Social Media is like corporate reputation insurance. You pay premiums in the form of building relationships, listening, responding, creating widgets, and building communities. And because you’ve done so, you’ve earned protection that can help should a PR disaster strike—you have an existing group of people who have affinity for your brand and an existing channel in which to reach them.

From Forrester’s Interactive Marketing blog.  http://bit.ly/9Q1biA

Step 1: Make Friend Lists

Step 2: Who Can See What on Your Profile

Step 3: Who Can See Your Address and Phone Number

Step 4: Change Who Can Find You on Facebook via Search

Step 5: Stop Sharing Personal Info with Unknown Applications

• Search/interactive agencies now going head to head with PR firms. 
• Clients say no one has the perfect ‘one stop shop’ offering. 
• And budgets shifting from paid media to earned media:

The landscape will only get more confused as marketers shift budgets, agency executives say. Many of 360i’s clients are shifting money out of bought media and into earned media, said Wiener. That’s led the agency to build out from its core search-marketing specialty and into social media, which has gone from 5 percent of the shop’s business to 20 percent in a year.

Are we looking at the cutting edge of our craft?

“As I’ve said many times, the ability to master any subject that moves, adapts, transforms and evolves so quickly is beyond mastering — at least for now. We are, for now, simply its dedicated students.” — Brian Solis

Any user of Google toolbar can post any comment to your site,  which could be cause for concern, especially for companies or products that tend to get mixed consumer reactions like car dealers, insurance companies, and direct response marketers.

There are some proactive steps you can take with sidewiki to help maintain your company, product or client’s online reputation.   The first should be to take ownership of your site.  A nice post with clear directions can be found on SearchNewz.  Taking ownership of your site is important because Google will put owners’ sidewiki comments at the top, something that might help if there are negative sidewikis also posted.   As shown in the SearchNewz post, you can take the opportunity to write something positive in your own sidewiki comments to explain your site, drive further inquiries with an 800 number, etc.  So it can be one more outlet for positive conversation. 

Another tactic to combat potential negative sidewiki comments is for site owners to  proactively build rich, moderated reviews and comments sections to their own sites.  This will likely draw more attention from consumers anyway, and might help offset any negative comments posted to sidewiki.   It will be interesting to see how this new social outlet evolves over time and how quickly it catches on.

Both programs had a strong presence at ComicCon with actors from the respective ABC social program websites appearing in character at the Con.   I have yet to check out the FlashForward digital campaign, but am happy to have the handy guide.

The subject of ‘engagement’ suddenly becomes more interesting when we’re looking at how it’s done by those with big budgets, sexy content (to the geek squad anyway)  and big imaginations.