I was at an American Marketing Association luncheon earlier this week and the guest speaker was addressing the topic of online reputation management.  Now this is the first person I’ve heard talk about controlling the message — as in “here’s how you control the message”.  What I find interesting about that is that every other “expert” I’ve heard talk about social media has basically said you can’t control the message and if you think you can, you’ll lose.  So I’m trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt but I have to wonder why he would say something like that, especially to a group of marketing professionals who probably know better.  He also addressed people who make negative comments on Twitter, Facebook or other sites, and one of his recommendations was just to ignore those people.  Now granted, there are some folks out there who will be unhappy no matter what you do to try to appease them but to make a blanket statement like ignore them?  Wow.  I don’t know what else to say.  How did this person become a so-called expert in social media?

At the end of the session, I left feeling very disappointed. First, I disagreed with at least 50% of what the speaker said. Second, I don’t feel like he adequately addressed the topic of online reputation management.  He talked quite a bit about making sure your company shows up on the first page of a Google search and how to handle negative feedback but that was really it.  He mentioned that he liked SM2 and Radian6 in terms of social media monitoring tools but there was no further discussion.  What I was hoping to learn was more detail about monitoring, especially if you’re a small company and the only one in charge of it.  What do you track — any mention on any site?  In comparison to your competitors? And what does the CEO truly care about?  I wanted a deeper dive into the topic and came away feeling like this was a waste of my time.  But perhaps that’s the main problem with social media — people’s knowledge is all over the board.  Maybe the other attendees were pleased with the information the speaker provided but I was not.