Blogged Down?

On a Sunday morning last June, Maria Accardi, a librarian at Indiana University Southeast, sat at her computer and composed an entry on her blog, Library Praxis, analyzing her mixed feelings about attending the upcoming American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif. She had been underwhelmed by the 2007 meeting. "I'm not certain that the ALA annual conference is the best conference for me and my professional needs and interests," she wrote. "Still, I'm going anyway, because I'm willing to give it another shot."

A week later, after a full day at the conference, Accardi logged on again to praise two sessions she'd attended and to register a few complaints about logistics. Two readers who commented on the post echoed her frustration.

Things really fell apart at the Library Instruction Roundtable the next day. "I noticed a pamphlet on the floor," Accardi reported on her blog that afternoon. "It had fallen off the seat when I sat down. I was totally stunned and appalled that it was a pamphlet selling diet pills." She flipped it over and saw the sales contact was Michelle Sanderbeck, wife of the session's speaker, Andrew Sanderbeck, founder of the People Connect Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Her next post: "Please, tell me: On what PLANET is it acceptable to allow a program speaker to sell WEIGHT LOSS PRODUCTS to an audience of professional adults at a professional conference?...Yet another piece of evidence to add to the file of why the ALA conference is not a good match for me. I came here to learn, not to be insulted and offended professionally." A few days later, recapping the conference experience, Accardi concluded she would "likely never go to an ALA conference again."

It's the stuff planners' nightmares are made of -- and a proliferating reality. The Internet is teeming with commentary, and as the popularity of social media websites increases (research firms estimate the active audience for blogs and social networking sites in the United States is between 30 million and 100 million), the field of online reputation management -- monitoring, influencing and responding to what's being posted about individuals, businesses, products or events -- is exploding. And with good reason: Bloggers and social media users are building a growing permanent archive of commentary available to anyone with Internet access. In the world of meetings, this material is becoming prevalent online and can undercut official marketing or public relations efforts.

"In today's world, people can go out and comment, and it's there for everyone to see and can impact you as you go forward trying to promote the event," says Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing for Visible Technologies, a Seattle-based brand management firm.

"People new to this, who don't know what people are saying about them online, need to learn," asserts Rick Calvert, founder and CEO of Blogworld & New Media Expo, an annual convention for bloggers. "It's like not knowing what people are saying in newspapers or on the nightly news."

Monitoring what's being said online about meetings and trade shows offers benefits to planners beyond damage control: The posts and comments actually can help associations or event organizers improve customer service, obtain valuable market research and competitive intelligence, and even generate ideas to improve meetings or create entirely new events. And while dozens of companies offer online monitoring and consulting services, there are tools on the web that will let planners manage their online reputations for free.

The ALA way
The American Library Association, based in Chicago, is particularly accommodating to bloggers. It provides a lounge for them at its annual conference and a special quiet room for recording audio podcasts. Attendees are given free wireless Internet access, and ALA encourages bloggers to add their URLs to the conference's wiki, a website that allows anyone to add or edit content.

"Our people love to communicate with each other," says Deidre Ross, ALA's director of conference services. "They've totally embraced Web 2.0 tools."

ALA bloggers also embrace the opportunity to air their unvarnished opinions, and thus, along with ample praise for ALA, there exists a wealth of negative sentiment about the association online that has been accumulating for years. A librarian in Pennsylvania even created a group on Facebook called "I want a better ALA Event Planner" -- referring to an online tool that generates conference itineraries for attendees, not specifically to Ross or her staff. The group has 96 members.

Ross says the IT department of the association does monitor industry blogs for references to ALA, "but we usually don't comment on the blogs because we don't want a fight." She continues: "One of our core values is freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of information. For us to tell people they're wrong, it's just not the ALA way."

How ALA interacts with bloggers has been a topic of internal debate, says Jenny Levine, the association's Internet development specialist. ALA publishes its own blog, Marginalia, on which Ross (usually via Levine) can respond to misinformation or criticism about ALA's conferences. The downside to that method, Levine acknowledges, is most readers of the offending blog probably will never see ALA's response, unless they navigate to Marginalia independently. While staffers are effective at responding to individual complaints via e-mails and calls, Levine says most are wary of direct engagement with bloggers -- a method she prefers.

"I've been a blogger for years before I joined ALA, and I very much believe in openly communicating online," she says. "ALA, which has been around for 130-plus years, is still adapting to that idea."

(Marginalia does not have reaction to the "diet pill" incident, which caused a stir on Accardi's blog. Andrew Sanderbeck says It Works! Marketing, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company that sells weight-loss and wellness products, sponsored his roundtable session. He says his wife does occasional work for the company. ALA's Ross claims she had no hand in the session's planning and notes that roundtables are member-organized groups that create their own programming. Accardi says 125 unique users visited her blog on the day she posted about the roundtable, and she never heard from anyone at ALA.)

ALA's general approach to online reputation management, often referred to as ORM, goes against what most people in the field recommend. The best policy, many experts say, is for businesses or associations to join conversations respectfully, posting responses to positive, negative and misinformed statements in a timely fashion so that future readers will be able to see that response alongside the initial post.

ALA is hardly alone in its hesitation to jump into the fray, fearing further comment will exacerbate problems or the association will be viewed as a bully. Barbara Hyde, director of communications for the Washington, D.C.-based American Society for Microbiology, says her staff monitors the Internet for references to ASM, its events and its publications, but "generally, if there's misinformation on a blog, we tend to ignore it... The New York Times is one thing. Somebody's blog in Podunk is another." Other association employees report similar attitudes at their organizations, where policies for monitoring and responding to blogs are informal or nonexistent.

But ALA's silence on her blog further frustrated Accardi. "If someone from ALA had responded to my posts in a way that acknowledged, validated or attempted to engage my critiques, this would have the effect of making ALA seem less like a faceless, impersonal entity and more like an organization that cares about the ideas of its members," Accardi told M&C. "I know that an organization as big as ALA doesn't have the time or resources to respond to every last bit of feedback from a member, but if they were pushing blogging so heavily, then why didn't anyone from ALA read the blogs or respond to posts? Maybe they did, and my blog wasn't one of the ones they read."

How to monitor
While countless search engines troll blogs and social media sites for keywords, ORM experts say meeting planners should heed these three.

Google Alerts. At google.com/alerts, users sign up for e-mail alerts with links to the most recently added Google search results for a given keyword. Setting up an alert takes only seconds; users enter a search term, choose the frequency for e-mail alerts (daily, weekly or "as it happens") and define the scope of the search (websites, news sites, blogs, videos, groups or "comprehensive"). ORM experts recommend creating multiple alerts. An association, for example, might create alerts for its name, acronym, publications or conferences, and the names of its top executives. People who prefer less clutter in their in-boxes might want to set up special folders or a separate e-mail account to receive alerts.

Technorati. Technorati.com is a search engine for user-generated content that also measures the "authority" of blogs by counting the number of other blogs that linked to that site in the previous six months. Technorati sees a link to a blog as a vote of confidence; the more links, the higher authority the blog is said to have. Users can conduct keyword searches at Technorati, or they can set up RSS (for "really simple syndication") feeds, which deliver the search results directly to an RSS reader, a web tool or software application that collects and displays items from the feed upon posting. (There are many RSS readers to choose from. Google Reader is an example of a free, web-based reader; FeedReeder is one desktop application.) To set up an RSS feed from Technorati, conduct a keyword search on the site, click the "subscribe" link on the results page and add the subscription link to the RSS reader.

Twitter. Twitter.com is a "microblogging" site, meaning the length of posts (often referred to as "tweets") is limited to just a few lines. "Twittering" during a meeting or convention is increasingly popular with tech-savvy attendees who, for example, share insights from their education sessions or organize impromptu gatherings on-site. Planners might decide only to monitor Twitter leading up to or during a live event, by searching the site (search.twitter.com) for references to their meetings; the results page indicates when new posts have been added. Alternatively, planners can go to a separate site, Tweetscan.com, and sign up for e-mail alerts with posts from Twitter and a similar site, Identi.ca. (For M&C's web-only feature on Twitter, click here)

For some planners, using Google Alerts and Technorati will be enough to keep sufficient tabs on online discussions. In other cases, it's too much. "Not only do you get what you're looking for, you get tons of garbage," says Richard Walsh, vice president of business development for Parsippany, N.J.-based Lodging Interactive, which in 2007 launched Chatter Guard, a service that aggregates customer reviews and ratings for hotels.

If searches and feeds are turning up too many irrelevant results, or if an organization simply doesn't have the resources to sift through the data, they can outsource ORM to one of dozens of vendors that offer services to individuals, businesses or both. The cost of outsourcing typically runs anywhere between $20 and $300 per month, though more comprehensive brand services and analysis can reach $100,000 annually. A few prominent suppliers include BuzzMetrics, Radian6 and Trackur.

SocialFish, an ORM company and social media consulting firm that launched last August in Washington, D.C., was created specifically for the association market. "That's the group that needs help the most," says Lindy Dreyer, chief social media marketer, who has a background in association marketing. "They need people who understand how associations work."

How to respond
Visible Technologies' Blake Cahill has a rule of thumb for organizations with respect to responding on blogs: If you can add something of value to the conversation -- thanking people for positive comments, acknowledging concerns, clarifying something -- go for it. "Almost all the times I've seen a brand jump into a conversation, it's viewed as positive," he notes. On the other hand, if commenting yields no foreseeable good, back off. "No brand wants a back-and-forth to turn into an ugly dispute," Cahill says. In those cases, organizations might want to reach out to the bloggers through private communication channels.

Most ORM suppliers advise responding within two or three days of the initial post -- faster on more popular blogs.

As Dreyer sees it, planners should respond to negative feedback as they would in person. "It's a social space," she says, adding that as long as bloggers act in a way that's socially responsible, there won't be problems.

Dreyer points out that attendees who publish criticism on the web "cared enough to go online and say something," which indicates they have a certain level of investment in the event. "If you can go to them and understand what they're saying," she says, "if you're able to address their concerns in a constructive way, you can turn that person from a detractor into an ambassador who will evangelize you. It's such a huge opportunity."

Jason Falls, director of social media for Doe-Anderson, a brand-building agency in Louisville, Ky., and a blogger himself, says bloggers like to know that people are listening. "As a conference organizer, to know what people are saying about you and to respond to that talk is to let your attendees know their opinion is important and a valid factor in the assessment process," he says. "The only thing it can produce is positive, unless, of course, the conference organizer minimizes or belittles the person's opinion. Most conference organizers are not that foolish."

What planners can learn
Kenny Lauer, director of digital technologies for George P. Johnson, a trade show and event marketing company based in Auburn Hills, Mich., says most planners don't comprehend the immense value of monitoring what's being written online. Thinking back to his days in market research, Lauer says, "We would die to get the kind of customer info we can get now, and we don't need to do surveys or focus groups to get it. People are sharing this."One company that's taken advantage of ORM strategies is Woodland Hills, Calif.,-based Advanstar Communications, which produces trade shows. Advanstar recently decided to move its Licensing International Expo from New York City to Las Vegas, based largely on concerns voiced on blogs about the price and scarcity of hotel rooms in New York. After announcing the move in June, Georgiann DeCenzo, the company's executive vice president, kept a close eye on the reaction in the blogosphere.

"While the majority of the commentary was very positive, we were also able to educate ourselves about areas of customer concern," DeCenzo says. "Blogs revealed that customers were concerned about losing the European attendee base by moving the show to Las Vegas, so we sought to align ourselves with major European and Asian airline carriers to offer discounted flights for international attendees. We also read that attendees were interested in new licensing categories, and we were able to respond to that by building new show floor environments into our 2009 expo plan."

Had meeting planners been monitoring blogs and Twitter during Blogworld & New Media Expo, held in Las Vegas last September, they could have gleaned plenty of useful feedback on the event. (Some 1,500 tweets a day were posted about the conference, in addition to traditional blog posts.) Planners would have noticed instant reviews of speakers, complaints about the lack of coffee, alerts to computer problems in meeting rooms and questions about the functionality of the conference website. Suggestions were posted for expanding panels, creating new education tracks, pairing two speakers to face off for a debate session and more. Bloggers even posted some advice for getting around town for other attendees, a service planners could consider providing the next time around.

Other bloggers posted about the reasoning behind their decisions to attend Blogworld or a less expensive rival conference in Orlando, providing valuable insight into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the two conferences. 

"To reshape an experience in real time is and will be, for our space, one of the most powerful opportunities with reputation management going forward," Lauer says. "If we can change the experience with microinteractions and increase customer equity, the perception of the brand is going to benefit."

Lauer says revenue-generating opportunities exist when planners come across comments like, "I would pay double for this conference if it had..." or "I would attend if only..." or "I'm having trouble convincing my boss I should attend."

Jeff Zabin, a research fellow for the Boston-based Aberdeen Group who has studied social media, says online monitoring can be "an early warning system" to identify potential problems before they occur. Protesters, for example, might use blogs or social media to gather support and plan their activities; planners alerted to the situation could make appropriate arrangements. Zabin also says the process of monitoring will allow people to identify the most influential bloggers in the industry. Proactive planners can launch conversations on those blogs by asking for feedback or by feeding news announcements to the bloggers directly. Winning the support of online voices -- people who, studies show, are sometimes trusted more than official spokespeople -- can be key in generating positive word-of-mouth marketing.

Lauer disagrees with the sentiment that brands have lost control over their brand marketing or online reputation with the rise of blogging. "You lose control if you're not listening, if you're not joining the conversation, if you're not present," he says.

Blogworld's Calvert agrees: "If you do it well, there's no better way to build brand loyalty."