A few months ago I spoke at an event in London on the topic of “Social Media in a Corporate Context”. Off the back of this talk, a journalist emailed me this week on the subject of “virally spreading online rumours”. He cited the following harmful rumours about brands that have spread online:

• An email that accused Starbucks of not supporting the War on Terror
• Talk of Red Bull containing a stimulant devised by the US army for soldiers in Vietnam
• News of fictional viruses affecting Nokia phones, etc.

There are many more examples we can find of erroneous information that spreads around the Internet. The journalist wanted to know how social media might be playing a part in spreading these rumours, and how companies should respond. The following is my response:

One of the most interesting ideas in this area is the employment of “conversation agencies” which aim to locate and respond to negative conversations on behalf of brands and corporations. I touched on these during my talk at Communicate’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference. I’m sure the guys at We Are Social would be delighted to discuss the way in which they manage reputation for brands such as Skype (their blog has case studies written up already – http://wearesocial.net/).

Any organisation using a conversation agency or an in house team to monitor the Internet for conversations about their brands would be well advised to take a measured and planned approach. This should ensure that these are dealt with efficiently and proportionally. The US Air Force drew up a flow chart which they use when deciding how they respond to online discussions about their activities. This was picked up on by people such as Jeremiah Owyang and popularised. It has then been updated to make it useful for specific sectors, e.g. Michael Grimes of Citizensheep has adapted this to third sector organisations (available as a Creative Commons licensed download).

The phenomenon of urban myths related to brands is not new. Sharing of information about companies, true or false, through web pages and viral email distribution predates what we tend to think of as “social media” and, indeed, predates the Internet. When we think about the web, commentators often reflect that it has sped up the exchange of ideas by making communication more immediate and removing geographic boundaries. When we think about social media we see more opportunities for forwarding on messages and ideas, and more public fora for discussion of those ideas. If social media changes the way we think about brand rumours, it is that if these ideas are shared and debated in the open (e.g. on a blog) then the brands have a chance to answer back; they wouldn’t have had this opportunity when the ideas were shared over email or face to face.

At the Social Media in a Corporate Context conference I discussed the responsibility that corporates have when they join online conversations. Corporates must remember that the public have a right to discuss their experiences of a brand. Some of these conversations will not be comfortable reading for reputation managers. Social media communities function through trades in social capital; most corporate organisations understand the world through economic capital and do not want to invest time in building social capital. This then leads to them short cutting their way into the conversation through using their financial resources to buy into the conversation: economic capital (money) is exchanged for social capital (influence). It is likely that the fiscal reserves of a given brand exceed the social reserves of an individual, and therefore companies must behave responsibly to ensure they are not “buying the conversation”.