Swurl knows brand management

On my off hours, I maintain a little blog about social media. Nothing worth crowing about, I've only been writing it a couple of weeks. Mostly it's a review of all these new sites that keep popping up all over the place. Last night I posted a little ditty about Swurl - a social media aggregator. I've already seen comparisons between it and Tumblr or Friendfeed. I didn't look kindly on it, but one particular gripe I had was that the Flickr tool seemed to be broken. Today, I received a comment from Ryan at Swurl:

"We are working to fix the Flickr bug. We just launched and are working hard to make Swurl tons better. Feel free to email me any feedback or suggestions you may have, ryan at swurl"

I want to thank Ryan and Swurl for getting back to me so quickly, especially since I wasn't expecting them to say anything to me directly. But I'm not writing a post here because of that, I'm writing because this is an example of what you should be doing with your own business as well.

Thanks to social media, everyone everywhere can say just about anything about your business. Left unchecked, all of this talk can turn to poison for you. If, for instance, I never heard back from Ryan, and just assumed Swurl wasn't working, I could have abandoned it and told anyone who asked that it doesn't work if you like your Flickr. Now I know better. Now I'm writing about it here. And Swurl has shown me that they care about what people think of their product, and so that's what I'm sharing with you now. This negative comment is now a positive one. Though guys, please, you need to add BriteKite to your list of sites you follow - because it's so da bomb, yo. Also, my real blog is on LiveJournal, because I'm old school. I can't add that in either at the moment. And everyone worth knowing rents from Netflix, not Blockbuster. I fear Friendfeed is eating your lunch on points like these. I suggest that you, the business owner reading this now, take the same proactive approach. How did Swurl find me? Well, they might have used Google Blog Search - my post is pretty deep in those results, but its in there. They could have used a Google Alert to notify them of all blog posts about their site in fact. They could have even used Technorati to search for posts about them to respond to. If I had said something about it on Twitter, they could have used a Twitter search tool like Summize to find it. Most likely, though, they just checked their own site for posts. That's one advantage they have that you probably don't. But as I say, the tools are out there to find the negative talk about you and your product. That is only the first step. Next you have to engage them, and quickly. If someone wrote something negative about you on their blog in 2002, it's safe to bet the dye is cast. If you found something this week, however, you could follow Ryan's example and explain yourself, or apologize, or get in touch with them directly to find out how you can remedy the situation. Do you think that person writing the blog post or Twitter tweet will appreciate it? If they do, it'll be another safe bet they'll post something about how the company that wasn't up to snuff yesterday proved how worthy they are of a second chance today. After all, that's what I'm doing now. And I'm also hoping BriteKite is doing this, in the other direction: Rewarding a positive comment about their service. Something you can do as well while you're at it. Thanking someone who has publicly stated they like you will strengthen their brand loyalty like nothing else can. For you, social media can be public relations on PCP. (An aside: If I hear one more person refer to something similarly energized as being, "on steroids" I'm going to start breaking things.) Swurl, thank you for letting me know you're working on it. And I'm not going to ditch out on you just yet, because your service really does make reading all of those damn Twitter posts a lot easier. Plus, you gave me fodder for a post here - and all bloggers hunger for something real to write about at the end of the day. :)

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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