link to her “Build me up Buttercup” cover.  I watched.  I was the 848,312 viewer of Build me up Buttercup on the ukulele.  I went to the next cover.  500,000 views.  The next cover 750,000views.  Now for the crescendo.  Her original song “Into the Sunshine” had 1,710,934 views.  Amazing.

Here is a cute college aged girl, with a good bit of talent, gaining a national following, creating her own brand with absolutely no monitary investment.  She was not measuring success on impressions… which can be nothing more than driving by a billboard…her success came in the form of creating fans and engaging an audience.  And she did it from her dorm room.

I can imagine the look on one of my clients’ faces if I walked in and said.  Client, we’re going to get this young girl who can sing a little, teach her how to play the ukulele and sing about your brand.  Then we’re going to put her on YouTube and watch the views roll in and up.  Trust me on this.

Julia may have had big plans for her videos, but I’ll bet she did them for the fun of doing them.  And that’s what makes them so endearing and entertaining.

The point of Julia’s success is that if you’re going to try to build your fan base on YouTube or any other social network, it has to be fun for your viewer and you should have fun with it too.  If not, you’re just buying impressions.