In late 2009, Wertz created a H.J. Heinz, yes the ketchup company, twitter account and proceeded to twitter on behalf of Heinz – links to recipes, bits of history about the company. He followed people in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s hometown, and people who included the word “Heinz” in their tweets, and he started to build a following.

And, oh yeah, he was never authorized by Heinz to create a Twitter account or to tweet on their behalf. After two weeks, Wertz logged into Twitter and found his account changed from @HJ_Heinz to @notHJ_Heinz. Today, if you’re curious and try to find the @HJ_Heinz account, they’ve protected their tweets. What?

Some might read my headline above and think it’s misleading. They were listening and they responded. “They contacted Twitter and had this yahoo booted after two weeks.” Two weeks? Time in social media is measured in dog years. Two weeks is the equivalent of about 6 months.

I’m curious. If Wertz had been tweeting links to unsanitary uses of ketchup, would Heinz have responded faster?

Yes, someone at Heinz was listening, despite their slow response. But, what if you’re working at a company that can’t afford a social media monitoring dashboard? What if you’re a small, locally-owned business that wants to make sure you know what people are saying about your business online, yet you don’t want to spend hours each day manually doing searches on Twitter to monitor the conversation.

Learning how to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system isn’t new. Chris Brogan wrote about in January 2009, and you should definitely check out his article. But, technology changes, and I have some updates to Brogan’s great suggestions.

How to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system:

1. Go to Twitter Search.

2. Search on your business name.

3. On the results page of your Twitter search, notice the orange RSS button in the upper right hand corner of the page with the text, “Feed for this query.” Click on that button.

4. Copy and paste the RSS feed URL, and then go to Feed My Inbox, and subscribe to that feed. For $5 per month, you can subscribe to 25 feeds and get real-time feed updates. If you choose that option, you will get an email, in real-time, each time your business name shows up in Twitter. If real-time updates overwhelm you, you can easily change them to once-a-day updates.

5. Go back to step 1, and create a new feed with the name of your town, the type of business you’re in, (Mexican restaurant, plumber) combined with another word, “hates, crap, love, wonderful, question, recommend” and you can create multiple feeds, each one of them subscribed to via Feed My Inbox.

6. As Chris Brogan pointed out, you can use this type of system in a variety of online monitoring tools, including Google Alerts, Icerocket (for monitoring blog conversations), etc.

Are you monitoring the Twitter conversation about your company and your local industry? Can you afford not to?

Photo credit – Nick Fraser

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Maclaren, a British high-end stroller company, currently faces a recall of 1 million umbrella strollers because the stroller’s folding hinge can amputate a child’s fingertips. According to reports, 12 children have already been injured.

Unfortunately, Maclaren fumbled their response to the recall. Here are a few things that Maclaren could have done differently.

1. Your website MUST work – We’re living in a digital world. When a PR storm hits your company, your customers aren’t going to call your 1-800 number. They’re going to hit your site to find out what’s going on. According to Time magazine’s story about Maclaren’s crisis, on Monday their website was basically inaccessible.

If you’re in charge of your company’s PR crisis plan, anticipate sudden, huge bursts of web traffic. If you wake up tomorrow with the FTC issuing a recall on one of your products, do you know exactly who you can call at your company who can immediately make the call to increase bandwidth and server capacity to handle the onslaught to your company’s website? If not, you need to think about this now – not when the storm hits.

Also, today, if you visited the Maclaren website, you’d be hard pressed to immediately find any information about the recall. There’s a link for recall in the top right-hand navigation menu of the page. The word “recall” is the same size font and color as the rest of the nav menu words. Why not have a prominent button that no one would miss – Maclaren Stroller Recall – We Want to Keep Your Child’s Fingers Safe – Please Click Here for Detailed Info

2. Twitter – It doesn’t really matter if you’re an active participant, just listening, or think that people on Twitter only talk about what they’re having for lunch. When a crisis hits, your customers, your critics, your evangelists, will be discussing your crisis on Twitter. And so should you. Certainly, you can also use traditional PR crisis tactics – press conferences, conference calls with reporters, 1-on-1 briefings with key reporters, but you should also be using Twitter aggressively to combat and negate the storm.

Maclaren execs could have first issued pro-active messages about the recall via Twitter – including a link to a webpage with all the info about the recall. Then, they could start engaging 1-on-1 with anyone mentioning or discussing the recall. If someone turns to Twitter to ask about a company’s recall, and then immediately gets a response directly from the company, that’s a whole lot better than an echo chamber of customers discussing, griping, complaining about a company’s recall with nary a tweet or word directly from the company.

3. Engage Your Critics ProActively – Moms and Dads these days are blogging about the trials and tribulations of parenthood. The Time article pointed out that many parenting bloggers were vocal in their consternation at the recall and Maclaren’s fumbled response. Here’s where the all-nighter comes in. In addition to an around-the-clock, proactive Twitter outreach strategy, Maclaren should have been engaging bloggers. First, they could have scoured the blogosphere for any mention of the recall and responded in the comments of the blog explaining the recall and what parents could do to order the stroller widget that fixes the hinge danger. But, Maclaren could have gone beyond responding via comments. They could have drafted a quick “blog response” to the crisis – an expansion of the blog comment text – and offered/suggested that bloggers run the item as a guest post. Would some bloggers have refused? Certainly. But some would have published it.

4. Facebook – Maclaren was right on in their Facebook strategy. Again, according to Time magazine, “An entry on the “Maclaren Baby” page instructs consumers to e-mail sales@maclarenbaby.com with their name, address, telephone number, stroller model and stroller Vin number.” This is good, proactive communication via social media. However, I wonder if Maclaren used the feature available to any Facebook page , “Send an Update to Fans.” If they didn’t, they should have. A simple update on a Facebook page can easily get lost in the stream of Facebook news. An update gives the message a little more Facebook urgency and attention.

Here’s the link to Maclaren’s website re: the recall:

http://recall.maclarenbaby.com/

What else could Maclaren done to get their message out yesterday when the FTC announced the recall?

Photo – bbaunch, some rights reserved

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I was talking to someone on Saturday who had been thinking about starting a podcast, but for whatever reason hadn’t reached a point where he was ready to pull the trigger. He did mention that he thought podcasting would be more comfortable for him, because he had tried writing a regular blog, and he was very self-concious about his writing ability, and he eventually lost steam on blogging due to his self-consciousness about his writing abilities. I can relate to that feeling of self-consciousness – not necessarily about my writing ability but more about revealing myself to anyone who should stumble across my blog online.

There have been numerous articles, including my blog posts ironically, about the importance for companies to participate in social media. It’s not all that hard to participate in Twitter – responding to people’s tweets, forwarding or retweeting other tweets, and posting links to interesting stories. In many ways, Twitter is akin to a high-volume broadcast version of truncated emails. And, ever since I got into PR in 1997 or so, I’ve lived and breathed email every day.

And, It’s not all that hard to participate in Facebook either. Posting photos, commenting on other people’s photos, posting links to interesting news articles, commenting on other people’s posts, and, of course, deleting over and over and over again people’s weird icons, sheep, mafia wars updates that come my way[this is not a sentence – I would reword this to make it into a sentence].

However, blogging, for me has been different. Over the years, I’ve often avoided writing a regular blog. Sure, I have had plenty of thoughts and opinions about public relations, technology, the impact of digital media on book publishing, etc., but for some reason a crippling modesty – or even shyness -– has kept me from blogging about my ideas. I’m certainly confident about my professional abilities – working with companies to identify the stories that they want to tell about their business and products, then distilling that information into timely, news worthy announcements designed to garner news coverage. And, I’ve always felt very comfortable stating my opinions to clients, giving them unvarnished feedback about their PR ideas and campaigns.

Yet, despite that confidence in my professional abilities, blogging felt foreign to me. I would try, and it would never feel “right” to me. The self-revealation aspect, posted online so that any one in the world could read what I’d written, constantly inhibited me.

Possibly it’s generational. I’ll be the first to admit that I consider myself on the cutting edge of technology and gadgets. I waited in line for an Xbox 360, a Wii, an iPhone, and other brand-new gadgets. Yet, the first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack color computer – hooked up to an old television for a monitor.

While I’ve always embraced technology, the self-revalatory nature of blogging – while natural for digital natives – has felt awkward and presumptive to me.

Finally though, I realized I needed to join the online conversation more overtly by blogging on a regular basis. I can’t remember a specific watershed moment for my decision. It has been more of a gradual change and a constant process of reminding myself that I do have ideas to contribute (not to sound too much like Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character on Saturday Night Live).

With all this personal background and info, I think it’s something to definitely think about as social media grows – some people for whatever reason are self-conscious about their social media participation.

Christopher S. Penn, one of the co-founders of Podcamp Boston, just blogged about a somewhat similar issue – breaking the shackles of your potential. It’s a great blog post that I recommend you take a look at.

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Here’s the TechCrunch article – Hey, Where’s The Twitter For Families – that I mention in the video.

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However, within hours of launching the promotion, the producers of a new documentary accusing Starbucks of union busting, decided to hijack Starbuck’s own promotional campaign. They encouraged people to take photos of themselves with posters or other signs with negative messages about Starbucks’ anti-union activities and post them on Twitter using the same hash tags as the promotional contest. I’m sure there were some furious emails flying back and forth around Starbucks that day.

Here’s what companies need to realize about social media, and here’s what I would have advised Starbucks to do.

1. Don’t be surprised. Many people have been saying this for quite a while now. The era of one-direction messaging and marketing is gone. Gone forever. It’s not coming back. Your customers have a megaphone. Yep, those pain-in-the-ass, never-please customers can now shout their displeasure to the world. And, they no longer have to wait until they get back to their PC at home or the office. Now, they can grab their smartphone and start ranting seconds later.

This type of brand and promotional hijacking is going to happen – over and over and over. And companies need to anticipate and be prepared figure to respond – or ignore – those complaints.

2. Respond. You’ve heard pundit after pundit say that social media is a conversation, and you’ve heard them say too, “Join the conversation.” Well if someone has hijacked your contest, promotion, or new product launch, now’s the time to start talking.

I’m sure that somewhere within Starbucks (probably HR and Legal), they’ve already developed talking points about the benefits of Starbucks employment (better-than-average wages, healthcare from day one for part-time employees, etc.) Why not use those facts and talking points to respond to the people posting on Twitter?

And, just because the talking points came from HR or Legal, you don’t have to be stiff and corporate with your responses. Why not something like, “Our customers are passionate about coffee. @Starbucksunionbusters doesn’t think we’re doing a good job w/ our employees. Starbucks pays better-than-average wages, according to latest employment stats link – for more info.

3. Ignore them. What? We shouldn’t say anything? Yes, I’m saying that’s one potential strategy. Have you noticed one of Obama’s strategies thus far? He doesn’t often engage with his critics. He gives an exaggerated (what a nutcase) eye-roll, or he shrugs his shoulders. A one-sided argument or shoutfest will usually lose steam pretty quickly.

If you were sitting in Starbucks HQ watching those Twitter messages, what would you have done?

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