ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS

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ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS Managing Corporate Reputation & Raising Brand Value

Master Thesis - Executive Master in Luxury Goods Management Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milan Academic Year: 2013-2014 Program Supervisor: Roberta Crespi Thesis Supervisor: Hélène Le Blanc

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS

“The way to gain good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”

Socrates

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

Henry Ford

“Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.”

Michael Iapoce

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 9

From Luxury to Meta-luxury (Luxury 2.0) 9

Luxury is NOT Immune!

10 Digital Marketing for Luxury Brands

Social Media Marketing

Rules of Engagement

Word of Mouth

Social Media Challenges

Social Media & Luxury

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Online Reputation Management

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management Approach

Brand Vandalism

Create your Team − Galvanize your Troops

Monitor your Online Reputation

Establish your Online Reputation

Content Strategy

Measuring Online Reputation

Risk Issues and Crisis Management

23 23 24 25 28 30 34 37 41 44

Business Analytics

Analytics Software

Online Reputation Tools

Web Analytics Trends

51 51 55 57

Reputation Management & Luxury 3.0

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INTRODUCTION

Introduction

FROM LUXURY TO META-LUXURY (LUXURY 2.0) What is luxury? This question troubles not only academics but managers as well. This project does not intend to indulge in the philosophy of luxury, but attempt to get a hold of what is that makes luxury so fascinating and desirable; examining one of the most important attributes reputation.

Ever since, luxury was meant for the few, those who could acquire it and find themselves envied for their possessions, the power they withheld, where they belonged and often found themselves consumed by an "informal" competition of strength and show-off. Until recently, less than 30 years, luxury was not accessible to everyone, and not due to the prices, but more as a matter of rarity and exclusivity. A brief example is that a classic Hermès carré could only be found in 10, maybe 20, stores around the world.

Moreover, throughout the ages, luxury has changed form, shape, audience and in some cases its own identity. It is of major importance to understand why luxury is such an intriguing field. In the book "The Luxury Strategy", luxury is given 6 different definitions according to the authors, Jean Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien, of which maybe the most important at this moment is "My luxury". "My luxury" refers to something very intimate, often not a product but a moment or a rare experience; it is not just trade and numbers, it is a different way of running and managing a business, but above all a way of understanding a customer. This is where the terms "Hyper-luxury" or "Meta-luxury" come in place.

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century introduced the world to the mass production. Yet, luxury was a field not acquainted with the changes and the new improvements. By the 20th century, luxury was set to conquer the world, due to the increasing demand, given by the growing slice of population who suddenly had gained access to luxury. It was time for the luxury world to compete with mass products and marketing techniques, unknown to the sector up to then. One may ask why now and the reasons are simple and profound. Gender equality, rise of the middle class, women in the work force, rising economies, democracy, even the 2 world wars that deprived growth made people worldwide desire more while elevating their standards. Luxury has become a standard, a guide in democratic societies, even in less egalitarian like the Middle East.

Even then, luxury was still elusive to the masses, mostly due to its nature and the idiosyncrasy developed through the years. Luxury speaks to wishes and desires, not needs and necessities. This is why it has many definitions and appeals differently to each person. Of course, there are common and worldwide acknowledgements but deep inside, luxury is still what sets us apart from the common, the ordinary, and the plebeians. Alternatively, it used to.

Despite the vast democratization of luxury during the 20th century, the sector remained beyond and above the horde, in some cases. On the other hand, there were brands within the sector that have reached a new level of luxury, the "mass luxury", which led to a total vulgarization of these brands, barring them from their identity. Such an example is Louis Vuitton, which during the end of the previous century and the first years of this one, had become a brand accessible to anyone,

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yet worse affordable to everyone. Vuitton quickly lost ground defined as a luxury brand, despite the mass earnings. The main advantage of that era of Vuitton was that is managed to become maybe the most famous and reputed, not necessarily good, luxury brand of the world. Yet the true democratization of luxury has not taken place.

It was around 2005-2007 when the internet had burst with a new era of websites, applications and social media, more than one could ask for. It was then when the World Wide Web gained it true meaning, as a unified login access has started to take place with pioneers like Google and Facebook. One could use only his email to access all kinds of web pages, applications, gather the needed information while having a more personalized web experience. It was then that terms such as Web Marketing (currently known as Digital Marketing), Social Media, Ecommerce and more popped up. The infamous 7 Ps of Marketing were altered to incorporate the changes and the new era. Traditional marketing involves around Product, Price, Promotion, Place, Packaging, Positioning and People, but one could say that another “P” was added, “Perception”; the way one identifies a product or a brand, the image created around the product or brand. Then, that Fans became “Followers” and Haters found more ground to express their negativity.

The terms Meta-luxury or Hyper-luxury have been used to describe a state of luxury where everybody has access to it, though a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone. Where Hermès was selling, was not very important any more, as even those who could not afford the products, could Google them and find out all the information, history, price, sizes, availability and more. However, there is more to that! Meta-luxury also meant that the brands where now fully exposed to vast audience, any kind of benevolent or maleficent content and attitude.

Since luxury in its core is all about perfection, idealism rarity brands were caught off guard in this new era of worldwide accessibility. In its nature, luxury depicts the dream, the elusive, something we look up and admire, something that responds to our desires; and it was that nature that in the past made luxury to move slow and not adapt changes. There was an attitude that change is bad and made many brands to make small moves or none at all, towards the new reality, as it was believed that luxury is timeless and everything else a trend.

Proven wrong this theory was, fortunately, quickly abandoned by the majority of the luxury brands, which today have incorporated and in some cases meliorate, digital strategies that have an effect, not only on their identity and image but also on their revenue and earnings. This is why in the "Meta-luxury: Brands and the culture of excellence", the authors propose that meta-luxury, luxury beyond luxury, should apply to brands that stand for unsurpassed excellence, brands for which authenticity, sustainability, innovation and talent are the principles by which they operate rather than part of an advertising spiel.

This does not mean that luxury brands should forget about digital, but that they should find ways to enhance their public image and the perception others have on them, by promoting more their vision and values, rather than their latest IT bag. Furthermore, brands must be aware of their digital footprint, their online identity, mostly because the risks in the online world are yet to be fully

INTRODUCTION

clear, due the continuous improvements in the computer and internet technology; also because in the digital world the first is most of the times the winner and it is better to be proactive than reactive.

LUXURY IS NOT IMMUNE! It is essential to remember that luxury is now globalised. It also very important to know who your client is. In past times, luxury was only for kings and priests, then for wealthy and ultra-wealthy people. Nowadays, luxury is part of the everyday life; connectivity has brought luxury closer to those who cannot afford it, but dream of having it. Everybody who owns a laptop, a tablet or a smart phone can have access to the newest Prada collection, watch on live streaming the latest Valentino fashion show, even search through the history of Cartier. Because of the perfect, dreamy nature of luxury, people tend to express strong emotions, with the often use of words like “love” or “must-have”. Rather extreme, but it is in these emotions that people can harm or praise a brand.

Considering a classic marketing tool, which indicated that a satisfied customer share his satisfaction with 2-3 other people at most, whereas a dissatisfied customer shares his dissatisfaction with at least 8-10 people, we could predict that a not-satisfied customer in the digital era shares his disappointment with his Facebook friends, his Tweeter followers, his Tumblr blog and all his online community. A satisfied customer can do the same, but it is always more interesting to play the bad character.

Due to the digital media prevail; brands are given an excellent opportunity to test themselves, their people, their customers, their fans - a true test to their identity; but they have to do it fast, because once a bad critic is posted, it will not come down. It is as much important for huge businesses, as it is to small ones. Yelp, Yahoo, TripAdvisor provide every user with the opportunity to rate a business, ask for information, have a place recommended.

Now imagine a client who has not been treated properly in a luxury retail store and it was a dream to buy the Speedy from Louis Vuitton or the Bamboo from Gucci. Once a bad critic is written, others will follow, like the domino effect. In case of luxury, it is better as the "non-return effect" or the "ratchet effect". Usually it describes the state where one has tasted luxury and it is almost impossible to go back, as one has increased his power, his prestige. However, in the case of digital, good is ok, but what you need is excellent; and bad is even worse. The online word of mouth, not only moves in a faster pace, but it has also a larger audience and once it is out there, it is irreversible.

In the online world, we are all equal; everyone has his own unique brand, comprised of his social media image, his likes, posts, photos and more. That is the true test for luxury, like in the French Revolution, digital has brought luxury to "liberté" and "égalité". Everybody has the "right" to luxury through digital access, buying or not, is most of the times irrelevant.

So how to provide all with the dream of luxury, while maintaining a certain brand image, a unique identity that brings together the nature, the core and the demand, while holding onto a top of the list reputation.

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DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LUXURY BRANDS

Digital Marketing for Luxury Brands SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media is nothing new. It is an umbrella term for web-based software and services that allow users to come together online and exchange, discuss, communicate and participate in any form of social interaction. The interaction is comprised of text, audio, images, video and other media, individually or in any combination.

Social media is not something new. Since the internet came out, its main goal was to bring users together in a faster way. Emails, bulletin boards and chat rooms are some of the initial tools internet used to bring users closer. What has changed over the years are the reach and penetration of the social media technologies, their adoption into the everyday lives of a mainstream audience, and the proliferation user-generated content and peer-to-peer interaction. Today, it is very easy for everyone to participate in the social discussion, through slick well-designed browserbased user interfaces that adopt methods and connections everybody feels comfortable with; it's easy, convenient and incredibly powerful; not because of the technology, but because of how this technology nurtures the connections among people.

The proliferation, and is some cases dominance, of social media is nothing more than a mere extension of the increase in internet usage and the penetration of always-on broadband access.

We are, by nature, social creatures, with the need to interact with other creatures coded into our DNA. These are some of the reasons that make social media undeniably compelling.

Compelling it may be, but for many marketers the thought of diving into an openly interactive world, where the rules are not made by them, but by media-savvy consumers, can be daunting.

Media-savvy consumers are aware, well informed and have the ability to spot marketing hypes from miles away; combined with the unpredictability of this whole new digital world, marketers feel powerless and know that a wrong turn can create a very real backlash, which would also be hard to make right. Marketing should be an industry were managers communicate, understand and connecting people with needs and wishes. Then why is it so scary for a marketer to enter this new world, where everything is about the people; and not necessarily the products.

Marketers want to create, implement and dictate the rules, but in a world where everything is open, people converse and opinions are said without resentment, how easy would it be to control what is said. It is impossible; and mainly this is what social media marketing is about. Rules of conversing were creating by the people, long before businesses developed an interested in the field or understood that this is the new era. One thing is for sure, people online talk about your industry, your competition, your brand, yours products and many other issues that concern you.

The conversation is happening, regardless of whether you choose to get involved or not. Surely, it is better to be aware of what is said, listen, engage and nurture relationships with these communities, than waiting in the periphery wondering and trying to grasp the situation.

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Effective social media marketing has more to do with letting the people come to you, than hammering them with the classic tools of traditional marketing. Instead of pushing them, develop a more subtle, like art consumer-based communication, engaging them in your activities. Find out what people are interested in, what they are talking about, and then provide them with useful information, advice and content for them. Talk to them, not at them, and above all, listen to them.

Managing effectively this, will happy a great impact on your organization's online profile.

Some broad characteristics define social media: Authenticity: online markets are conversations; people want organizations to talk to them as they would in a conversation with another human, in an authentic way. The classic principles of communication and marketing have no place in the digital world. For some organizations to adopt a more conversational way of communicating, could be a cultural shift, a new way of brand exposure. Organizational involvement in social media is driven by a desire for more transparency from within the organization. This is in part because actions and reputation that used to be safeguarded by a framework of professionalized functions are now the responsibility of everyone in the organization.

Transparency: as mentioned above, transparency is a key innate in social media strategies and involvement. Don Tapscott in The Naked Corporation defines transparency as, "the accessibility of information to stakeholders of institutions, regarding matters that affect their interests". Open organizations are perform better, as transparency is a new form of power, if harnessed properly. Now that business trust hits historic lows, transparency can be a way to rebuild that trust. Transparency is also related to the way the organization communicates with people in the social media; now is more likely an interaction between the two in "downtown" social media, available for everyone to see, comment on and spread even further. Additionally, all people within the organization are now able to see the events unfold publicly, whereas in the past it was usually the communications or customer service.

Decentralization of authority: social media is characterized by a multi-directional and increasingly two-way conversation. It enables people to interact and have the potential to affect each other, organizations, products, causes or politics. The flow of information is not a strict top-down direction; it is more circular, information can go from the bottom up, come from the sides and between different groups.

Speed: it is a defining element in social media and a challenge for firms in reputation management. The pace of information sharing is faster, broader and in the event of a crisis, things can be difficult if the organization does not respond fast enough, at least to mitigate the initial impact.

On the positive side, speed can help an organization amplify the information gathered, providing access to different channels. The way information is spread online is part of the acceleration process, providing compact knowledge in small doses to be better search and reached.

Collaboration: social media is defined by collaboration. Successful strategies are the ones that approach social media as a collaborative way of communication, encouraging engagement, com-

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LUXURY BRANDS

mitment and sustainability. Limited time campaigns and classic marketing strategies will not have the desired effect.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Social media offers a wealth of opportunity for consumer engagement and building brand awareness, but one has to be careful as to in what way to use social media. The fast-paced environment makes it challenging and scary for the marketers.

The 'rules' of social media are really about applying a bit of common sense to what are essentially human relationships. The key thing to remember is that these are called social media; people are going online to interact and exchange information and content with similar-minded people.

They are not interested in sales promotions or marketing hypes; they want interesting, fun, eyecatching, quirky, and addictive - whatever turns them on - content. When it comes to social media, you are not just sending out a message, you are part of the dialog. This is why you need to be flexible in social media marketing, a plan should be in place, but always be ready to respond to the community.

Draw on what you already know: organizations have tons of knowledge when it comes to customers. Social media is a way to get to know these customers a bit better, but before you dive in, use that knowledge of your customers, your business, and your brand and add it to your social media strategy, refining it when more knowledge arrives.

Don't jump in unprepared: make a clear plan before you start; know whom you want to communicate with and engage. Find ways to measure your impact use milestones frequently to keep track and don't forget to be flexible and adapt quickly to the community's feedback.

Look, listen and learn: before starting your social media strategy, let you immerse into the community without participating. Observe the differences among the different social media sites, read the blogs and familiarize with the various nuances of each online community.

Be open, honest and authentic: go online with transparency and 'full disclosure' of your brand. Don't pretend to an "individual" exalting the virtues of your brand, people will know and you don't want to go 'viral' for all the wrong reasons. Be yourself, because everybody else is taken.

Be relevant, interesting and entertaining: join the conversation by being helpful, constructive, creative, offering valuable and considered insights. Make a real effort to engage with the community on their own terms and they will be happy to accept you, adding to your business goals.

Don't get 'spammy': don't "bomb" people with information on why you're the best or why your products are more innovative that the wheel. People don't respond well to countless information and brands that delude themselves; best-case scenario, they will just ignore you, worst, you will

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have a negative viral effect.

Respect rules - Respect people: it is of utmost importance to read the 'terms and conditions' of each site and comply with them. More important is to value your fellow community members; this does not mean that you have to agree all the time, different opinions help the conversation move forward. When you disagree, always be kind and show appreciation of other opinions, everybody has the right to his opinion and there is nothing personal in healthy debate.

Respond to feedback: good or bad, honest feedback is priceless. Make sure to read, interpret and use feedback to your advantage. People want to know that their opinion is valued and show them not only your regards to their feedback, but also update them of how it helped you meliorate your business.

Moreover, the way a company decides to participate in social media depends mainly in the business and the communications goals. Social media is just one aspect of the communication activities, so it needs to be tailored to fit coherently with the organization's communication picture.

Building and maintaining reputation on the social web has to be in line with all the other efforts of the corporation. While each company is different, there are some pillars on how companies participate in social media: • •

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Community Building: the broadest way of participating in the social web is for companies to build their own communities. Plenty of them participate already in existing communities, like blogs and social media sites, while building their own, maintaining interaction in both.

Customer Service: a revolution social media has brought, was the speed of which customer service can take place. Nobody waits at customer service lines anymore; posts, tweets, comments, blogs are used to bring together the customers with the customer service, making companies respond faster to needs and complaints. It is a two-edged knife, as a pile of complaints and bad critics can cause a crisis on the company's image.

Market Research & Product Development: social media provides a direct line to customers, potential customers and general audience, allowing companies to get immediate feedback on products, services, advertisements and more. Though traditional marketing, with focus groups and statistical sampling, is still in place, social media allows continuous feedback and quickly accessible information. It can also be used to conduct competitors' analysis, social media strategies and tactics.

(Social) Media Relations: the line between 'old media' and 'new media' has become very blurry; companies use both to create both their online and offline communication strategy.

Stories formed in traditional media are spread into the blogosphere and stories from the blogosphere provide inspiration to create traditional media. Companies now work with influential bloggers the same as with influential journalists and "blogger relations" have become a significant part of the media relations mix. In addition, social media is used by companies to talk directly to different audiences along with the use of "social media influencers". Social media complements traditional media releases and does not replace them; it should be used strategically and with scope to enhance the communication mix.

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LUXURY BRANDS

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Crisis Management: maybe the biggest mistake a company can make in social media crisis is to completely ignore the blogosphere and isolate the problem within social media, undeserving a response. Ignoring a problem in social media amplifies and prolongs the crisis, such problems cannot be treated like viruses that need to be "contained" into the blogosphere; the crisis dynamics have changed and problems always find a way out. Successful companies have found ways to deal with outcries immediately and on spot, preventing them from becoming a crisis.

Employee Engagement: using social media to transform internal communication is a growing and important area of corporate social media adoption. Urge your employees to indulge into social media, getting to know each other better, resulting in knowing the company better and provide better services.

WORD OF MOUTH Building transparency is no longer negotiable. For years, marketers have worked at shaping people's opinions with different marketing tactics, while stretching the truth to achieve their objectives. Organizations must be honest and transparent when using social media; honesty and transparency build a direct relationship between you and your client, and any deviation from the truth can harm your brand trust irreversibly. In the digital age is almost impossible to hide the truth and customers so expect transparency from companies.

The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has established an ethics code around what language and behavior is appropriate or inappropriate from organizations on social networks. The code is centered on honesty. From the WOMMA website (www.womma.org): It's all about the HONESTY ROI. Ethical word of mouth marketers always strive for transparency and honesty in all communications with consumers, with advocates, and with those people who advocates speak to on behalf of a product.

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Honesty of Relationship - you say who you're speaking for Honesty of Opinion - you say what you truly believe; you never shill Honesty of Identity - you say who you are, never falsify your identity

It may seem stretched but many rules have been broken from marketers in past years and, even if they are not illegal, they can impose a great deal of image on your brand reputation.

The rule is quite simple. Nobody wants to be misled, manipulated or lied to, so put on your consumer hat and make sure to not do, to him or her, what you would not want to happen to you.

There are some actions you can take about that: •

Create a social media strategy that insists on honest and transparency as a default expectation. Make sure all your people are aligned with that and all stakeholders embrace openness.

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• • •

In large organizations determine whether your CEO can use social media tools effectively; the CEO is the ultimate transparent representative of a brand.

Check regularly your social media strategy to make sure that it stays aligned with the code of honesty and transparency.

Write down ways you could respond to questions, comments, feedback and complaints in your social media, in a more transparent way, to build further your customers' trust.

Everything and everyone is word-of-mouth marketing. Every single person in your organization has the chance to create a word of mouth marketing experience each time he talks to a customer.

At every moment that someone spends browsing or reading your online material, you get a chance to be either 'likable' or 'unlikeable'. Since we mentioned before that everybody in the blogosphere is somebody and has his own unique brand, pay attention to singularity and create tactics to engage, not as many advocates as you can, but that right advocates for your brand and for a reason, building deep connections with your customers.

Word of mouth is a referral; even in the online world, nothing beats a good recommendation from a friend, family or colleague. However, good referrals do not provide online reputation immunity.

In the digital world, offline and online referrals are combined; when a friend recommends a nice restaurant he usually prompts you to search them online, and this happens both ways. Your online reviews affect the decision process and in varying degrees at some point will affect your offline referrals. Bad referrals and reviews are like the Kryptonite to Superman; they silently take your power off and deprive you from a good online reputation, affecting your objectives, goals and profitability. With a bad reputation, your "cost of customer acquisition" increases and your revenues decrease, whereas good reputation is fuel for marketing.

Moreover, word of mouth is more than just the product or the service. Word of mouth is about the history, the identity, and the people in your organization. These elements, combined with highleveled products and services, boost your reputation. A good story online is better than a great product, because a story makes a brand look more 'human', thus more approachable, and they can be told by anyone, customers, employees, advocates of management; often for little of no cost.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGES Social media is a great opportunity for companies and organizations to promote themselves redefine their identity and generate revenues. However, since the field is recently developed there are still a lot to learn. Social media possesses also great challenges and risks, when not used in an honest, authentic and transparent way. Some of the challenges a company may come across are: Ethical: as mentioned above many discussions have been made around what are an ethical and an unethical approach to social media. Online reputation is referred to both the company and its employees; many examples of high-level managers using undisclosed profiles to praise their brand or even worse harm it. Online reputation has to be unique and authentic, like the company itself is, so embracing the new mentality of transparency and full disclosure should be everybody's

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LUXURY BRANDS

concern and not only the communications department.

Legal: Despite the transparency, mentality organizations should adopt to engage in social media, there are still certain types of information that should remain private and confidential, due to legal issues. Debbie Weil in The Corporate Blogging Book notes that legal risks fall into two categories: "stuff you don't want to reveal (trade secrets, financial information) and stuff you can get sued for (copyright, libel, privacy issues); the same goes for all online media, not only blogs. Certain highly regulatory industries have very specific limitations and challenges in social media. For example, alcohol beverages and cigarettes must be careful in order not to market in individuals under legal age, 18 or 21 in the USA. Moreover, for employees the Constitution of each country may protect civil rights and freedom of speech, but when it comes to speech that relates to their employment status and violating legal guidelines, that can get them fired. Frequently, the legal issues that restrict a company for certain aspects of the social media find common ground with the ethical code. Simple rules: don't talk about confidential stuff or forward-looking information, be careful with copyrights and trademarks, don't hide or disguise your identity and don't say things you wouldn't say face to face.

Bias: social media is an online conversation and when conversing people hear with 3 different filters - access, language and bias. Access has to do with the people not being able to access the social media in an everyday basis, thus their knowledge on it use is limited. Language has to do with companies that have multilingual audiences and they should consider that an actual translation might give out an inappropriate phrasing in Arabic or Chinese for example. Bias has more to do with what is called "selective listening", which risks exclusion of potentially significant people, topics, issues or media in general. For example, when a network like MySpace is not considered hip any more, but still plays a significant role on the social media map, it should be considered when developing a social media strategy.

Attacks and Campaigns: a high risk for companies in the blogosphere is the use of attacks and campaigns. At first we have to separate campaigns from attacks, campaigns are coordinated and usually attack a certain aspect of the company, many of the times of legal or ethical concern. Campaigns are organized, structured and usually fueled either by dissatisfied individuals or by the competition. Attacks are mostly done by individuals and are usually uncoordinated. They start with a dissatisfied customer, a flawed product, or a poor service. Attacks are built on during their outcry, like the domino effect, one starts and more will follow. An example here is the online discussion of poor Dell products, with posts from Dell users and a video showing a laptop exploding; the absence of the company in the social web fueled more negativity and attacks that affected the brand's stellar reputation. Dell managed to regain the public's trust by adjusting the products and the customer service, but it took almost 2 years; just because they were, absent in the initial online conversation.

Both attacks and campaigns should be dealt with, barely after their arrival on the blogosphere and this is why monitoring tools and software should be used on a daily basis.

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SOCIAL MEDIA & LUXURY As we have mentioned before luxury is not like any other industry. Luxury brands are different; they carry history, craftsmanship, a certain type of clientele and their key factor is not promotion, but creativity. Luxury brands have challenged the world to see things differently, inviting him to indulge in the dream that luxury is, despite his ability to conquer it or not, but making him strive for a higher level of social recognition. Luxury is part of the social structure; it is an aspiring place for the many and a place where the few can show their power.

Luxury brands, like their products, do not follow the classic marketing hypes. They are like real living creatures, they have roots and they radiate an alluring uniqueness. The life cycle of a luxury brand is not like any other; luxury brands are not born, they are established and developed. No one says, "let's start a luxury brand", this is something that has to be earned. The life of a luxury brand is not linear, it has to reinvent itself and recreate the gap. This is not always easy as there are plenty of socio-political factors that affect the redefining and sometimes a whole luxury sector has to change to adapt to the new circumstances, maintaining its identity. Moreover, a luxury brand is like a phoenix, its death is not final, as it can be reborn from its ashes, by finding to whom it can empower the "dream factor" again (potential clients).

The internet today is part of the everyday life and highly influences it. Internet is all about easy access, quick results, mass information, whereas luxury is about authenticity, creation and individuality. Moreover, on the internet the is a push for quickly copying success and pushing results with total freedom, but luxury is all about empowering the dream, being patient, perfection in creation and total control of the value chain. For luxury to adapt to the digital world, didn't happen immediately, let alone embrace it and use it to its advantage.

Luxury arrived online kind of "late" and it arrived because indexes on fluency on the internet showed that luxury brands were thriving on the internet buzz, becoming influential at their own absence and ignorance. On the internet, arriving last is easy to get in the loop and start imitating successful practices, but luxury didn't build its model on copycats. Another challenge luxury has to face is to maintain the gap between itself and high-prestige brands online. E-commerce is essential to support the retail, but for luxury, its contribution is marginal, so the brands need to look in themselves to find how they will enter the social media, attract new clients, engage advocates but still have that "discriminative" essence.

Oxymoronic as it may sound, luxury and social media have a similar way of thinking; social media was created to provide easier access to a vast audience of people, but with each person conducting as an individual within the digital web. Everyone has his own unique brand in the social media and nobody is the same, even they share the same name, birthday or eye color. The term "digital footprint" could have been more accurate if "fingerprint" had been used. Footprint is about tracking a person, seeing what he sees; monitor his preferences and his dislikes. Fingerprint is about the unique features and actions one does online, these actions comprise his online brand. Luxury

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LUXURY BRANDS

is the same, as it is uncommon and different; so it has to understand that copycats of successful practices won't have the same effect.

Luxury brands must unleash their story telling power, their dream empowerment ability, their rarity, their craftsmanship and know-how, the era and the clientele of their relevance. All tactics are welcome; as long as they are modified to help, the brands interact, entertain and interact in their own universe; after all the internet has enough space for everybody.

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ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Online Reputation Management WHAT IS ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT?

Online Reputations Management is the process of ensuring that the right information appears when people look you, or your brand, up in search engines like Google or Bing, or in social networks like Facebook or Twitter. The concept is to minimize negative content and maximize flattering content. To achieve this goal, you must monitor your online activity, search engines and social networks, and do what is needed to silence potentially harmful content.

Once upon a time, before social networks, brands addressed negative comments by tracking links and performing damage control. Today, if a crisis is not handled both immediately and correctly, a brand's image can be brought down in a matter of hours, causing either months, maybe years to recover, or have an irreversible effect. These days, most of the conversations and talks about brands are done in the social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and more.

Negative content decreases your visibility, your rankings and can have a great impact on the both your brand image and your revenues. The best way to mitigate negative content is to make sure that it never appears in the first place. Effective online reputation management means getting involved with social networks, closely monitoring them and responding as fast as possible to potential crisis outbreaks.

Reputation is defined as the Sum of Images he various constituencies have of the organization, which equals the performance, the behavior and the way the organization, communicates itself; John Doorley and Fred Garcia in the Reputation Management book.

Reputation = Sum of Images = Performance + Behavior + Communication A good reputation has both tangible and intangible benefits. It is important for everyone, from stakeholders to customers to employees, to feel good about an organization; good reputation can help sustain an organization through tough times. Reputation adds value to the actual worth of a company and this capitalization is often greater than the liquidation values of assets. This component of market capitalization is called 'reputational capital' and is closely related to goodwill.

Although academics, experts and managers agree that reputation has a value, few are the companies that treat is as such and take a quantitative approach to reputation. Most organizations don't know what their reputation is worth or have a system to monitor and measure it. Measuring, acknowledging and planning make possible proactive behaviors and communications to take advantage of reputational opportunities, minimizing problems and risks, and as a result build reputational capital.

To reputation, identity is a key factor. Identity is defined as the 'raison d'ĂŞtre' of an organization

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and naturally an organization, like an individual, can have multiple identities. The concept is for these identities to be aligned and not to pose conflicts between each other. It is very important that of all the identities, one must prevail as the main, dominant one.

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT APPROACH Reputation can be measured; often the approach is to take comparative measures against similar organizations. Another common approach is to evaluate reputation among 'multiple audiences', grouped in attributes called "dimensions of reputation". Reputation can be managed, but the field stills needs a lot of research and development, as usually the bibliography doesn't cover the issues of crisis management or crisis communication. There is definitely a need for a new approach in reputation management, companies can measure, monitor and manage their reputations and the factor that contribute to them in a long-term basis.

At this point, we have to spend some time to see the differences between Online Reputation Marketing and Online Reputation Management. Online Reputation Marketing is a process that is designed to leverage your online reputation to influence the conversation, from "consumer browsing" to "consumer buying". Online Reputation Management is a form of public relations; it is a plan to neutralize negative feedback from customers, ex-employees with an axe to grind, current employees who disagree and your competition, some of whom may not follow ethical online practices. Online reputation management includes doing damage control, addressing negative customer reviews and creating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that guarantees your message will rise to the top of search engines, pushing away negative reviews. Moreover, Online Reputation Management increases brand reach, sales and product development.

There are 5 steps in establishing an Online Reputation Management plan and the first to identify your needs; no two people or brands are the same, so there is no unified approach or strategy to reputation management, each brand is different and so is its reputation. Initially, you have to discover your brand online; this is not a spiritual journey, but comprises of two parts. The first is to go to your major social networks and blogs to check if you're constantly communicating who you are, what you do, who you do it for and why you do it. The second part to perform online search of your name, your brand and you industry and see what results are given.

The second step to check your competition and see what they're doing online. Perform an online search of your competitors, their brands and brands you aspire to become. In luxury the marketing say that there are comparables and not competitors, still perform a search on your comparables; even better by product category, apparel, jewelry/watches, shoes and leather goods as in luxury some brands are dominant in one category and followers in others. The third step is to listen what people have to say about you and your brand, what is the opinion and the perception around your brand in the digital world. You may not like all the opinions and the feedback, but it is generally known that people tend to be more honest online, as they feel safer behind a computer, avoiding "judgmental" faces and comments when in person.

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Step 4 is to set your online goals, where you are and where you want to go. These goals need to be clear and can be achieved through an Online Reputation Management strategy. Last step is to anticipate and build defenses around your privacy, your brand's privacy, your customers' and employees' privacy.

BRAND VANDALISM THE ENEMY WITHIN The term brand risk is used to describe anything that directly threatens brand value. Brand risk threatens brand value by rupturing he consumer's trust in a brand and it may include disgruntled employees, poor behavior from the executive team, unhappy customers or poor products. In addition, it can happen anywhere and anytime, unless you put a program to recognize and prevent it.

The nature of brand risk is contextual, thus high-esteemed brands need to build better and more robust safeguards.

Many times brand risks begin with operational decisions, such as licensing, outsourcing, new products or selection of suppliers and partners, product pricing or use of confidential information.

Moreover, brand risks exist within each department of the organization and unfortunately, it is no one's job to address them, there isn't a clear brand risk responsibility to any job description.

We have to understand that doing business involves risk and is not a "safe and sound" procedure.

Managing risk starts with good intelligence and effective brand risk management requires four main capabilities: • • • •

Understand and assess brand risks Select the acceptable brand risks Develop the appropriate brand risk mitigation strategies Minimize the likelihood of unacceptable brand risks.

This is where brand risk intelligence comes into play. Identify potentials points of attack and narrow them down to the most serious ones, before you get ready to combat threats to your brand.

Because insurgents are people, the first step in creating risk-intelligence systems is to find out possible insurgents and sources of brand risk by finding the answers to who, what and why. Insurgents are usually within the organizations and act freely as individuals and not as members of an "army". Some are very determined and well trained to do damage, but difficult to distinguish.

Among candidates, the brand-risk-intelligence coordinator should consider employees, executives, customers, partners and competitors.

The Valentino "Paradox" There is a vivid example to what an 'enemy-from-within' might be and that example is Mr. Valentino Garavani, former founder, creative director and owner of Valentino. In 2002, Valentino S.p.A. was bought by the Marzotto Group in Italy and Mr. Garavani was not happy at all. There are interviews in magazines and a video that prove that Valentino Garavani was not ready to

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take directions, nor willing to sacrifice his design point of view for sales and revenues. In 2007, Valentino S.p.A. was bought by the investment group Permira and Mr. Garavani decided to retire.

In 2012, Valentino S.p.A. was bought out again by Mayhoola S.P.C., a private investment fund that belongs to the royal family of Qatar. After Valentino Garavani's retirement, Alessandra Facchinetti was named creative director and since 2008, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli serve as creative directors. Mr. Garavani is known for his outspoken personality, his lifestyle and his tastes.

Since his retirement, many times we heard his opinion on both the designs of his former company and its governance. In every fashion week, he is present at the fashion shows, sitting first row and visually expressing his likes and dislikes as the garments walk down the runway. In 2010 there was also a DVD named Valentino: The Last emperor and later in 2014, early 2015, a new book entitled Valentino: At the Emperor's Table is expected. When building brand risk intelligence, one may assume that Mr. Garavani is a potential insurgent, with his outspoken mind, honest opinion and bold personality. Moreover, Mr. Garavani is constantly present in fashion events, gives interviews about himself and the brand he created, and has a powerful presence in social media - his Instagram account has more than 100k followers - along with his close friendships with very influential people in the fashion industry, like Anna Wintour, Anna Dello Russo and AndrĂŠ Leon Talley, to name a few.

In addition, the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum belongs to his partner and not to Valentino S.p.A., a powerful online tool, which along with the things mentioned above can mask a potential brand insurgent with power to damage the brand's reputation and identity.

BEYOND YOUR BORDERS After building the risk-intelligence system to identify the enemies within the organizations, it is time to look outside your borders. Although there are significant exceptions, brand sabotage from within, usually happens accidentally and unintentionally, from carelessness and not malicious intent. By contract, outside of the borders of companies, you may find a whole raft of intentional vandals, whose motivation is usually to harm the trust consumers have in the brand or cause irreversible damage. Some of the external sources of sabotage may include customers, reviewers, ideologues and competitors.

Let's start with why a customer would want to harm a brand, which until recently admired and even loved. It's very simple: You let your customer down! They no longer trust you, but this loss of trust happens in 3 stages, so you may have an opportunity to fix things. First, the customer is disappointed by the poor service, the low quality products or a bad attitude at the selling points, and in the last case, it's wise to have a service recovery system, especially in luxury where it's not always about the product, but the experience, the dream and the sense of belonging to an exclusive club. Stage two is anger and it usually happens if you don't manage to address the client's disappointment in an effective way. Anger is a tricky stage as there types of it; some customers suffer in silence, some desert you, but some are determined to make you pay for your mistake and this is when the brand attacks start to take place. The third stage is rage and it happens only if you haven't done anything to calm and comfort your customer in neither of the above stages, and rage is usually irreversible and looks something like Kramer vs. Kramer.

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Another potentially harmful category for your brand's reputations is what we call "professional reviewers" or "professional analysts". More and more product ratings and reviews play an important role in the buying process. An honest review of a product is more than welcome, as honest feedback can assist in product development. However, there is a category of volunteer reviewers that rate and write about everything, they are used to either elevate or demote certain products, lines of products or even brands. However, true professional reviewers, critics, usually adhere to strict editorial standards, "professional analysts" are not and the only thing bounding them is a website's guidelines for reviews and user-generated content and the right to restrict or remove reviews.

Furthermore, you have to be very careful with ideology. We have to state that ideology-inspired brand insurgents did start long before social media. They are many examples of people using an ideology to harm a brand and we have seen plenty of court-fights, catfights and street-fights. A clear example is NAFA (North American Fur Auctions) with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and the countless destroyed fur coats, because PETA wanted to impose a law in the USA for real fur to become illegal.

An ideology outcry can also be caused by associating brands with similar or similar-pronounced brands. Alfred Dunhill, the British high-end men's luxury brand has a very risky synonym. Dunhill, spelled the same, omitting "Alfred", is also a Swiss cigarette brand by British American Tobacco.

The brands share no connection, yet ignorance can cause great damages on Alfred Dunhill's image and reputation.

Competitors are, also, possible to increase brand risk. Usually business competitors play fair, due to the legal framework that binds them and because playing dirty can backfire; of course, there are exceptions but only a few. Competition can harm your brand, only if you have left spots unguarded and if you are not ahead of it. We have seen targeted messaging aiming at the competitors' weaknesses and inviting customers to try a better similar product, usually with a great offer. In luxury there is a bigger rank of "safety" for competitive advertisement and product substitution, as part of the buying process is the desire of belonging to a specific exclusive club It's a very thin line between 'clean' and 'dirty' when it comes to brand sabotage and we, also, have to mention that in some countries or industries competitive advertisement is illegal.

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CREATE YOUR TEAM − GALVANIZE YOUR TROOPS First of all, you will need to decide whether the team will be internal or external. The possibility a social media agency to build the strategy and establish presence for you is very real. However, in luxury a brand should have control of itself, due to the distinct nature of the business. It is better to keep your reputation management within the company, preparing your people to defend it; this is mostly because of the history, the values and the expertise a luxury brand possesses, thus there is even more sensitive information in risk of disclosure and since we mentioned plenty of times that luxury is about emotion, you will need people who a priori love your brand, in order to engage in meliorate its position in the digital world.

There are three main key factor you need to take into account when engaging your brand troops are: • • •

A clear mission A purposeful and easy-to-follow system A strategy for employee ownership of the mission.

The first factor you need to create efficiently in galvanizing your brand troops is to have a clear mission. Often, missions are fluffy and complex, but you need one that your troops can talk about with clarity. Clarity to permit decentralized execution where subordinates are able and trained to exercise disciplined initiative for successful mission results. Moreover, the second part of a clear mission is mutual trust and understanding that subordinates will do the right thing. This requires an environment of trust, honesty and freedom of mind.

Unfortunately, organizations don't cope very with either of the factors and through the "Ethics & Workplace" surveys of Deloitte, it was discovered that 74% of employees believed that it was very easy to damage a brand's reputation through social media; a result that proves that companies and employees are not aligned to respond to the reputation damage threat.

More and more surveys prove that employees are not aware of the company's objectives, the strategies, don't read the manuals and in many cases don't even care. They only see goals they have to achieve to make their superiors happy and avoid the risk of getting fired. We cannot pretend that is a recipe to restore employee-employer trust, but there are some specific recommendations for how to deal with the issue, in the context of brand reputation and resilience.

Recommendation #1: Embed brand intelligence throughout the organization. Executives should communicate to employees the importance of building and preserving brand value, they should also be very clear about the types of activities that could destroy brand value with devastating results. In addition, communicating the equivalent brand facts with all your employees will catch their attention.

Recommendation #2: Influence employees that they are the first and most important line of

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

defense when it comes to protecting brand value. Trust starts by asking your employees to do the right thing and by giving them the opportunity to do it. Clarity of the mission and an invitation to participate in this mission are the bedrock of employee engagement.

The second factor to take into account when engaging your brand troops is to create a purposeful and easy-to-follow system. A common issue in business is that the communications programs are "du jour"; there isn't a stable and continuous communication plan. A brand resilience program should created and implemented; such a program is tied to the life cycle of employees and the awareness of brand value, examining the alignment between the brand and the employees' values. Moreover, such a program should have clear principles, sending a clear and strong internal message, engaging employees to aspire and elevate the "brand standards".

The system also has to be easy-to-follow; the KISS (Keep It Simple Sensational) is very effective.

You don't need novel-paged mission statements, simple rules and tasks that are easy to do and follow. Interaction and sharing are more important than long meetings; you can focus on listening and responding online. Make sure that you have clear objectives, right them down, rank them and communicate them so that the whole team has the same direction. Easy and simple are keys to enjoying the work, save time from explaining to be sure that you are all on the same page and make you quicker in responding to crisis.

Factor number three is for your brand troops to own the mission for more effective results. Employee ownership of a reputation management program requires three elements: 1) ability to recognize brand threats and potential threats, 2) willingness to share knowledge of these threats and 3) ability to communicate these threats to other employees so as to adapt their behavior appropriately.

In order for all the above to work, you will need to choose the type of team members you want.

There are different jobs and different job descriptions within a team, but for sure you will need people with can accurately interpret reports, understand and foresee trends, effectively communicate and exude brand enthusiasm.

Many times the best brand evangelists are your customers, but in luxury, you don't need brand ambassadors as the products speak for themselves, along with history and artisanship. You need to be very careful on who to choose and why. There are luxury brands that have so much history, innovation and creativity, that the ambassadors can actually harm the products. Such examples are high-end luxury brands like Hermès, which does not show off the products, but the experience, the moment and the feeling, promoting more its causes than its products; another example is Vacheron Constantin, where the watches are true pieces of art and they don't need to be showcased by 'fashion icons' or celebrities, but it takes a true connoisseur to enhance, if possible, their value. As a consequence, in luxury is not only difficult, but also risky, to recruit customers as part of your online team and brand troops.

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MONITOR YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION After choosing your Online Reputation Management approach, preparing your brand, recognizing potential enemies and engaging your employees, you need to go to the next face, which is monitoring your online presence and reputation. You need an early-warning system that could help you detect risk faster and take actions to minimize it.

Predicting in general is a difficult business attribute, but predicting brand sabotage is even more tricky, mostly because of three reasons: you may not recognize that your brand is attacked, attackers always come with new and inventing ways to attack you, making it challenging to acknowledge an attack, and last but definitely not least, because these attacks happen very fast and spread like fire in a forest. In general, when it comes to Online Reputation Management is better to be proactive than reactive.

This is why the most important aspect of reputation management is listening! Listening empowers your team, make them more cautious and aware of brand risks and helps them build better defenses and monitoring tools. It is also very important to understand that everyone can be part of an early warning system, a phenomenon called 'crowdsourcing'. Crowdsourcing is a system where you give a certain job, instead of a designated employee, to a large group in the form of an open call.

First thing to do in monitoring your online reputation is to Google or Bing your brand online, to get an idea of what is said about you in the digital world. This technique is not accurate, but it can give you a general idea on how your reputation stands and help you in screening and separating good from bad. Reputation management is about much more than that, brand managers have to address both the good and the bad reviews online, finding ways to enhance the former and either turn around or eliminate the latter.

This is a great way to convert people with credible complaints into some of your most online passionate supporters. It establishes your reputation as a good organization that operates with integrity, transparency and the proper amount of pride. Your strongest online reputation management involves creating meaningful, appealing and bite-sized content that helps people. This is the kind of stuff that wins your fans, devoted followers and turns around haters, who will defend your reputation and share your best attributes and content with all their audiences.

INTRODUCING A SYSTEM Social media have become mainstream and all your people - customers, employees, competitors - expect to see you online. Sure, you can cover up bad reviews to look better, maybe create artificially 'good reviews', but it takes much more to cultivate a positive reputation online.

There is a simple and basic system to follow. Run your online business with the same customer service strategy and the same integrity you apply on your retail. Listen to what people say about your brand, using social networks and blogs, monitor your Search Engine Optimization keywords,

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

craft a crisis communication strategy, reach out with honesty, publish engaging content following a strategy, respond effectively and promote goodwill. Your online reputation management strategy depends on listening to what people are saying about your brand and then responding.

Pay attention to people and sites where information is shared.

You can discover and investigate developments and emerging trends within your industry online, which then you can adapt and use to increase your brand's success. If you don't have any specific goals in your online strategy, you can just look online for trends, strategies and content, but not having clear and specific goals is a waste of opportunities that could enhance your brand's reputation.

INTRODUCING THE TOOLS There are tools you can use to monitor your online reputation, a great number of tools covering different organizations and industries. You have to pick the tools that are appropriate for your organization in terms of identity and size. Tools come with a cost, depending on their size and how comprehensive and deep detailed data they can provide. The larger the organization, the better is to use cost-effective tools that dig deeper into the massive pool.

Because most luxury brands are large-sized businesses and because of their nature and identity, they need tools that can provide more specific in-depth data, by asking more targeted questions and search in a significantly bigger pool of people. The information they provide are about: • • • • • • • • •

Blogs, like Tumblr or Wordpress.com Message board and forums Micro-blogs, such as Twitter Video-sharing sites, like YouTube or Vimeo Photo-sharing sites, like Flickr, Pinterest or Instagram Wikis - sites that allow anybody to change the content Social networks, like Facebook or Linkedin Classified-ad site, like Craigslist Review sites, like ePinions.

At his point, we have to tell you that these tools are useful only if you're running social media for a large-scale brand, with a global digital strategy and can cost from $900 to $3500 a month.

Different tools provide information in different ways, so you may find one that works better in your organization. Most of these tools can give you access to social insights, like Demographics (gender, age), Geo-location (where they are), Influence (audience size), In-depth sentiment (how people feel about your brand) and Topic categorization.

Some of these tools offer what's known as "sentiment analysis", which means that you can program the tool to determine whether the comments posted about you are negative or positive, you can also combine the sentiment analysis with other aspects like demographics or geo-location.

A major limitation of these tools, common with the efforts of building Artificial Intelligence, is

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that these tools don't recognize irony, sarcasm or regional differences in speech. One of the most effective and free resources you can use to check sentiment requires time and effort, but it gives you the most accurate results, is crowdsourcing; be careful of the volume of comments you will receive back.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in search engines' regular search results. In plain English, it means using keywords, content and links to get your organization to appear closer to the top of the page, when somebody Googles your name or keywords. SEO is essential to your online reputation management.

There is also a new term, Social SEO or Social Media Optimization (SMO), as social media have become so mainstream that relevant and credible news and information breaks in social networks.

These days, we get as much news from the internet, as we get from traditional means like the TV or newspapers. As a result, Google and other search engines have come to value what is called "temporal relevance", which means that the fresher information is, the more important it is. This is significant as it means that old content has diminished in value and nowadays organizations need to work timely to rank high in social networks.

The Google Panda algorithm showed that a social profile could have just as much value as the site it links to. To be successful an organization must cultivate a holistic relationship between social profiles, websites, content and engagement. A strategy that combines modern site architecture, targeted content and activity-based considerations, is needed.

SEO is the art and the science of helping people to find you website more easily via search engines.

Making your site the most prominent source for information about you, gives you a huge advantage in defining your reputation online and taking charge of your online reputation management.

You have a reputation to establish and maintain, so the best way is to have a vibrant, well-maintained site for people to find you easily. If you have an effective online reputation management, the best way to enhance it is to have big amounts of traffic coming to your optimized website. A SEO joke says, "the best way to hide a dead body is on page 3, sometimes 2, of Google". At the moment, the most used search engines are Google and Bing.

Google ranking are another term of "search results", you need to be as close to number as possible for your subject area and SEO keywords can help you reach that. A SEO keyword is a word or a phrase of up to five words that people can use to search for your brand and organization online. By setting the correct keywords for your site, you can ensure that the right audience will come to you.

Keywords help you understand what your market is looking for and drive more traffic to your site.

Keywords are as essential to your online reputation management, as warming up is to exercise and like a color decor, they can determine your entire online reputation management strategy.

You need clear, easy-to-understand keywords to help you with your branding and when correctly used, they show up to your website's architecture, posts, copyrights and status updates. SEO keywords help you establish and manage your online reputation, and they're useful for boosting

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sales, increasing visibility and generating positive name recognition.

You will need to anticipate the different ways people search online, instead of looking for a product directly, many time they search by asking questions. You need to be ready with your SEO keywords for your name to come high in the results' page. When your keywords are current, up-to-date and in-line with your communications, people who love your brand will be willing to share your messages with their own audiences. People love to share positive stories; it lifts the audience up and creates a warm feeling for your brand, better than any amount of advertising.

One thing is sure with search engines, they constantly change and it is an urgent need to stay up-to-date with your SEO, as search algorithms become more and more complex. Optimizing SEO is an ongoing procedure that needs to be done at all times, ensuring your online presence and assisting in your reputation management strategy. You can either hire an external specialist or do it internally with help from online tools.

BUILDING A SEO FOUNDATION Google uses more than 100 factors when assessing a website, but they won't tell which. It may sound clichĂŠ, but websites need to be designed to cater to people. Giving them a compelling, easy-to-use, interesting and entertaining website, while remaining relevant to their interests.

Design for people and you will be ahead of every search algorithm, no matter how advanced.

First, you need to look at your website and its design. Make sure not to get too "graphic", with multiple eye-catching banners, as most times they are invisible to search engines and add nothing to your SEO, and replace what you can with text, incorporating your SEO keywords to your headers.

If you are using Adobe Flash, it would be better to change the website, as flash sites are also invisible to search engines. Your website must communicate your brand, your identity and your values.

It has to be a great impression of your brand, true to its identity, so don't be afraid to simplify your design, elegance in simplicity is a way of staying ahead of your competition, optimizing your SEO. Design "anchors" and "backlinks", inviting people to link to your site. Backlinks show Google how popular you are and anchors (highlighted text) connect blog posts to your website, so a good review of a product, a service or the entire brand will link and appear to you Google results. Content is another very significant contributor to your SEO strategy. Content should engaging, aka empowering interaction, aligned with your SEO keywords and always up-to-date.

A "trick" you can do, if you're not sure where you're going and how to get there, is to look at your competitors. Look and engage with the website, finding great ideas to imitate and adapt to yours, as long as you remain legal and ethical. However, you could go to your competitors' websites, look and take ideas, and then go and do something completely different, something creative, something that is more you and represents your brand; remember that online, creativity and diversity are factor that draw people to a website.

In order for Google and Bing to evaluate your site, the use "indexing", which is a way to take

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snapshots periodically of your website and index them. Your main concern is to see what Google and Bing have in store connecting to your website. To do so, is simple: go to www.google.com or www.bing.com and in the search textbox write "site:" and the exact URL of the site your want to evaluate. Then Google will show you a list of pages indexed for your website. It would be wise to keep track of these indexes, as they can be used to evaluate your progress online. Then, you can go through your website analytics report, which tracks how users get to your website and what they do when they're there. Look at your analytics* report and other search items people use to find you, and arrange a brainstorming meeting to write down and decide your SEO keywords.

After deciding your SEP keywords that effectively communicate your brand, it's time to incorporate them to your online messaging, making a more coherent, congruent strategy, that's proactive and positively communicates your message to the world. Organize your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube etc.) by incorporating your search keywords. Important things you may want to do quickly, to align your online presence with your SEO, are: • • • • •

Revise the text on your home page Rework text in all other pages Reconsider unnecessary graphics Keywords need to be used in both titles and throughout the text Remove unnecessary Flash from your website

Last but not least, take advantage of trends and incorporate them to your SEO, adapting the keywords and the content to enhance your online presence and engage more people.

ESTABLISH YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION ENGAGING VIA SOCIAL MEDIA You want to protect the integrity of your own name online, otherwise called as "marketing your brand". Some marketing know-how is necessary in order to appear in Google search results. People looks at your brand's voice as the true representation of it true heart and soul, paying attention to what messages people are getting from your brand, an essential element in building a successful online reputation. After, just a few social interactions, people can usually tell when a company's outside voice doesn't match its inner voice. Organizations with strong online reputation and success rates usually have integrated their inner and outer voice, presenting a thematic consistency and an integrity resonating from employees to customers. The more you stay true to your branding message, the more you attract audiences that love it for what it is.

In the digital world, every brand and every person is an individual and brands are usually treated like if they were real people. Being extrovert and honest, with a positive attitude and spreading good vibrations will attract more people, who genuinely come because of your good mood and radiance. There is nothing better than making people feel good about your brand, building up to your online reputation. To do so, your social media team members should exude happiness and credibility for your brand, the glow from within.

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The tone of social media is personal and companies should adapt they way they speak to their audiences. You shouldn't hide behind your brand or use "corporate speak" to address your audiences online, as it makes your communications rigid and deprives your brand from its more "human" voice. In this busy world, it takes a compelling message of integrity to get noticed and attract positive attention online.

The first step is to identify your audiences; people are attracted to you because they have either met your brand in person or online, others because of your online presence. Both categories appreciate a personal touch to your messages you send and the information you're sharing. People will share your information and adding to the online discussion about you, with their own points of view growing and developing your content. Regardless of who your audience is, always assume that they are intelligent and either uninformed or somewhat informed. Recognizing your audiences and the kind of followers these audiences attract is crucial in building a great reputation online; bear in mind who these people are and what information you should share with them, creating targeted and useful content.

Psychographics are a set of personality and value-added characteristics shared by a group of people, also referred as "tribes", and they can help you identify your "tribe" and build your "community". After you find your "tribe", you need to find out where the hang out in the online world and monitor what and they say things, before engaging. Waiting to post a message, after you have understood them, conveys respect and appreciation. It's of the utmost importance to relate with this community by being honest, only adding to the discussion, using their terminology and treat this as a long-time relationship.

Choosing your social networks depends on your audiences and your activity. Different things are said and in different ways to different social networks. For example, a hashtag on Twitter "pounds" the term, but on Facebook, it has no significant meaning. Some of the most important social networks, defined by their activity, are: • • • • • •

Linkedin and Google+, for more professional audiences Instagram and Pinterest, for photo sharing YouTube, Vimeo and Vine, for video sharing Wordpress and BlogSpot, for anything you want to share – traditional blogging Tumblr, a hybrid platform for blogging, combing the written text and visual content Twitter and Facebook, the “fraternity college party” where big audiences are available easily

Creating and sustaining your successful online community, you need to get involved with your people and ask them if they need help, but also to help you. When you give your people, a platform to share their expertise and perspective, they feel empowered and makes your relationship building better.

Earning trust online is very tricky, as people get more easily suspicious with brands and they tend to treat them with cruelty. A good plan is to start by doing small things and then exceed your

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audiences' expectations, provided that your content is meaningful and useful. Promise less and deliver more, earning bonus points by delivering value. Respond to your audience quickly but with patience; develop a FAQ to keep your social media team informed and urge to be quick and patient, decisive and spontaneous. People will start respecting you more if you level with them, promise to get back with them and deliver promises within a reasonable time frame; nobody like a knowit-all, nor the attitude that comes with.

For mobile users things are different, mainly because there is a smaller screen and usually users cannot read content more than 200 words. In addition, mobile sites may look like miniature version of the desktop ones and smartphones have fewer resources, for example Flash. Customize your strategy for mobile users, to engage more easily, optimizing the website, blogs, newsletters and more. When you message, mobile users include funny images to capture the attention and enhance the meaning of your message. Moreover, make it short and simple and entertain your visitors.

ESTABLISHING YOUR BRAND ONLINE Claiming your brand online right now may sound that you are already late, but in terms of legal considerations, social media analytics, even culture and new media, is still in its infancy. Facebook has become mainstream, but it is a fraction of your online reputation management and you want to distribute your brand as widely as possible. Positioning your brand in more places has some of the following benefits: • • • • •

Makes it easier for people to find your brand online - using the embed search engines of social networks Improves your rank on search engines - because of the way search engines calculate their search results Encourages familiarity - the more people see your brand, the more they feel comfortable with it Keeps posers from taking your online identity - avoid the identity and brand theft risk Eliminates name squatting risk - doppelgangers of your brand name cause confusion.

Before claiming your brand online your need to do 3 things: research, research and research! Investigate yourself online and find the right ways, domains, accounts, and products, characteristics to claim and establish your online brand identity.

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression, people decide within seconds whether they want to pay attention to your brand of not. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to styling your brand, but it's important to differentiate, in order to enhance your online reputation.

Your branding bottom line must be the benefit that people receive from doing business with you.

Use emotional triggers in your design decisions and your marketing, as long you're telling the truth about your particular service or product. Some emotional triggers can be security, prestige, luxury and trust.

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The online business model is all about listening and learning, way more effective than just broadcasting. In this attention-starved culture, listening is a gift, and it will draw faithful responsive people to your brand online. By earning people's trust, you will gain clients and also friends, people who can speak on your behalf when you're not online. This is called the familiarity bias and makes people feel that they have more in common with your brand, than others brands.

You also have to create a short, yet memorable, message because the average online reader has a very small span of attention. The message has to be simple and communicate your brand's unique value proposition, in a few words, a photo or a shot video. Moreover, it has to be consistent with your branding goals and your online reputation management strategy; sounds easy, but it's not.

All of the above, the audience identification, the short messages and the online business model, along with the design and content of your website and your social networks need to depict your brand's value and protect your interests. Complex website designs may chase off the reader, who is not willing to spend a lot of time in finding what he needs, so he moves on to a more simple, easy to navigate, website. Furthermore, in order to communicate your brand properly in the digital world, you need to make sure that you're seen in all the right places. Of course this means social networks, but in those that communicate at best your brand, managing your time properly to engage in the same amounts, yet staying true to your brand's core identity and values. Resources and people are usually needed to run a full-scale social networks presence. You must also bear in mind that your presence in various social networks may be necessary, but its obligatory in terms of risk prevention. If you claim you brand online in different social channels, it is very difficult to be copied, confused with others, prevents fake profiles and improves your search engines rank.

CONTENT STRATEGY What is content? Content is text, data, photos, videos, audio, error messages, articles, links, forms, surveys, search results, metadata; content is everything. A content strategy is the plan to achieve certain goals through the management of your content. A core strategy is the long-term equal of content strategy. In order to create a content strategy you have to decide, not just what, but why, how, from and by whom, when, where, how often and what's next.

There are three steps when creating a content strategy: • Audit: check and decide on current content • Analyze: quantitative/qualitative and internal/external impact factor analysis • Plan: core content and detailed content strategy - what we want to do and how As in every strategy, you will need to define your objectives for business and content, metrics for success, incorporate stakeholders and define your budget and timeline.

THE CONTENT OF LUXURY One of luxury's fundamental roles is to create social stratification, which is pure communication.

Moreover, luxury is transmitter of taste and content is about taste. It should be ready at all times

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to deliver strong, high-quality brand content and given its nature of originality and differentiation, luxury's content and communication is not about making sales.

In luxury, you communicate in order to create and sustain the dream, and to recharge the brand's value. Luxury brand communication is sufficiently abstruse so that many people can identify with it and find their personal share of the dream. That means highly artistic content, which is not out-dated and is never direct. This way you cannot measure the impact of luxury communications on sales. Luxury communication suggests a brand universe, the sense of being part of something exceptional and living the dream, not about the benefits of owning the product; it has a more qualitative impact on the brand.

The value of the luxury brand depends more on the quality of the image and less on brand awareness, though brand awareness is something that all brands want, but in the right audiences. Luxury brands don't communicate to sell, but communicate because they sell. Communication helps in recharging the dream factor that had helped to create initially. On luxury communication, the high diffusion of an image weakens the dream, contrariwise of classic consumption goods, and you constantly need new images to enhance it.

Moreover, in your communication, you never talk about the price or money; you talk about value.

Talking about prices means that you have nothing better to say about your products. Also, avoid to publicly about financial results, unless you're legally obliged, because they diminish the aspiration factor of luxury. Luxury brands communicate and don't advertise; what matters are press and public relations. The luxury brand transmits taste and in order for that taste to be acknowledged as "good", it needs to be adopted by those who make the covers, present in places of high taste, living culture and fashion as well. The budgets of luxury communication strategies are built in a different way than mass prestige products; luxury brands invest mostly to communicate with existing customers and invest in whisper (word of mouth technique, that focuses on tribal marketing, aka the sense of belonging) communication. Furthermore, apart from perfumes, luxury doesn't advertise in traditional media like the radio or television, mostly because television is not an interactive medium and luxury seeks actual participation from the client. Public Relations events are used to reinforce the sense of belonging and spur the brand's imaginary. Sponsorship and patronage are both ways for luxury communication, given that the event is coherent with the brand, making the link between the nature of the event and the history and identity of the brand.

However, you need to be careful not to despair across many events because it dissolves the brand's identity.

Another significant point, in a luxury brand communication strategy, is that you don't need celebrities in advertising. A luxury brand is desired for itself, not because someone else desires it for you, the trap of "triangular desire" used extensively in fashion and mass consumption products.

This may be easy for some luxury categories - cars, hotels, yachts - but it is very difficult for apparel, jewelry or watches. A celebrity deprives the power of a brand, which should be dominant in the communication strategy, so you could either create an "eternal product" like the Hermès Kelly bag, or use a celebrity as a testimonial. This is the case of Angelina Jolie travelling to Cambodia

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for her work as United Nations ambassador in her Louis Vuitton luggage, using the "star" as an endorsement in the product's every day use. Don't use somebody who outshines the brand, but enhances the product's image by showing how worldly respected people use the product.

An excellent testimonial case is Marilyn Monroe and Chanel No 5, who "implied" that the best nightgown is only this perfume. Luxury communication should also encourage a permanent and continuous word of mouth. Everything the brand does should be talked, empowering rumors and consequently the social desire for the brand.

The Bottega Veneta Ambassador A particular case of brand ambassadors is the Bottega Veneta and the motion of "When your own initials are enough". Bottega Veneta offers a variety of products customized and personalized with someone's name initials. Indeed, Vuitton does something similar, but in the Bottega Veneta case, the engraving happens on the leather of the bag - the core material the brand manipulates and within the brand's signature "Intrecciato" technique - and not on the metal parts. This way, whoever carries a Bottega Veneta personalized bag, enhances the imaginary of the brand. Moreover, these products are parts of a digital collection, available for ordering online and only in very few selective stores that incorporate the digital experience. The testimonial of Bottega Veneta is said through everyday people, who carry their own unique products.

LUXURY CONTENT ON THE INTERNET The internet is a remarkable opportunity to engage and deepen the relationship with customers, and so build brand equity. Online, the challenge is not to sell, but to build a real differentiated luxury experience, versus the plethora of look-alike lower-price products.

Luxury brands avoided the internet for a very long time, because of the medium's poor quality, without harming their sales. However, now, the internet is just as compulsory for luxury, just as for any other business. It is, also, a medium of high risk; online the rumors spread faster and it is always more intriguing to share a bad than a good rumor. As a result, the brand must monitor the internet as closely as possible, checking continuously for malevolent content. It is wrong for luxury brands to create fake stories online, better say nothing, because the nature of the brand and the dream factor are destroyed. Using influence marketing, staying open to bloggers, social media and online communities, is a way to convey your story in an honest way.

Communities of fans are an important part of luxury's stratification, as they assist in discovering the brand for newcomers and in measuring existing customers and the passion they share.

This way the information is not biased and the feedback given is both honest and trustworthy, as people tend to be more sincere when behind a computer. This feedback can be used on how luxury should create, use and impose its innovative opinion.

Internet is a fast-paced, but also a 'slow-time' medium, meaning that everybody takes and masters his own time online, choosing the messages he wants to receive and interact with them and the communities they share them. The web allows all types of content - text, photo, audio, video - and through interaction to communicate a brand's value. This is why websites should feel

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"cozy", easy to use and conveying the brand's identity. Complex websites appall the users and is more likely to substitute or alter their preferences for a brand with a more easy communicating system.

Furthermore, luxury brands must create brand content, which the opposite of advertising. Brand content means creating editorials that delivers contextual information about the brand's history and personality, with the use of text, photo, audio and video - all together or individually. Brand content relies on the internet capacity to provide interesting, creative and entertaining information through social media. A luxury brand's content has the scope unveiling information of the brand's heritage, secrets, creativity and passions. Luxury brands need to build content in order to avoid risks such as counterfeiting and rise above the average in the jumble of information that can be found online. Luxury has a lot to say about its uniqueness with social media like YouTube, Facebook, blogs or Twitter; it can reach larger audiences making its intangible aspects visible and possible to experience though creative, informative and entertaining brand content.

The key principle of luxury brand content is that is not a marketing tool to tell a story, but an experience itself, a gift to the audience, with high reciprocating effects. This is why luxury brands invest in creating qualitative and appealing content that they can share with their audiences and far less in media buying.

The Hermès Content Hermès is a brand with deep roots in the Parisian aristocracy, with a long history of creativity and iconic products. There is also a core history with horses, depicted even in the brand's logo. Hermès creates a unique brand content to communicate in its social media; the content is not about the products, but the moments. They rarely show off new products or lines, but promote their collaborations and the causes they support, like the 'Grand Prix de Diane' and art exhibitions all over the world. The content is about the moment, the experience, the testimonial and how they are all connected to the brand, the products and the use of them. It is more often to see backstage photos from the fashion shows of Hermès, than the collections themselves, because the backstage enhances the moment of the birth of something new. The “Kiss the Frog” short videos, depict a frog that turns into a striking green Kelly bag, but the product is shown only in the last couple of seconds of the video. The number of follower is significantly lower Chanel’s or Vuitton’s – it would be essential to clarify that some social media platforms give a brand the opportunity to buy “likes”, fake followers – but Hermès has an audience of true troops, both clients and fans, that support, share and defend that content.

Luxury, on the internet, is usually forced to imitate other sectors, but luxury brands should be about creating online social experiences of luxury. A fashion show is not just a parade, but a proposition of taste; using interactive technology brands create the experience of luxury, with live streaming, comments and discussions with the designers, makes people feel part of a luxury experience. Due to the fact that luxury brands are experiential, visual speaks more the senses than words, and it's because of that nature that luxury brands should saturate their content through their own unique and distinctive codes.

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The notion of brand codes is relatively new and the specificity of luxury brands relies on these brand codes that make it recognizable and distinctive. Some brand codes that characterize luxury brands are the logo and its typing, a certain color (like Valentino RED), a certain material, a cult of detail or the emphasis in manual work. These codes are mostly visuals and are used in social media to enhance a brand's image and value. This is called Visual Marketing and has 3 main channels: • • •

Snapchat: an application that creates ephemeral content, mostly short videos, that is deleted after the recipient receives the communication – vast audience in the USA, Asia Pacific and Africa Vine: a platform that enables users to create and share 6-second videos, often whimsical and some cases effortless. Vine requires direction and creative editing to achieve passing a clear message in 6 seconds.

Instagram: a platform that enables users to share their photos and with its new feature 15-second videos. Brands admit that they naturally fit in Instagram and its 200 million users.

Photo and video sharing, integrated with Facebook, is used by many high-end brands like Lexus, Burberry and Valentino (recently reached 1 million followers).

Finally, a luxury brand creates content not to give a promise to its audiences, but to invite them and share with them its universe. This is why brand content must contain stories, tales and rumors; there is no luxury brand without storytelling. Enabling content to feature authentic stories and codes that make a brand unique increases the density of the brand, its mythical dimension, while feeding the word of mouth in an ongoing task. The communication of a luxury brand forms an inherent part of the brand, becoming a visible lever of creative content in the media. Different attributes of luxury speak to different types of customers; there are those to whom you speak about history and heritage, those who embrace creativity, those that appeal to the prestige and the social success, and those who wish to stand out and differentiate themselves from the mass.

For each type of customer, there is a certain form of content, but incorporating all, in the proper analogies, in a certain content strategy will boost your online reputation, engagement and enhance your identity as a true luxury brand. One thing that you always need to take into account is local versus international content. Accurate translations, certain images and values can be considered provocative, dangerous or insulting in some communities with specific characteristics. Be aware of the audience in these communities and align your message with their social beliefs and boundaries.

MEASURING ONLINE REPUTATION Reputation is the result of what you do, what you say and what people therefore think and say about you. The digitization of media can help in measuring reputation, because what you do and say, and what people say and "hear" about you, can be tracked, assessed and analyzed. In addition, if you engage the right way and ask the right questions, you can truly lead what the audience thinks about your brand.

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The management of reputation is the classic definition of Public Relations and has both tangible and intangible gains. Due to the expansion and digitization of social media, marketers are now able to measure the given outcomes. Conversely, if brands are able to measure the success of public and digital relations, they can also measure the negative impact that adverse circumstances have on their fortunes. Nevertheless, brands are now able to measure things better, in both quantitative and qualitative measures; the trend up to now was to measure the short-term impact of one or campaigns, but with the right tools and use of data, such measurements can now expand their limits in long-term impact, assessing the perception, therefore, reputation. Thus, an identifiable correlation between the reputation of a brand and its profit and loss account is formed.

However, volume alone can lead to dead-end, as it is equally important what and how - the editorial - it is said. Moreover, you have to considered whether your audience reads and gets influenced, either positive or negative, by what is said. Ultimately, this will affect their decision in buying or not, and if they will recommend you - using word of mouth - to their audience.

The use of internet and social media may have made the measuring process of reputation and influence easier, but mostly data provide numbers and quantitative reports, in regards to sales.

Qualitative measuring has still considerable limitation, as "what is said" and "how is said' are tricky to be understood by machines; machines don't comprehend sarcasm, idioms or matter of speech. The use of words and phrases by the human mind is combinatorial and not seclusive.

Content that includes storytelling, tales, myths, secrets and affects the dream factor, is part of the editorial and enables people to open their wallets. Another thing Analytics (more on Analytics on the forth-coming subchapter) don't tell, is whether these people made the purchase or not, and if it was the content that influenced and enhanced their decision or they had taken it in advance.

There is also the rarity and price factor; a fan of Bentley may love the brand, circulate and engage with the content, participate in the discussions, but unless he wins the lottery, he won't be able to buy any time soon.

Furthermore, big data provide different levels of detailed analysis, but there are some levels that can become counterproductive or even discriminative. Assuming that an audience has a certain degree of diversification and data gave out that the best results come from gay men and women between 25 and 35, the clients from these categories can receive special treatment, which leads to a negative word of mouth and diminishes the value of the 'dream factor'; demographics in this occasion become discriminative and analyze stereotypes that could harm a brand's image.

Brand reputation measuring tools are constantly changing and there isn't a handbook or a unified method managers could adopt to extract the same results and the impact these tools have on a brand's reputation are yet to be discovered.

THE BUSINESS OF INFLUENCE The pursuit for a robust measurement system for influence is something Philip Sheldrake tackles

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in his book "The Business of Influence". As mentioned before measurement tools mostly provide quantitative analysis, whereas influence - therefore reputation - is a more qualitative analysis.

Reputation does not necessarily need numbers, but focuses on interests, trends, bias and other variables. Thus, it should be treated as a strategic tool and not as a tactic.

Sheldrake's solution to this matter is the introduction of the Influence Scorecard. Like the Balanced Scorecard, developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the Influence Scorecard contains all the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) detached from the narrow departmental thinking that infuse the influence disciplines such as creative, marketing, public relations, internal communications, customer service or corporate responsibility. This is very important as it removes the tension among functional roles and focuses on outcomes. The scorecard can assist in setting a strategy for corporate and online reputation, and acknowledges the highly complex way in which influence goes-around-comes-around.

PROMOTING GOODWILL On the internet, people tend to be more conscious and suspicious about brands and their content.

If you start giving away thins for free, they will start questioning your motives as they assume that you want something in return. This is why it is very important to create personal connections online. When people feel that they know more about you, the less suspicious they are, and you become a friend. Tell them about who you are, what you do, whom you do it for and what you expect to receive in return. Be a friend and allow long-term relationships to flourish.

Bloggers are a category of people you want to build a good and honest relationship with. Influential bloggers are considered leaders in online influence and developing a relationship with them can benefit your brand. Invite them to indulge in your brand, learn more about its identity, its values and its history, so that they can be both objective and subjective, sharing their experiences and being part of the 'dream'.

A high priority should be to develop and maintain relationships with past and present clients online and, also, create relationships with future clients. It is a relatively easy relationship, as clients already believe in your brand. You can do that by sending them updates about your company, your brand and your products and by inviting them to content built especially for them.

Moreover, when you build online relationships, you look at demographics and psychographics.

Psychographics is what is going to help you develop a personal relationship, as it refers to people that share the same point of view over a subject, a product or a brand. These people - your fans are part of your audience and, eventually, online promoters and first-line defenders of your brand.

The Givenchy Instagram A great case of building strong relationships with fans is the case of Givenchy and use of Instagram. Until recently, Givenchy was a brand with a huge audience and little online presence. In 2013, it took a turn towards digital by engaging more in social media and online platforms, they even created a 100% mobile store; when something clicks on the e-store button on the website are sent to iTunes to download the app - separate for men and women - from which they can buy

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Givenchy products. They also started using Facebook and Twitter more, and they created an Instagram account (@givenchyofficial) where they engage in the photo-sharing community. Up to that moment, a fan-made account (@loveforgivenchy) shared and showcased content about Givenchy campaigns, events, products, street-style an more. This account had more followers, until June 2014, than the official account and gathered more 'likes' on its posts. Givenchy has an interactive relationship with the fan-made account and Ricardo Tisci, the Creative Director of the maison, often "regrams" their photos, tags it in posts and shares his appreciation for the fans who made the account. They are also a great line of defense, as they out fake accounts and malevolent content.

They have the honor or being followed by the official Givenchy account and there are cases where the brand has shared content of the fan-made account, even thanking them publicly for their support and contribution.

Furthermore, an excellent way to communicate better and invite more people into your brand experience is to promote the causes you support. As mentioned earlier, Hermès promotes horse races and art exhibitions, Cartier has created its own foundation for the preservation of contemporary art and Gucci supports the 'Chime for Change', an organization created by Gucci's Creative Director, Frida Giannini, Salma Hayek and Beyoncé Knowles, fighting for education, health, justice and equality for young women across the globe.

Due to the high volume of information, people and brands, struggle with potentially fallible content. Brands need to push it away and people need to decide whether its trustworthy or not.

Admitting this humanizes you brand and makes you more approachable and gives you both help from the fans that you - constructive criticism - and the ability to identify room to grow and meliorate your online image, thus your reputation.

RISK ISSUES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT Issues management is a corporate process that helps organizations identify challenges in the business environment, both internal and external, before they become crises and mobilizes corporate resources to help protect the company from the harm to reputation, operations and financial condition that the issue may provoke. Issues management is a subset of risk management, but it deals more with risks in the company’s pubic visibility and reputation. Every company’s issues management structure should align with its business operations, marketplace realities and leadership styles.

Identifying risk issues is a process of enabling brand intelligence and collaboration among different functions. Once an issue is identified, it important to understand how significant it is and what corporate resources will be needed to manage the issue effectively. The two critical factors in assessing the importance of an issue are likelihood - the probability of this issue playing out to the company’s disadvantage - and magnitude - how much damage it can cause.

The issues management plan has two parts: the analysis and the action. The first part includes research and assessment on the risk (magnitude and likelihood), defining which groups the prob-

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lem affects and if the company has the required resources to deal with it. The second part is the development of a plan of actions to either avoid - if caught early - the risk or deal with it in an effective way, and it includes business decisions, strategies, department involvement, budget and a communication plan.

Preventing an escalating social media crisis is a delicate situation. It demands a greater degree of delicacy and research than normal everyday engagement online. In order to assess the situation you will need to understand the conversation around issue, identify the social media channels that are affected by the issue and find out whether you have dealt with the same or a similar issue in the past.

The first step is to learn more about how the issue started and what kind of language your commenters use to describe it, empowering all your listening tools, using both machine and human factor. In addition, you will need to learn who causes this issue; either it is an honest review that is being reproduced causing an “echo chamber” or is it a fake profile with non-tangible evidence just wanting to shake things up for your brand or even being part of a targeted campaign. You will, also, need to define what the motive is behind such an attitude; either wanting to bring traffic to a website, being a sneaky competitor, having received poor customer service, wanting more from the product and the brand, or just getting even.

In responding to an escalating issue, you must achieve a balance between implementing a strategy quickly and slowing down to engage in analysis. There are some pointers to help you out: • • • • •

Determine the urgency of the situation: don’t get misled by two or three hotheaded comments.

Bring in the right people: detect who is affected by the issue and who has the knowledge and ability to effectively manage it, they can be from the same department or not.

Determine a solution: after the involved parties are informed, determine which strategy you will implement and get ready to adapt the strategy according to the feedback you will receive from your audience.

Keep all teams on stand-by: your crisis management team should be ready at all time to reevaluate the situation and continuously check the spectrum you initially found out the issue affects, determining whether it has shrank or broaden.

Craft your response message: take time, but not much, to decide your crisis communication strategy and what is the proper message to transmit, but remember that social media can “explode” in a few hours.

It is essential for you to heard what reasonable people have to say, without pandering their credibility, and offer them solutions. People just want to be heard, understood and have their concerns validated or scattered. Although, you have to remember that you cannot please everybody online and over-engaging to solve an issue may lead to adding fuel to the fire. Responding effectively to a crisis is a crucial step of the process of defending your reputation. You have to consider two main things: knowing when to take the discussion private and when to offer an individualized solution.

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Moreover, during crises companies tend to forget or leave behind their core identities, in order to manage the issue as good as possible, and that makes them lose even more followers. Winning a crisis is something you can do, without losing yourself or your brand in the process. It is more efficient and estimable to tell the truth, stay true to yourself and admit when you’re wrong; people online appreciate honesty, more than anything. That way, you may be able to reverse the crisis into a vivid opportunity to change your practices and gain even more fans, troops ready to defend and void negative criticism towards you.

The Tom Ford Provocation Assessing issues that could harm your brand image is both an internal and external procedure.

Tom Ford, the worldwide famous for his provocative images and quotes, designer, applies his own attitude to the brand and the content. His use of naked models, so as to enhance the perfumes, the shoes or the accessories, is a synonym to this own nature and image. Although, the risk of such “provocative” images is not so much cultural, with certain audiences opposed to sexy and nudity, but more of an actual ban from certain social media channels. Recently, Instagram published its new strict nudity policy, banning Rihanna from the platform, as her content was considered offensive. The same can apply to some pictures of Tom Ford, though the models, both male and female, carefully cover their sensitive parts with the products, enhancing the view of the products, as the human eye is trained to go to such places. A risk lurks in such content, as Instagram could ban the account for offensive content, but also there are some voices raised for the same content on Facebook, where 13-year-olds can hit the page to discover the same kind of images, without the maturity to look beyond the obvious. Recently, the designer wanted to promote the new jeans collections and decided to do so, by demonstrating a photo of a male model wearing his jeans with his anal crevice exposed. This image was shared on Facebook, Twitter (which allows all nudity), Instagram and finally it was the front page of Tom Ford’s website. The photo was banned from Instagram and taken down from the website’s front page within 48 hours, but both positive and negative discussions have started. Classic marketers would say that “they is no such thing as bad publicity’, but with online media the speed in which news spread is out of any tacking systems control. As a marketing tool, it was very effective, as the image was reproduced by several blogs and fashion magazines’ websites, but was the scope of the discussion positive or negative. In addition, was the overall image of the brand hurt or enhanced? These are topics that create risk and potentially can harm the brand, if not addressed properly.

CREATE YOUR CRISIS RESPONSE TEAM Building the most qualified team to properly respond to crisis is a key aspect of brand rick management. It’s not only about the most qualified professionals, but also the diversity and communication within the team. You will need to bring together people from the Public Relations, the Legal, the Human Resources and the Executive board.

Crisis management is largely about prevention. Only few things are harder to do than suffer through an online reputation management crisis, which could have been minimized or averted up with the right crisis response system. Your crisis response team needs to craft a strategy that will be easy to follow ever day and handy if a situation escalates up to a point where new decisions

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have to be taken. It is wise to have back-up team members, in order to get more coverage in the event of an emergency.

People from Public Relations usually have contacts in the traditional media, so you need to get them to notify these contacts as soon as possible. Legal will help you seek within the law for advice on how to handle your situation; never threat with legal action, unless you’re prepared to follow through, it costs your credibility. Human Resources will assist you if the crisis implicates current of former employees, and with running the team, as they know better the staff and the flows. The Executive Board will be your guide and advisor through this tough time, ensuring the credibility of the company towards the stakeholders and showing that you promote a unified message.

Another issue you have to address is the Online Reputation Policy for employees. There are plenty of cases studies, where the employees suffered the embarrassing social media frenzy and “friendly fire” caused damage to the company’s online reputation. Employees should not be rude in comments online, gossip or grip about management or share unauthorized and foolish content.

It is important to be consistently decisive and start taking actions when employees break the social media policy, risking your reputation, with either issuing warnings or dismissing those who won’t comply with the rules.

Most companies have created departments dealing with the digital aspects of business, within which a Corporate Image or Communication sub-department can be found; in less adapted organizations, they are usually within the Branding. These exist to prevent and solve issues and crises, escalating in the digital world and promoting a clean, honest and “healthy” image of the company.

REPEL ATTACKS AND ADAPT YOUR DEFENSES A brand attack is an event, and as such, provides the opportunity for pre- and post-event actions.

The idea is of a “brand shock” - a violent, sudden, unexpected or traumatic act. A brand shock and the actual even, when you become aware of the brand shock, can be one and the same. The way you respond to brand shock is characterized by persistence, which is a function of both the uniqueness of the brand shock and the resonance, the extent to which your answers are considered compelling. The aftershock is an “objet d’ art” of the initial shock and it results from either others identifying themselves with the issue, or the way you handled and responded to the issue - lack of adequate level of compassion.

After identifying the issue you need to address, you have to consider whether, and how far, you want to pull the remediation, repentance and rectification levels in responding to brand shocks.

Repentance is when you ask for forgiveness, remediation when you give compensation (tangible or intangible) to the victims of the crisis and rectification, when you take actions to prevent the recurrence of a crisis in the future.

Whatever you decide to do, in order to deal with a crisis - offering your apology, showing regret, admitting your mistake or offering compensation - it all has to do with your brand’s narrative.

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The narrative is the sequence of events and the message they send, and in a business content, it is the story around which your employees rally and find inspiration. If you lose control of your company’s narrative, you lose control of your customers’ minds and hearts. The narrative exudes brand value, trust and loyalty. However, be careful not to stick your head in the stand, instead of sticking with your brand’s narrative. Inappropriate and not rehearsed answers usually lead to viral brand shocks.

Sometimes a crisis provides an organization with the “slap” that it needs to move from complacency to action and provides the organization with a chance of introspection and not just ‘respond - fix - move on’. Learning and adapting your brand defenses requires taking a hard look at the brand, the organization, the people and what really happened. It is very important during a crisis to focus on cause an prevention, than assigning blame. Responsibility is to be assigned, implemented and tracked.

The “learn and adapt” process needs to start at the top of the organization and focus on the customers, evaluating changes through your customers’ perspective. Inquiring minds want to know, so clarify your policies for communicating the changes that you implement in response to brand shocks, acknowledging that expectations for transparency.

MEASURING BRAND FLEXIBILITY Building a measurement system for brand resilience can be viewed as an evolutionary process that starts with capturing the voice of the customer. Assess where you stand today when it comes to customer data, brand delivery, value management, tracking escalating issues and brand engagement. Starting at your front lines and implement a program for executives to gain visibility when it comes to “delivering the brand”. Systematic tracking of your brand value should become part of your brand risk assessment plan, incorporating measures of brand clarity and employee engagement. Moreover, your executive board should play a role in the process of tracking and measuring brand resilience, emphasizing on the importance of focusing on brand risks and ensure that the risk management tools are clear.

Generating public support for your brand resilience campaign is a key factor to the success of your campaign. You will need to find brand advocates, who are often hidden in places where you wouldn’t consider looking. Advocates and allies enhance the visibility and impact of your campaign, but never take them for granted. They can be easily turned to insurgents, if you don’t pay proper attention to them. They can be powerful in assisting your counterinsurgency tactic and respond to brand shocks, including playing a role in an early warning brand risk system.

CRISIS COMMUNICATION We have to remember that reputations are won or lost during a crisis. Companies are not judged on the nature of the crisis, but on the way, they respond to it. Every organization, at some point, will be on the receiving end of an event that risks reputational damage. Effective crisis response - including what a company does and what is says - provides companies with a competitive advantage and can even enhance reputation.

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

A crisis is not always a catastrophic event or situation. In Greek, the word crisis also means decision and judgment; the actions one should take to avoid or deal with a challenging situation.

Moreover, crisis includes time in its nature and time in such situations, is a powerful enemy.

Whether a company survives a crisis with its reputation, operations and financial condition intact is determined less by the severity of the crisis, than by the timeliness and quality of its response to the crisis. A slow response to a crisis can alter the perceived image of the company and characterize it as indifferent. No one wants to look indifferent to a crisis, no matter big or small, guilty or innocent. A crisis is a non-routine event that risks undesired visibility that in turn threatens significant reputational damage.

The first who defines the crisis, its motives, and decides the organization’s actions is more likely to win, along with responding quickly, which is a key factor in protecting reputation. Crisis communicators speak of the “Golden Hour” of crisis response, the early phases when the opportunity to influence the outcome is at its best, providing the organization with a tool to stop the expansion of the crisis. Incremental delays have a greater than progressive impact on the likelihood of success. Many organizations misjudge their own ability to control the course of events and wait too long before responding to a crisis. Flailing around and looking confused and helpless, are not inspiring to you stakeholders.

Developing a communication agenda is a key part of coping with a crisis. Crisis communication needs to be grounded to the desired outcome; the end state audience to whom you’re communicating. Contents need to be crafted properly to influence the audience’s frames of references and channels, through which communication takes place, need to be sufficient to reach audiences effectively. Once the goals of communication are determined, the process is relatively straightforward. You need to tell it all, tell it fast, tell what you’re doing about the crisis, tell when it’s over and get back to work.

A challenge facing nearly every organization in a crisis is the circulation of rumors, that, unaddressed, can cause significant reputational harm, sometimes more than the crisis itself. Rumors are particularly damaging because they often seem nebulous and arise from uncertainty. One of the most important roles of corporation communication professionals is to develop an earlywarning and rapid-response mechanism for rumor control. Paradoxically, telling more and telling it faster has the effect of scattering or eliminating rumors.

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BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Business Analytics Analytics are programs developed to assist in the online experience and business attributes of companies. Analytics help collect and work with data from websites, search engines, social media, blogs and other online channels; the volume of this data is extremely large and without the help of analytics, the companies would need countless hours and people in processing. Before understanding the use of analytics, we have to understand the meaning and use of data in business analytics.

According to Thomas H. Davenport, analytics can be classified as descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. Descriptive analytics involve gathering, organizing and depicting data, and then describing the characteristics of what you’re studying. Managers used to call this ‘reporting’; it’s useful, but it doesn’t tell you why this happened or what might happen in the future. Predictive analytics go beyond describing characteristics; they use data from the past to predict the future.

They define associations among the different variables and then predicting the likelihood of a phenomenon occurring, on the basis of those associations. For example, they might predict that a certain type of customer would respond better to a particular product advertisement. These kind of things, usually, make skeptics jump out of their seats and say that correlation does not mean causation, but you don’t need causation to make predictions. There is no assumption of an explicit cause and effect relationship, just noticing that when X happens, Y usually happens as well.

Prescriptive analytics suggest a course of action and they get into a cause and effect analysis. To understand causation, researchers have to manipulate one or more independent variables and to effectively control other variables. If the ‘task group’ performs better than the ‘control group’, then you found a variable you should emphasize broadly.

There are a lot of methods that go into these three categories of analytics from statistics, to forecasting, to data mining and experimental design, but you don’t need to build your own algorithm to get the basic gist. As a manager it is more important to understand what you want the data to do for you, than how to manipulate it. Data analysts - the “geeks” - are the ones needed to extract and manipulate the data, needed for interpretation and business decisions.

ANALYTICS SOFTWARE There are plenty of programs for analytics, depending on the use you want them for, the money you are willing and able to spend, and other factors. Maybe the most well known program is Google Analytics, an internet-based analytics program, with a relatively low cost compared to Adobe for example. Apart from Google Analytics, there are some more cheap tools, among which: •

Crazy Egg: Free to try and very economic at $9 per month after that. Famous for its heat map and claiming to track eye movement, quoting Carnegie Mellon professor who claims that mouse movement and eye movement correlate at 88%. It also offers a scroll map and a confetti report, which displays every click on your page. This is a great help in fixing user interface problems. Crazy Egg is a hosted service like Google Analytics.

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Piwik: An open-source alternative to Google Analytics with a very important difference. It’s software. You download and put it on a server and run it as you would any other application. Some yearning for “net zero cost” alternatives may find this off-putting because servers are not free. But if you’ve got a server and you want to control your own analytics, you may want to see if Piwik makes sense for you. It utilizes MySQL protocols and allows for custom variables, segmentation and even manual queries (try doing that with any on-demand solution!). The tool utilizes tagging, just like hosted services, so it can achieve very granular levels of data. By the way, it’s pronounced “peeweek.”

FireStats: A geeky cousin of Piwik, FireStats is also software. It’s especially well suited for WordPress and can be installed as a plug-in. Its chief feature (self-proclaimed) is that it protects the privacy of your users (unlike Google Analytics, as FireStats is wont to point out). This may seem trivial, but with “do not track” dogging the tracks of trackers everywhere, we may at some point be headed back to servers and real first-party cookies (rather than the spoofed first-party cookies served by certain hosted analytics solutions). While “hits” has become a dirty word for savvy marketers, be aware that FireStats creates a raw log of hits for those who want to analyze every server request. Of course, it can deliver referring information, search engine keyword information and page popularity reports. However, given its hacker-heaven vibe, it’s probably not for the beginner.

Woopra: Free to try and free for non-commercial use, Woopra is also cheap if you need volume. It’s a hosted solution and offers robust visitor profiles and visitor history in a neatlooking dashboard. A Custom Events feature lets you track tough-to-spot actions like game interactions, videos played and ad click-through rates. A desired feature on even high-cost solutions, notifications about selected activity on your site are available via Woopra. For instance, you may want to be notified about a 404 error or a sign-up, and the tool will send you an email. Woopra is visitor-centric and prides itself on enabling personalization by utilizing analytics: It goes beyond where even some paid analytics tools go in this department. Taking user-centricity a step further, it lets you provide customer assistance on the spot via live chat.

And since it’s hosted, startup is point-and-click.

AWStats: Good-old log-file analysis software. Naturally, it needs to sit on a server to analyze log files, but it’s one of the only analytics tools that does so at all. It reports on web logs, FTP logs and email logs. It reports on geographical stats including city, country, ISP, organization and state — all of which makes sense because those parameters are embedded in most server requests. It will track unique visitors, returning visitors, time on site and page views.

However, it won’t track mobile or Flash files. Where Piwik uses PHP language, AWStats uses Perl. In addition, since it tracks log files, it tracks robots and spiders. Many users say they miss this in their tag-based reporting, but it’s always there in the log file no matter what — and AWStats can get it.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS Google Analytics is a service that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It’s the most widely used website statistics service. The basic service is free of charge and a premium ver-

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

sion is available for a fee. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. Google Analytics offers a vastly wide range of features, which measure from visitor loyalty to top content, including a feature to export and save your reports in PDF. In order to avoid numerous pages filled with features, Adam Ostrow, Chief Strategy Officer at Mashable, gathered the 27 key features of Google Analytics in a very useful article, which can be found at Mashable - 27 Features of Google Analytics.

Since its launch, Google keeps adding features to Google Analytics, improving the tracking and measurement of the online experience. Below, you can see the 10 new and promising features of Google Analytics.

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Dashboards got a much-needed overhaul in the new update. Users can now create up to 20 personalized dashboards, developing widgets and formats that make the most sense for them or their company. For instance, each company department could develop its own distinct dashboard to quickly access site performance statistics that relate to department goals.

Keyword Clouds: Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can now evaluate a keyword cloud. This cloud makes it easy to visualize top keywords based on different user-selected criteria, including visits, bounce rates and pages per visit.

Real-Time Data: In the past, Google Analytics data was typically delayed up to 24 hours after the visit. For the first time, a real-time data solution is offered. With its real-time reports, users can view the activity on the site as it happens, drilling into the top active pages, top referrals, keywords and geographic locations driving the traffic. In addition to monitoring current activity on the site, these reports can also be used to test campaign tracking prior to launching campaigns.

Site Speed: Now speed reporting is standard on Analytics, and doesn’t need extra code. Use the site speed reports to get information about average page load time. A slow site can have a negative effect on quality score for paid search, so visits can cost more to a slower site.

Google has also indicated that site speed may be an important factor in organic search rankings. Additionally, a one-second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Use this report to monitor site speed and avoid these issues.

Search Simplifies Navigation: Google Analytics has activated menu search, a phenomenal usability update. The tool makes it easier for users to quickly navigate to the proper report.

Google also created an account search that lets users directly access the correct profile, rather than scrolling through hundreds to locate the right one. In addition, Google introduced the ability to switch between multiple profiles while staying with and maintaining the settings of the same report.

Webmaster Tools: The new integration incorporates Google Webmaster Tools data into Google Analytics. Using this tool, users can get a better sense of which Google property (web, image, local) drove site traffic. Although the numbers are not 100% accurate, they can be used to evaluate relative trends and to provide insight into data lost due to Google’s search update.

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Social Engagement: Use Google Analytics to track how visitors interact socially with your site. With more companies making a push for social, it makes sense to analyze social site interactions. Analytics new social reports break down how many of a site’s visitors are socially engaged with the site, itemizing which social source and action occurred. Social plug-ins ShareThis and AddThis easily integrate with Google Analytics, passing information on social interactions.

Visitor Flow & Goal Flow Visualization: Flow Visualization consists of two reports, Visitors Flow and Goal Flow. The Visitors Flow report can be used to visualize the “flow” of visitors through the site, while the Goal Flow is an improvement on the original Funnel Visualization reports. The Goal Flow report is especially valuable, as it simplifies evaluating a conversion funnel.

Event Tracking: For the first time, Events can be used as goals. Want to find out how many people downloaded a PDF? Interested in knowing how many visitors viewed more than 30 seconds of a video on your site? Now users can easily track these events without affecting other metrics.

Multi-Channel Funnels: The Multi-Channel Funnels are a series of reports intended to help provide attribution information. For example, a person visits your site first from a paid search ad, then from an organic search listing, then from a link in Twitter, and finally from an email link. Therefore, which channel should get credit for the conversion? With many analytics platforms, the credit goes to the final funnel, thus, the email marketing campaign.

Multiple reports in the new Multi-Channel Funnels allow users to view further back than the final channel. Google Analytics shows every interaction a user had with the site in the 30 days prior to conversion. Using these reports, departments can take credit for their assists to conversions, and companies can make more informed decisions about which marketing activities have the highest ROI.

These are just a few of the many advancements made to Google Analytics with the new rollout.

While there are still several features missing (such as the PDF and email export functionalities, percent comparisons, missing graph by week option, etc.), Google is constantly striving to correct these with future iterations of the platform.

Finally, Google on Thursday, July 17th, released a version of Google Analytics for iPhone and iPad. The IOS app comes more than two years after Google released Google Analytics for Android. Like the Android app, Google Analytics for iPhone lets users check in on their website analytics - including real-time visitor reports - from the comfort of their smartphone. In addition to real-time and time-based reports, the app can be used to view behaviors, conversions and more. (http://mashable.com/, 10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using: Rachael Gerson, November 30, 2011)

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

ONLINE REPUTATION TOOLS At this point, it is essential to say that Analytics track different data in overall of the company’s online performance. There are different tools for tracking, monitoring and defending online reputation. You should consider paid services if you are unable to manage and keep your pulse on your online reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations around your brand, which would take you even longer if you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over $100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering using a paid service, select the one that best matches your current situation and scale up as your requirements grow. You need to decide if you want software for tracking conversations or if you want to pay a vendor for consulting and reporting. You might want all three. The difference is the amount of labor you’ll have to expense versus the amount of money you’ll want to spend.

Companies should bring all stakeholders involved in this type of a decision to the table before selecting a vendor to use. The key for success is to figure out what groups within your company can benefit from this type of information. The obvious groups would be in marketing research, public relations, advertising, and then executives, who will not only have to sign-off on this initiative, but are most concerned with how their corporate brand is being portrayed in the media (new/ traditional). Depending on the service you are considering, you may have to select keywords (with pay per keyword/phrase services), so that you can track your competitors, your own products or personal brands within your company. Once you have buy-in and one or more people as dedicated resources to either use the vendor’s software or analyze and communicate their reports and strategies across the business, you are ready to select a vendor. Below, some of the best available tools are listed.

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Buzzlogic: Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic Insights” application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who). They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.

Radian6: Radian6 offers a solution, where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and micro-blogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets. The solution covers all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and emerging media like Twitter. Conversational dynamics are constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each post.

TNS Cymfony: TNS Cymfony offers the “Orchestra Platform”, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you. The platform is able to decipher be-

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tween different media sources, such as traditional media and social media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine who and what is being talked about, whether something or someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how the various entities mentioned relate to one another.

Nielsen: Nielsen offers “Buzzmetrics”, which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing relative to the competition. Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media, is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful service.

Trackur: Trackur offers a monitoring plan for individuals ($18 per month), companies ($88), enterprises ($197) and agencies (N/A). Like many of the other services mentioned, Trackur works around your keywords and then organizes the results for you in the form of a Dashboard. Depending on the package, you’ll be able to save more keyword searches and have more frequent updates to your Dashboard. Trackur was built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal, which gives the service some added credibility.

Brands Eye: Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that accurately reflects the state of your reputation over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in terms of a number of pre-determined criteria. Like many of the other services, you are paying for keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many times you receive updates grows depending on how big your package is.

Reputation Defender: Reputation Defender offers four different services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen by name, screen name or social network profile and reports back to you. MyReputation allows you to review everything that is available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to remove your personal information from people search databases, such as Pipl and Peek You. Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google results. All of these services scale in size depending on your need and how much money you want to spend.

Sentiment Metrics: Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that, just like the other services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the name), which tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral. The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the big differentiators and benefits of using this service is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you have bad press.

Visible Technologies: Visible Technologies offers two different services. The first is “TruCast”, which is a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises who want to track, analyze and participate in social media communities. The differentiation here is that you can comment on blogs and forums directly from the tool they

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

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provide. The second is “TruView”, which protects and promotes reputations online. This service is similar to Reputation Defender’s MyEdge in how it helps you take ownership of your Google results by ensuring there is positive and relevant content at the top of search engines for your brand name.

Cision: Cision offers the “Cision Social Media” service, which claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites.

One of the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is that these companies have been monitoring and measuring traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide a more comprehensive solution across the board. Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7 buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6, which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and daily reports, just like the other services, where they tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day through email.

Depending on your work schedule, business needs, how popular your brand name is and how much money you want to invest in reputation management, any of these services may be of great assistance to you. And using a fee-based reputation management service, in combination with a number of free services, is a wise decision. Most of the services above aren’t real-time, so subscribing to Google alerts and Twitter feeds is still very important for monitoring your brand.

The sooner you get a hold of what people are saying about your brand and plan how you will respond and manage those relationships, the more successful you will be in social media. This area is still relatively new and no company has gotten it 100% right yet. The complicated part of monitoring a brand in a social world is that humans are needed (human error). Some posts are sarcastic or others are using brands as examples to illustrate a bigger idea and these tools may respond differently. On the other hand, since these tools require an investment, if you don’t possess enough money, you can always use the simple and quite effective tools, examined throughout the chapters. (http://mashable.com/, Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For: Dan Schawbel, December 29, 2008)

WEB ANALYTICS TRENDS With the start of 2014, we have more experienced web analysts out in the field than ever before and organizations are now relying (rather than hoping) upon analytics for improvements in their bottom line. At this point, current and upcoming analytics trends are examined.

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Better Content Analysis Tools: When it comes to engagement with content (text, graphics, video, etc) most web analytics platforms show the same data - views, landing page visits, next page views, exits, goal contribution, etc. To get reporting on actual engagement with the content, analysts need to implement other tools to track engagement such as scrolling, mouse movement, zooming, and highlighting. This divide in reporting is a major challenge for content producers.

Multi-visit Click Paths: Unless you’re selling competitively priced pencils at auction, odds

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are that your visitors are looking at your site multiple times before (and after) converting.

But today almost all web analytics platforms focus on reporting for a single visit. There are persistent tracking variables that can be used to show multi-visit attributes. But site owners need to see how visitors’ behaviors change as they learn more about products/services and as they start to interact with the organization offline (i.e. sales calls).

Physical Interaction Tracking: The way we interact with websites is changing. Touch screen laptops, smartphones, tablets, gaming systems with web browsers, etc all allow us to physically interact with a website. Web analytics platforms need to help us track pinches (zoom), swipes, device orientation, tilts, and other physical movements. With the current platforms tracking this type of activity requires a lot of custom JavaScript. In 2014 we want to see the web analytics tools provide out of the box tracking of this type of interaction.

Better Video Tracking: Sites have been using more and more video content every year for the last 5 years. But most web analytics platforms still don’t do a very good job of helping analysts understand how visitors engage with videos. There are a lot of fancy things people can do to track video engagement with integrating with players (i.e. YouTube) and custom JavaScript functions. But this level of complexity prohibits most site owners from tracking common video functions (i.e. Play). Web analytics vendors should provide better out of the box video tracking functions. It would be great to see specific video reports in web analytics tools the way we see specific mobile reports today.

Multi-domain Tracking: Many corporations big and small have multiple sites across multiple domains. Their prospects, customers, partners, employees, etc likely traverse across domains in multiple visits or possibly single visits. But today, most (not all) of the web analytics platforms don’t do a thorough job of enabling site owners to track visitors across domains.

While this is not a problem for most site owners, for companies with diverse initiatives in marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, and customer support this can cause a major gap in tracking the customer journey.

Compensate for “Not Provided: As Google continues to encrypt more and more user search submissions we have seen the percentage of users with Not-Provided search phrases grow by over 100% across sites that we monitor in the last year. This makes measuring SEO performance and optimization very difficult. Analysts need Google to provide some sort of help with this. If not showing the exact search phrase, perhaps they can expose search phrase categories or better integration with Web Master Tools. It would be easy for tools like Google Analytics to create reports that show which search phrases generated traffic without associating the phrases with individual users. This would help site owners with SEO reporting without risking user privacy or website security.

Better Tools for Integration with Third Party Data: If previous years were all about the “Big Data” then the following years should be the year for data integration with web analytics. While platforms like Adobe Analytics and IBM CoreMetrics did a decent job at enabling analyst to integrate data from multiple sources (i.e. CRM, Call Center, Lead Nurturing) with web analytics data, most platforms are lagging in this area. This year we want to see web analytics platforms help site owners to have a more 360⁰ view of their prospects and customers by providing excellent tools for integrating data from other platforms into the web analytics environment.

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

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CMS integration with Web Analytics: The most commonly used administrative tool on most sites is the Content Management System. This is the area where people making site updates need information on how pages and pieces of content are performing and how visitors are interacting with the site. We are hopeful that some CMS vendors will make big improvements in 2014 by enabling plug and play integration with web analytics tools to empower their internal site owners.

Better Data Exports: Google made some great strides to share Google Analytics data with other platforms and a large number of dash-boarding companies built/updated plug-ins for Google Analytics. But almost every other vendor in the web analytics space does an insufficient job at sharing data, which makes dash-boarding and analyzing closed loop sales cycles unnecessarily difficult. We are hopeful that the other web analytics vendors will follow Googles lead this year.

Data Manipulation within Web Analytics: Platforms such as Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Adobe Analytics are great at tracking visitors and then presenting the data. But the platforms do not provide much functionality in terms of manipulating the data once it has been brought into the platform. Providing tools for editing fields and values would provide web analysts with powerful Business Intelligence capabilities to fit the tracking to the organization.

This year may be a defining year for how organizations worldwide gain and utilize customer intelligence in the digital channel. While few organizations fully utilize the web analytics tools they have in place today, there are progressive teams pushing the limits of what website tracking can do to improve digital experiences and I am optimistic that in 2014 the industry tools are going to evolve even farther to drive the entire web industry to new heights. (http://mashable.com/, 10 Web Analytics Trends for 2014: Mark Ryan, January 8, 2014)

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REPUTATION MANAGEMENT & LUXURY 3.0

Reputation Management & Luxury 3.0 Reputation management has always been a concern for prominent brands and individuals, but interest in online reputation management is much broader. As we have seen throughout the paper, online reputation management is like a hot potato; you can through it and don’t receive it nutrients or you can hold it and start adapting to the temperature.

For luxury, this is an even more challenging task, as luxury brands had to “wake up” brutally into the new digital world. Luxury is not like any other business, it is governed by creativity, innovation, craftsmanship and it an “aspiring reality”, a dream for those who cannot have it, and a lust for more, for those who can. The real online issues for luxury brands involve the efforts to maintain the dream factor, to enhance the customer experience, to include fans, protect their craftsmanship and stay true to their identity. Luxury was always implicit and secretive, and it was those characteristics that made it almost mythical; so in what way should they infuse the current mentality of transparency and full disclosure. The first and foremost attribute of online media is that being proactive is way better than being reactive.

There are many codes, rules and tools to create, maintain and raise a brand’s value; reputation is an asset that adds to this value and should be treated as a commodity that can bring both tangible and intangible results. The main aspect of online reputation is that you have to be honest and remain true to yourself - consequently to your customers and fans - because people online tend to be more cautious and suspicious.

The first step in online engagement is to find out who you are and communicate yourself in an kind, honest and unique way, building not only credibility for your brand, but also a shield against the new risks that the digital age involves. Luxury holds on to its true meaning, while finding ways to become “easily accessible” to everyone. Content is the key factor of online engagement and reputation management, as it is enables the brand’s communication strategy, defines the attitude and brings more, or less, followers, depending on its quality. Moreover, a brand has to define its online audiences and in which communities they can found, along with identifying its potential enemies, both within and beyond its borders. Listening to trends, fans or customers, will bring the brand to the next level, combing the technical tools available and the human factor, in order to avoid misinterpretations. Not only enemies, but issues that could escalate and cause reputational damages, difficult to turn around and, in some cases, irreversible.

In the digital world, brands are treated like if they were real human beings, so they need to be extrovert and have great social skills; otherwise, people tend to turn away from them. A brand cannot be mean or rude, never say things that it wouldn’t want to hear and never try to cheat or misguide its audiences. It’s very easy to faceplant your reputation, turning fans to haters, but very difficult and time consuming to restore this reputation, and the followers. In addition, nobody likes a know-it-all or a flibbertigibbet who only deludes himself with lies or half-truths.

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The amount of new and unknown risk that occur online, could only be characterized as brobdingnagian, so brands need to develop systems that assist in early risk recognition, even prevention, and organizational flows that help in the fast and effective management of such risks, mostly due to the speed of risk and rumor spreading online. There are many tools that assist in monitoring both the online experience of a brand and its reputation. These systems include advanced algorithms and high-leveled features to measure and enhance the online presence, as much as help in risk prevention. These tools are continuously evolving, developing integrated solutions and covering broad spectrums of data, but they lack in understanding the human nature that triggers negativity and patterns of the human mind referred to, as the notion of perception.

As technology evolves and connectivity becomes easier, people want more and more; they want to be asked, appreciated and included. It may sound like “pampering a baby”, but is more than that; babies have certain needs, whereas customers have needs and desires - new almost every day - that a brand needs to listen, respect and, if possible, include in their products and services.

Luxury needs to be on top of these needs and desires, forming public opinions, engaging and deepening customer relationships, and enabling communities to assist in a stratification, even on the internet. Managing a luxury brand’s online reputation involves dealing with history, tales and myths, artisanship, rarity and singularity; protecting and promoting them in a fast-paced mass world. Of course, bullies will always exist and find ways to inflict damage, but the challenge is to separate the lambs from the goats, embracing constructive criticism and sanctioning your troops to fight the reputation battles for you.

The Web 2.0 has brought together people and brands that 15 years ago, it would be utopian even to think of. Can you imagine the world of Web 3.0? As 3D and 4D-design progress, as interactive computer systems evolve, is the thought of any person in this world able to see, feel, touch, smell or “play” with an Hermès Birkin, from the comfort of his laptop, tablet or smartphone, illusory.

What if he finds the product flawed or unsatisfying? Could he share his thoughts instantly with millions of others and find tapered opinions?

Reputation Management is an everyday race that needs to be won one user at a time; if lost, at least go down with decency, as they is no such thing as true death for luxury brands, more like a sleeping state, till its next rebirth. However, you need to fight for your right to be perceived as a luxury brand and that can be conquered only if you are honest, transparent, innovative, creative, ahead of the curve and daring. After all, luxury is the absolute form of expression through a product or an experience in a market or a business, and it stands out, even in the most mass and cohesive places.

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT FOR LUXURY BRANDS

BOOKS 1.Cepuran, Jeffrey (2003), Winning Reputation Management Strategies: How to Increase Your Revenue and Protect Your Business Image, JC Internet Solutions Inc. 2.Copulsky, Jonathan R. (2011), Brand Resilience: Managing Risk and Recovery in a High-speed World, Palgrave Macmillan 3.Davenport, Thomas H. (2014, Big Data at Work, Harvard Business Review Press 4.Doorley, John & Garcia, Helio Fred (2012), Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations and Corporate Communication, 2nd Edition, Routledge 5.Earl, Steve & Waddington Stephen (2012), Brand Anarchy: Managing Corporate Reputation, Bloomsbury 6.Earl, Steve & Waddington, Stephen (2013), Brand Vandals: Reputation Wreckers and How to Build Better Defenses, Bloomsbury 7.Griffin, Andrew (2014), Crisis, Issues and Reputation Management (PR In Practice), Kogan Page 8.Halvorson, Kristina & Rach, Melissa (2012), Content Strategy for the Web (Voices that Matter), 2nd Edition, New Riders 9.Kapferer, Jean NoĂŤl & Bastien, Vincent (2012), The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands, 2nd Edition, Kogan Page 10.Ryan, Damian & Jones, Calvin (2014), Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation, 3rd Edition, Kogan Page

INTERNET SOURCES 1.Bain & Company: www.bain.com 2.Business of Fashion: www.businessoffashion.com 3.Harvard Business Review: www.hbr.org 4.Interbrand: www.interbrand.com 5.Luxury Society: www.luxurysociety.com 6.Mashable: www.mashable.com 7.The Luxe Chronicles: www.theluxechronicles.com 8.Wealth-X: www.wealthx.com

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Dedicated to my family and friends for all their patience and motivation… Αnd to my superb supervisor, Hélène Le Blanc, for her help and support.

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Reputation Management is a notion of business, established long before the internet and social media. The notion of “fame and clientele” that enhanced the value of a brand. Reputation is not necessarily treated like a commodity, or included in an organization’s assets. The spring of the internet and social media channels challenges the reputation of brands to a completely new level. The online world is all about the people and the power of their individual brands; everybody has its own unique brand online. Online Reputation Management is a relatively new field of study and business. In this essay, the application of Online Reputation Management on luxury brands is examined.

Due to the distinct nature of luxury brands, the approach to the online world, and hence the online reputation issues, has to be very specific as well. Luxury brands are not about the mass and the collective, but more about the special, the unique and the dream that comes with the products and the experiences. How can luxury brands be exclusive and feed their “dream factor”, in a world that equalizes everything? Luxury, despite its slow adaptation attitude, has to become a pioneer, set the tone and create ahead-of-the-curve online experiences, not just for the products, but also for the brand itself and its prominent customers and fans.

Mini case studies explain how luxury brands adapt, incorporate strategies and shift their attitudes in the online world, such as Valentino, Givenchy, Hermès, Tom Ford and Bottega Veneta.

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