It's undoubtedly the summer of comic book and Sci Fi this year, traditionally a niche genre but with a summer line-up that includes Gravity, Elysium, Star Trek, Thor, Man of Steel, Oblivion, Enders Game, After Earth, Pacific Rim, R.I.P.D, The World's End, Riddick, there's a definite theme Hollywood is banking on this year.

Of course breaking from tradition always brings a certain amount of risk with it but in the modern consumer age it's safe to say that for the entertainment industry as a whole, the stakes and risks are higher than ever.

The cost of movie making and producing TV series has reached record levels. The huge investments needed to make and promote entertainment material, coupled with the blurring lines between TV/DVD and on demand internet services have lead to a many a sleepless night for those in the entertainment industry.

Marketing campaigns are more advanced than ever, going out across multiple platforms but there are other factors that affect the success of a new offering aside from how well it's publicised.

It's a question of Influence

Once the marketing and advertising was done, a successful TV show, band, play or film used to rely on media/critic reviews and simple word of mouth to promote themselves. To a certain extent, mediocre or badly received products could still find success because of how slowly this information passed.

The world today is dominated by social media. The benefits it provides for viral marketing are well known but the risks and problems it creates influencing the opinion of entertainment consumers are just beginning to be understood.

With so many viewpoints available, consumers are slowly moving away from the mainstream media outlets to guide them in choosing what entertainment to spend their money on as seen by the falling readerships of mainstream newspapers, falling TV viewership and the rise of so many blogs, websites and YouTube channels reviewing and commenting on film, TV and music.

Sentiment can, and in many cases is, now be led by bloggers and tweeters. Anyone with access to the internet can now be a potential critic, influencing the opinions of their small or large circles, who then in turn pass their opinion on to their circles, the ripple effect.

Of course this isn't revolutionary, most successful brands in the entertainment industry use services to collect this data to gain insights, warn them of potential issues that could threaten a new release's success but increasingly the question is becoming, 'What to do with the data?'

Many services provide big data, large clumps of volumetric stats such tweets, Facebook likes & numbers of fans or followers but this large data is increasingly leaving marketing less informed than when they started.

False Economy

Not all social media data is pertinent. Sure, volume is always a great indicator but in the social media world you need the analysis agency to also understand the value of insight. Facebook likes for instance can be a questionable currency of measuring marketing success. Sometimes campaigns with a one off prize can get a brand huge numbers of Facebook likes at it will seem like job done. But measuring the volume of social media traffic aimed at your brand is only half the story.

A complete service agency needs to have the expertise to evaluate the full ecosystem of communications that come together to effect a brands reputation: Press releases, financial results, advertising, CEO statements, company messages, corporate CSR policy, what mainstream media is writing about the brand behind the release. Every one of these factors and more affects what is being said organically in blogs and forums as well as on Twitter and a brand's Facebook Page.

Focusing on just the sanitised social media space a brand creates for itself will not give an accurate or full story of how that brand is perceived or help to understand how each factor effects.

More than numbers

Insight, direction, answers. This is what marketers, Comms and PR professionals are looking for from media analysis, not just figures.

An entertainment brand and its offerings are affected by so many reputational factors that having a complete picture to make effective decisions means drilling down through the large data, finding the key influencers, identifying the issues that really matter, using human intelligence and experience to interpret the numbers and use them as supporting evidence for conclusions and recommendations.

In the work that we do here at Echo Research we frequently tackle the reputation gap; the difference between an organisation's identity (who they are, or think they are) and their reputation (what other people say they are, or believe them to be). It recently struck me that there is one aspect of my personal life where many comparisons can be drawn with my work providing insight into the reputation of financial services firms.

This is my dog (stick with me and you'll quickly see where I'm going with this).

He is eight years old and has lived with me since he was an eight week old scrap of fur that I could hold in my hands. He is a joy to be with, a wonderfully loyal companion and a much loved member of my family. He is also a Staffordshire bull terrier. How's that for a reputation problem?

The day to day reality of our life together is a million miles away from the image frequently portrayed in the media. He has never tried to maul me, or anyone else, in fact he has never shown the slightest amount of aggression towards a human being. He might lick you half to death, but that's about the worst of it. In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that he has had a few disagreements with other dogs over the past eight years, but then I too have disagreed with some of my own species in that time, so I try not to judge.

I'm not an apologist. I don't pretend to love all Staffordshire bull terriers and I'm not launching an impassioned defence of the breed, painting them all as little cuddle bunnies. That wouldn't be any truer than the vicious monsters often portrayed in the press. I certainly won't deny that that there are some SBTs harming their owners or in some very upsetting cases, being involved in the death of someone, as we've seen recently in the news. However, to generalise and make judgements based on a few bad examples is a dangerous game. Just like judging all financial services workers on the dubious actions of a small number of them is a risky business.

There is a tendency in the media to portray all bankers cackling maniacally as they deliberately destroy the global economy with one hand and stuff fistfuls of bonus money into their pockets with the other. Isn't it time that we took a step back and realised that just like the majority of Staffordshire bull terriers, the majority of financial services workers aren't rabid slathering beasts (to borrow some tabloid style hyperbole)? That they are in fact normal, decent members of society diligently trying to do their jobs?

Again, there is no point in denying the issues that the financial services industry continues to face, but it's time to get some perspective and to see that despite what the press chooses to print, the bad apples are not the norm. It's time that firms started to really look at their corporate identity, figure out who they are and who they want to be. Only then can they start to fix what has gone wrong and to take charge of telling their own, individual stories, to engage and connect with their stakeholders and to rebuild trust across the board. Until we start to regain a sense of identity from our banks, their reputation will remain in the hands of the media.

The dominant theme of the second, conference day of the World Federation of Advertisers annual Global Marketer Week in Brussels was purpose. Purpose. The role that brands play in people's lives beyond the purely functional; the role of brands in society; their responsibility for giving something back; how brands enable positive change; what brands stand for; what their higher sense of purpose is in the world.

Time and again, different presenters showed how brands with a purpose - a raison d'être beyond pure profit and market domination - are better able to start and sustain meaningful conversations with customers, consumers and stakeholders. In each case, this isn't about corporate philanthropy of its own sake; it's about doing well by doing good, whether the purpose delivers social, environmental or economic benefits.

Kimberly Kadlec, CMO of Johnson & Johnson, set the bar high by showcasing an inspiring range of real life stories that deftly demonstrated the purpose that J&J has written into the heart of its brands' DNA, and the way that it has embraced real-life storytelling to make each individual purpose come to life. She showed how social and digital technology - exemplified in J&J's YouTube platforms and health channels - have transformed how the company reaches, builds and sustains patient communities. And she revealed how the company has evolved and rewritten the classic 4 Ps of marketing, from Product, Place, Price and Promotion, to become Purpose, Presence, Proximity and Partnership.

The theme of purpose was picked up by Manuel Patricio, CMO of AB InBev, and by Marc de Swaan Arons, Executive Chairman of Effective brands, stepping in at the last moment for Antonio Lucio, the global CMO of VISA. They both talked a lot of hard commercial sense about purpose, as did representatives of both the WFA and Edelman, reporting back on two recent studies. The WFA had polled its own membership about purpose, and was sharing findings from 149 members worldwide. And Edelman presented the findings from its most recent "good purpose" study, the fifth consecutive, annual study, which interviews 500 consumers in each of 16 markets worldwide, in both developed and developing economies.

Some highlights of these parallel studies included:

• 56% of brand custodians think that consumers are happy if brands "do well by doing good". Consumers are rather more bullish - 76% of consumers are actively looking for brands to build purpose into their core proposition.
• Consumers don't just seek brands with purpose in developed economies. In fact, consumers in emerging, particularly BRIC-MIST markets are more prepared to pay a premium for brands with a purpose. For some emerging markets, indeed, consumers are twice as likely as their peers in developed economies to reward brands for attaching themselves to and espousing a strong and relevant purpose.
• These findings reflect the results of a global study done by Ebiquity's reputation practice, Echo, and Boston-based CSR PR firm Cone Communications in 2011.
• A purpose needs to be fit for purpose, and successful purposes are generations beyond simple cause-related marketing tie-ups. Marketers are sensitive to the need for appropriateness of purpose, with 57% agreeing that not every brand can have a purpose without it feeling contrived. This is something that an overwhelming majority believe brands should strive to avoid.
• The company generally agreed to have embraced purpose-led marketing to its heart most effectively is Unilever - think Omo/Persil's Dirt Is Good and Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. Unilever was closely followed by P&G, Coke and McDonald's.

The day was rounded out by one of the most impactful marketers of his generation - Andy Fennell, global CMO of Diageo. He talked of Diageo being in the aspiration game, whether they're selling a bottle at $5 or $150,000 (the 60 bottles of 1952 vintage Scotch blended to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee), Diageo is inviting consumers to buy a product that is more expensive than it needs to be for purely functional effects.

Fennell moved talk of purpose on to focus on "endeavour", and revealed that the company always gets its brand managers to ask and answer the killer question "Why does my brand exist?" By stripping brand purpose back to bare bones, by relentlessly focusing on the role the brand plays in the lives of its consumers, Diageo - like some of its cutting-edge peers - is helping brands to consolidate their social utility, in addition to their functional and emotional utility.

Ebiquity is the Effectiveness Partner of the WFA and sponsored the WFA's 60th anniversary dinner on Wednesday 6 March 2013 in Brussels.

A swift response, a heartfelt apology and news updates are key to averting a PR disaster, as BP and other advertisers have found.

For every well-planned ad campaign, there is also a PR disaster potentially waiting to undermine it. Most recently, Tesco has had to issue apologies about the presence of horsemeat in its burgers to reassure customers. When a crisis hits that's as big as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it demands an all-hands-to-the-pump approach to marketing and years of attempting to rebuild reputation. Welcome to BP's world in April 2010. Immediately after the disaster, as you might expect, ads appeared in the press to inform consumers and show efforts to clean up. But, more interestingly, the $93 million the oil giant spent during 2011, and every US above-the-line ad since, have been almost entirely designed to refuel goodwill towards the company

Primarily, they have highlighted the brand's desire to rebuild local communities and provided updates on the clean-up work. YouTube was a key medium, with the BP channel showcasing the company's work to boost tourism and help locals get their lives back together. So was BP's Olympic Games sponsorship, designed to convey that the company is both responsibly aware and global. The "fuelling the future" campaign and its emphasis on finding alternative energy solutions was integral to this. However, a launch ad showing Jessica Ennis running along a beach was judged by some to have got off on the wrong foot. Sponsorship of the Cultural Olympiad and Paralympic activity have been activated below the line with events, competitions and workshops, some of which have attempted specifically to engage a teenage audience, while others aimed to regain trust in the UK and champion the company's British roots. Print, out-of-home and online ads celebrated athletes' and workers' contribution to the Games with BP's inclusive "here's to the home team" campaign.

Any fleet-of-foot responsiveness came in the form of ads congratulating athletic ambassadors on their success and informing consumers of how many journeys were offset during the Games. Now the brand is expected to draw a line under the oil disaster with a return next month to ads that showcase the contribution BP makes to society. Other brands have had less environmentally catastrophic disasters to deal with and have reacted in a variety of ways. Starbucks and Barclays tried to apologise in open letters after accusations of UK tax avoidance and Libor-rigging respectively - but still were taunted in social media. Domino's Pizza used the need to counteract a YouTube film - in which employees abused customers' food - as an opportunity to revamp areas of its business and apologise. The PR disaster was the catalyst for "pizza turnaround". This was a campaign that began with the chief executive apologising on YouTube and - via a massive social media drive, online delivery tracking and iPhone apps, plus taste tests, TV ads and more - resulted in a reputation that is arguably stronger than ever.

But perhaps some of the clearest examples of how to make the best of a social media gaffe come from KitchenAid and the American Red Cross. Speed of response and consistent apologies from the head of the company managed to pull KitchenAid back from the brink of social opprobrium after one of its corporate Tweets made a joke about Barack Obama's grandmother dying. And humour did it for the American Red Cross when an employee accidentally posted a personal message on the charity's official Twitter feed about "getting slizzerd". The employee and the brand deflated the situation with swift apologies and tongue in-cheek posts. Even Dogfish Head beer - the apparent cause of any "getting slizzerd" - got in on the act with a fundraising Tweet for the charity.

Strategic Opinion Trevor Hardy, Founder, The Assembly More truth, less marketing may be the right approach in the current climate, as the world of business and governments shift from one crisis to the next. A case in point is Starbucks in the UK and what could have been a taxing disaster for the business as many action groups,politicians and media announced their intent to boycott the brand. But Starbucks' approach was immediate and frank; not wrapped up in spin or excuses. It wrote open letters to customers, laid bare the real state of its finances in digital and social channels, and spoke in front of politicians. It was honest, in plain English, about where one could see questionable tax behaviour; it put a convincing case forward and encouraged debate. The power of the response across channels was that it was fast, unpolished and, like some of the best marketing, felt very little like marketing. Sometimes, the truth hurts; but, in Starbucks' case, the truth helped.

This article was first published in print and online at: campaignlive.co.uk

With Macworld / iWorld starting Thursday, I thought I'd check out the pre-event news and buzz to get an idea of the expectations for the latest products and introductions.

(Click on info-graphic to download PDF version)

On the news side there was agreement that current consumer trends in apps and mobility will drive the interest at the show and an observation that Macworld / iWorld is "reborn as a consumer mobile lifestyle festival" (7x7.com). The huge growth of this market was, of course, already confirmed at CES. We should expect a particular interest in photo-themed apps for the iPhone and a series of new tablets from Apple for this year. Most of all, people will be looking for the three elements defining Apple technology: innovation, creativity and excitement. With an increasingly serious competition it will be more important than ever for brands to demonstrate this at the show.

Interestingly, social media buzz was very much picking up the news content but also focused on the announcement of jOBS film stars Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad making an appearance at the show and on people announcing their travel plans. I expect more 'organic' chatter and content to appear with the start of the show.

I'll be following the event over the next couple of weeks and will publish my findings here on how the two channels - social media and news - report innovation, creativity and excitement from Macworld / iWorld and how this may affect brand reputation.

This week, the Facebook-owned photo service Instagram announced that it would be changing its EULA (End User Licence Agreement) to allow itself to sell user photos without notifying the photos' original uploaders. This comes only a month after Facebook Vice-President of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, said: "Eventually we'll figure out a way to monetise Instagram".

As usual Twitter users were the most vocal and least appreciative with their comments.
(taken from a sample of replies to a Tweet by USA TODAY)

The word monetisation seems to be a tad overused in relation to internet stories these days but when you dissect the mechanics bringing you services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google's free tools, it becomes rather like answer to life, the universe and everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: we already know the answer (and it's not 42!) but we now need to know the question.

Who pays for it all?

Take Facebook as an example. To run a global site like Facebook is a huge and costly enterprise. If you were thinking of doing this yourself to the same scale, first of all you would need server farms to host the thing. One in each area you want to deliver the service to. Global company? You're going to need a few of those.

Each server farm is a huge futuristic facility with industrial cooling and millions of pounds worth of server equipment that constantly needs monitoring, repairing and replacing. To do this you can't just rely on local IT support from the yellow pages either, you are going to need a lot of very highly trained professionals, the kind that are quite rare and never come cheap.

On top of these you will need all the staff, offices and organisation that any large corporation would need as well as a development team taken from the top mathematicians and programmers the world has to offer. Again, these don't come cheap.

You begin to realise that revenue made just from advertising may not stretch far enough to cover the vast costs involved in running a service on this scale and start to understand why 'monetisation' is so important to the people tasked with making these enterprises profitable.

I know this is unlikely to garner any sympathy for a sector which has made massive profits over the last few years while everyone else has been tightening their belts, but it does raise another point: how well are these organisations handling their communications to a user base who behave at times like a herd that will only graze on the greenest grass and happily follow each other to pastures new?

Back to our example, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have gone to great lengths to tell the story of the boy with an idea who fought the establishment and changed the world. Something that rouses the underdog-supporting, rebellious streak that exists in all of us but demands no more allegiance than simply creating a Facebook account to feel like part of the movement.

But communications like the aforementioned overuse of the word 'monetisation' by the Vice-President of Global Marketing Solutions can pop the bubble of the story that the social media use to sell themselves, be it bringing people together, providing a creative outlet for everyone or championing freedom of speech. Badly timed communications can remind everyone they are infact another multi-billion dollar corporation.

As with all other forms of business, understanding, coordinating and evaluating communications is key to success and when your user base is willing to mass-migrate in an instant, great care must be taken to establish, understand and protect any online service's brand reputation.

Because however these services choose to raise their revenue, retaining their user base is vital to their continued success. Instagram & Facebook are savvy enough operators to realise this and so they quickly reversed their decision to change their policies and put an immediate halt to the user migration that had started. Time will tell if there is any lasting reputational damage or loss of trust.

by Tom Mattey. Twitter: @graphical_tom

Last week, I was invited to be an animator at the International Association of Business Communicators' (IABC) Christmas Communications Emporium.

"An animator, you say? You were making cartoons, then?"

Not quite. Five friends of the IABC - each of us with something very different to say about different aspects of communication - led tables of ten or so IABC members in animated discussions for 20-minute sessions. Time was called, the members swapped tables, and the process was repeated. And then again. And one more time. 75 people doing an innovative and dynamic form of speed-dating, en masse.

"Does internal communications still exist?" mused the table led by our (geographical) host Rob Briggs from the Royal Bank of Canada ? How do you build and grow online communities, asked internet start-up angel Greg Jackson? What makes for brilliant events, quizzed David Paul from Event Extra ?

And me? I asked what comms professionals can do to get beyond the situation a lot of us find ourselves in today, "too much data, too little insight". There were plenty of suggestions, and perhaps even a consensus: focus on what matters and express that in a way that is received credibly in the C-suite.

The idea was the brainchild of Stephen Welch, President of the IABC's UK Chapter, our (spiritual) host for the evening, a Director at the Hay Group and a one-time, long-former Echoista himself. Great debate had across all the tables, fantastic to meet such a high calibre of communicators from such a diversity of communications backgrounds - agency and in-house, public and private sector, generalist and specialist. Not to mention the fab film-maker, an area from which more "traditional" communicators could learn a lot.

It turned out not to be too early to be in a Christmasy frame of mind, and if you ever have the chance to eat and drink fantastic nibbles in the RBC's riverside, river-level bar, snap it up.

For those who couldn't make it, here's a great and very short video memory of a most enjoyable evening.

Earlier this week, I attended a PR Week conference on reputation management strategy. A chance to take the temperature of client and agency thinking on measurement of corporate and brand reputation; a chance to network with peers, rivals, clients and prospects; and, a chance to reflect on best practice. And perhaps - above all - a chance to think, to reflect on the dominant themes shaping industry understanding of how best to assess the impact of earned media and stakeholder opinion.

Practitioners, both agencies and client side, are all now well aware of the ways in which social media has changed brand and reputation management for good. Brand custodians now see only partial control as the new normal, and new paradigms and orthodoxies are really starting to take shape. And while many have built and are proud to showcase new methodologies of reputation measurement, what surprised me was that so many are still making up their minds about what they should be measuring, how and why.

And that focus is the nub of continued confusion, I think. If you're focused on the outputs of comms and the impact of these outputs on reputation, you're only ever going to scratch the surface. What matter are outcomes. It's not so much what's been produced - from retweets and likes to good old-fashioned column inches - it's what those outputs have done to change attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and advocacy. And it's only by linking communications measurement to business objectives and outcomes that we can know if there was any point doing what we set out to do.

The conference got off to a blistering start, with Conrad Bird from the Prime Minister's Office giving a compelling case history of the six-department GREAT Britain campaign. Just ten months old, riding on the coattails of the Olympics and triumphant in its recent "BOND IS GREAT Britain" activation around Skyfall, the campaign has already grown UK plc by a claimed quarter of a billion pounds on a ten-country investment of just tens of millions.

We learnt lots from Sky, Shell and Arcelor Mittal. I found Arcelor Mittal's Ian Louden's definition of reputation particularly appealing: Reputation + Aspiration = Brand, where Reputation is what people remember about us based on what we've done historically, Aspiration is our future promise, and so Brand is the whole concept of who we are, of what we stand for.

The savage independence of Stephen Jolly, Director of External Affairs and Communications from Cambridge University, was a blast of fresh air after lunch. In the same session, we also learnt that Mumsnet now makes as much as 25% of its revenue from insight alone, conducted directly with among its membership.

The day was rounded out by two barnstorming performances. First up was Alex Pearmain, the head of social media at O2 with whom I shared a platform earlier this year to launch the #smcustomer research we at Echo had conducted with Fishburn Hedges. Alex's storytelling about the dynamics and lessons learned from adopting a tongue-in-cheek yet respectful tone of voice during O2's mass outage last year are getting richer and more rounded. Alex will be missed when he moves on from O2 in the near future, but O2's loss is very definitely Brands2Life - and its clients' - gain.

The keynote to close the day came from PwC's Head of Reputation and Policy, Richard Sexton. He skilfully pulled together a number of key strands about earning and maintaining trust. He boiled it down to having more authentic conversations with the people and stakeholders who matter.

Authenticity.
Delivering on your promises.
Transparency.
Doing the right thing.

In the age of social media more than ever, you can't demand to be trusted. You have to earn it.

In the run-up to this week's US Presidential election, we were often told that the result was too close to call. By focusing on the share of the popular vote - and not on the performance of the parties in marginal districts of key swing states - many of the loudest in the commentariat got things wrong. An inability to see the wood from the trees - the capacity to know with certainty what's a signal and what's just noise - meant they focused on the wrong Vital Signs of performance.

In our world of measurement and evaluation of paid, earned and owned communication, we often meet marketing, comms and insight teams who are drowning in data. It's not that they have too little information on which to judge how well their company or organisation is communicating - in fact it's quite the reverse. They're crying out for help in understanding just what the Vital Signs of successful communication are so they can make informed decisions based on genuine insight. Part of the problem is deciding which data matters, and part of the solution is how this data is presented.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the world of politics is increasingly looking for big insight out of big data. The US Election spawned more than a dozen, first-class, data aggregation apps to make sense of the real-time shifts in opinion and sentiment. This Prezi is a great summary of the election, and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog correctly and elegantly predicted 49 out of 50 states' results.And news just in this morning is that British Prime Minister David Cameron is trialling an app to aid Government decision-making. The "Number 10 Dashboard" app keeps track of housing, jobs, opinion polls, and social media commentary, pulling data from hundreds of sources. If the trial goes well, it will be rolled out across Whitehall next year, giving ministers and officials real-time understanding of how policies are being received nationwide.

Collating data from a broad array of different sources, making sense of it and presenting it clearly, simply and effectively is the Holy Grail of modern marcomms professionals. They could learn a lot from US data scientist, Edward Tufte, whose book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a must-read. And it's easy to get lost in the worlds created by David McCandless, the UK data journalist and information designer behind Information Is Beautiful - lost because of the clarity, simplicity and beauty of the way he presents information.

Lets hope that 2013 will be the year in which politics starts to catch up with those smarter public and private sector organisations that monitor, measure and benchmark the genuine Vital Signs of total communications effectiveness.

In a week that has seen ten people appear in a British court accused of naming on social media a woman who was raped by a footballer, the question has to be asked: how much freedom of speech should we actually have?

Social media have given a generation the freedom to say what they like with almost no accountability or comeback. For many people, these media are the first places to go to let off steam and express (often strong) views and opinions. They have provided accessible platforms for people outside the media industry to affect and shape the reputation of individuals and organisations.

Expressing opinions gives people a voice and allows them to be involved in the discussion. In many cases companies are using new media to learn from and engage directly with their consumers. The concern for many is that, because it can be used as a damaging tool and with such limited control or regulation, do companies have as much protection as individuals?

On individual cases, the legalities are becoming clearer and in the court case mentioned above, the law gives the victims and alleged victims of rape and other sexual offences lifelong anonymity. Those commenting on the case, therefore, are deemed to have broken the law by simply naming the victim on Twitter and can be held accountable.

In traditional media, individuals and businesses are protected by slander and defamation laws. In the case of social media, the most appropriate legislation for an organisation would be the Malicious Falsehood law (intentionally false statements made to cause damage to a person's business reputation), but complainants must be able to prove that: a) the person who published the statement did so knowing it was false or did not care whether it was false or not, and b) financial loss has to have been caused or is likely to have been caused.

There have not been any high profile social media 'malicious falsehood' cases to set the precedent yet and I doubt there will be. Social media move at such a pace that a costly court case would take a long time to reach a conclusion and the outcome would be almost pointless as the damage would already have been done. It is more effective for companies, instead, to embrace and engage in these conversations.

As reputation experts, we at Echo Research have certainly seen a rise in companies using social media to their advantage and, although they will never be able to control the content, they can 'get involved' and counteract negativity with proactivity. They should also be using negative opinion as a guide to emerging issues and respond accordingly. If tracked in the right way it can become an extremely insightful tool.

A recent abusive tweet to Team GB diver Tom Daley sparked the Director of Public Prosecutions to issue a rethink about social media rules on abuse, saying: "in my view, the time has come for an informed debate about the boundaries of free speech in an age of social media". It leads me to wonder if this discussion should be widened out to protect organisations or should freedom of speech allow people to air their views and frustrations about businesses regardless of the negative effect?

If you take the time to read the extensive Twitter terms of use policy, there is nothing to protect your business from any misrepresentation expressed under the guise of a personal view, so it seems ultimately there are three options for social media damage limitation:

a) Ignore it
b) Go through a long a costly court case or
c) Embrace, join in and use it to your advantage

Done right, our money is on c).