Reputation Management Becoming Necessary for Company Success

Today isn’t the same promotional world you’re used to growing up in (or if you’re young enough, your parents). The days where having a big advertising budget translates into big profits simply isn’t true anymore, or at least not without other factors coming into play.

While raising brand awareness, segmenting a target market and positioning strategy are all crucial to selling a product or service, the world where companies can make their customers believe anything that’s advertised is simply no longer the case.

Just like a company can find out as much information about its customer base as it wants, customers are also open to researching the good and bad about any company they want. This gives the business owner an opportunity to either accept the challenge that comes with engaging in a two-way dialogue with their customers or assume that if they ignore bad feedback, that the problem will go away.

Running on Dunkin: How a Donuts Company Repositioned Itself

In light of Dunkin Donuts’ decision to be publicly traded, I’ve decided to look at how the relatively new catch-phrase, “America runs on Dunkin” changed the perception of being an unhealthy donuts shop to becoming a socially acceptable coffee shop. For more information on the Dunkin Donuts IPO, you can check out the Wall Street Journal article on “Everything You Need to Know” regarding the recent decision.

Dunkin Donuts isn’t the only company that offers coffee with its junk food, but its slogan shifted the focus of its advertising from the donuts to the coffee and it is paying off. According to the quoted Wall Street Journal article on Dunkin Donuts, 60 percent of U.S. sales come from coffee and other beverages. DD only had to learn from the McDonald’s controversy where the fast food giant faced several lawsuits for selling unhealthy food in order to figure out that focusing a marketing strategy around donuts would not be wise. Whether or not you feel that the lawsuits against McDonald’s were justified, you can’t argue the amount of negative publicity the company suffered because of these lawsuits. Although McD’s now sells healthy food, the company is too closely tied to Big Macs and the phrase, “super size me,” to successfully reposition itself.

In other words, be associated as unhealthy and your brand will be damned.

Response to Edelman on Sports Teams and Social Media Policy

I came across an article on July 25 by Edelman about how sports teams should use social media to engage in a conversation with fans without harming the team’s image. Here are some suggestions Mitch Germann, Edelman’s new Vice President in the Seattle digital office had for teams.

• PR should consider everyone on staff to be a potential spokesperson, not to traditional media but to their friends, family, customers, prospects and partners, knowing many of these conversations will take place in the digital space

• PR should have messages for everything relevant and distribute them internally so everyone is communicating consistently

• Staff posts on social channels should mirror the approved messages the owners, GM, team president or other team spokespeople are using with the press

• Create a social media policy for the organization that clearly outlines the do’s and don’ts, best practices and possible consequences

• Conduct interactive in-person training sessions with small groups to teach the policy to the entire organization

• Create a digital communications monitoring and response team to track conversations about the team in the social space seven days a week and flag issues for the PR team for immediate follow-up

You can read the rest of the article here. I believe that having a social media policy is crucial in any professional environment, but it’s important for staff members to not become PR pieces and actually engage with fans.

My First Contribution to Generation Y Rants

I had the opportunity to contribute to Generation Y Rants. It’s a blog started by Justice Wordlaw, a CEO of an online marketing company. I decided to write about how social media and networking today make it possible to find a job in a field that the job-seeker is passionate about.

I welcome all feedback either on the site or in the comments section of the blog. Click here to read my post on Generation Y Rants.

Welcome

My name is Adam Miller and I am a graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst looking to get into Public Relations and Marketing. The purpose of this website is to creatively showcase some of my work from different classes and internships in order to properly articulate my abilities in future work.

I can be reached my email at ajmil0011@gmail.com or by phone at 312-354-0081.