Bees make me swell. Badly.

You see, I am allergic to bees, so when they show up, I close my eyes and magically, they disappear but we all know that they’re still hovering over me with their stingers aimed at my face. By being absent online, you’re simply closing your eyes and hoping it’s not there. Whether you like it or not, someone is talking about you online and it may be excellent or it may be a terrible crisis. If they’re not talking about you, they’re generalizing your field of expertise and lumping you in with others in your field.

How to fight off the bees:

The easiest way to manage your reputation is to be present. By being part of a conversation, you know what is being said and where. There are many tools that give you email alerts when your name is mentioned and others that help you track your influence as measured by your network value, but that’s all technical mumbo jumbo. If you’re not online, get there. If you don’t know what you’re doing, have someone hold your hand- we do it for a living and we live in a society of collaboration, so there really are no excuses left other than you just want to close your eyes when the bee swarm comes.

All afternoon today there have been numerous complaints across Twitter about Media Temple downtime- and yes, Media Temple (mt) more than just a sexy logo has a social voice, they even have a blog- the crazy thing is they even have a status update blog, and it’s fed to popular social media site Twitter to update users there.

Let’s Take a Look at Strategy

I’m not here to be harsh with mt, I like the guys at mt, but what I am here to do is point out why patrons of mt are still ticked even though mt has two blogs, and two twitter accounts.

The problem isn’t a lack of trying

I mean come on, they’re going out of their way to communicate- the bottom line is that server hosting is a bitchy business. When your websites are up, they’re essentially forgotten and rarely thanked, but when they’re down- you’d better duck…

The problem is that the appearance is that no one at mt wants to really deal out front on the issue, the complaint and issues seem hidden away- take a look at the main blog page: (as of the time of this post, there had been no updates on this issue) ah, there’s that pretty logo- but notice it has nothing to do with the outage…

Get Authentic

The problem is that being present simply isn’t enough in the social media world, you have to be willing to be authentic- admit when things are wrong, and open about what you’re doing to resolve the problem, if in fact there is a problem. You want to relate to the consumer that you understand, but also that you’re not ducking the issue- it’s out front for the world to see.

Now why would you want to pull down your pants for the world to see? Because this is mt’s opportunity to really humanize its brand in the face of criticism. It’s their moment to really show off mt’s customer service dedication, and it’s the perfect time to front and center lay out exactly what options are available to customers, and yes, shopping consumers- what consumer doesn’t love to witness great human customer service? What consumer won’t want to work with a provider that has gone to this extreme to communicate with users, and what consumer wouldn’t brag about receiving such awesome service?

Being human and authentic is crucial, and mt has an opportunity to really take that human service to the next level, and so do you with your brand, or you may find things like this about your brand littered all around the internet…

Are they listening?

Now, we’re pretty positive that mt uses tools to listen to consumers (such as this New Media Labs article) and should promptly respond here to correct any misconceptions related to this event or post- so let’s hope they’re listening as part of their social media strategy.