Tweets posted by the company have been slammed as wooden, corporate and lacking in empathy, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Qantas will reimburse the difference between the cost of the new ticket (in same cabin of travel) and value of the refunded Qantas ticket,” read one remarkably concise tweet, failing to offer a human voice at a time of major chaos and upset for many customers.

Word has it that although Qantas generally demonstrates successful Twitter marketing, the social media team had been effectively “gagged” by senior Qantas staff with a corporate message to deliver, yet little experience of using Twitter.

In response, numerous Twitter accounts have surfaced with the sole aim of blasting Qantas, with chief executive Alan Joyce bearing the brunt of the flack.

It’s hard to say how damaging a Twitter backlash can be. One parody account, @AlanJoyceCEO, has posted a healthy 989 tweets since springing up, and has lured 2,740 followers in its short lifetime.

Any social media backlash is likely to fizzle out as the crisis resolves, but we can’t help but feel that Qantas has missed a crucial opportunity to reach out to a global customer base craving open communication.

You may have 10,000 happy customers but it only takes one motivated, IT literate one to turn feral and as generation Y matures, there’s only going to be more of them.

Assuming the website is legitimate and can’t be taken down through legal means – or negotiated with, there is still something you can you do.

The main issue is stopping negative sites appearing directly under your main brand site in Google search results. SEO focused content creation can push the offending site far away enough from the main search results to have little associative impact on your brand.

Adding content about your brand is a good thing to do in any case, not just building a bulwark against attacks but establishing the brand as a thought leader in their respective field and providing material for social media marketing.

In that sense, the famous phrase ‘publish and be damned’ perhaps needs reversing for the online world – ‘publish or be damned.’

Findings from the annual survey ‘The Rising CCO’ III, indicate that as online threats to corporate and brand reputations have increased, so too has the importance of communications officers possessing the necessary crisis management skills. 61% of CCOs currently consider crisis management skills as important, compared to only 33% in 2007.

Social media is identified as the most critical challenge as well as the greatest opportunity in the year ahead, with 54% citing social media experience as key for communications staff. Social media and blogging are expected to be the fastest-growing functions in communications departments in the next 12 months, rising from 28 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in 2010.

Media sentiment is top of the CCO’s list of effectiveness measures according to the research. Media favourability as an indicator of communications success, increased from 75% in 2007 to 84% in 2010.

The annual Rising CCO survey is conducted by global executive search firm Spencer Stuart and global public relations firm Weber Shandwick. The 127 survey participants were from companies based in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific with 78% of respondents working in global Fortune 500 companies.

TaylorMade is the next most loved brand, followed closely by Wilson and Nike.

While Nike Golf and Callaway are the subject of an equal amount of chatter, Nike is merely liked while Callaway inspires real passion.

Despite the negative publicity, Tiger Woods does not appear to impact the passion level for the Nike Golf brand. In fact, golfers express little negativity towards any of the major brands.

Titleist gets the least amount of love, but is still generally liked. Personally I hate them, keep losing the pesky things!

Over three quarters of FTSE 100 companies lack basic social media tools such as a blog or an RSS feed, according to a new survey by UK PR company Furlong.

See full article here: http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1009924/City-agency-digital-comms-chief-warns-FTSE-100-companies-act-now-social-media

At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.

Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online.

If you put ‘Coutts bank account’ into Google today, the eleventh entry on the page is a site called www.couttssucks.com, a site essentially dedicated to destroying the brand reputation of the three hundred year old institution. I’ve got no personal axe to grind about Coutts (unless on an actress related subliminal level) but many ex-customers obviously do and are enthusiastically warning other individuals, dreaming of that Coutts chequebook, to think again.

In this new era of online brand transparency, negative customer comments are an inevitability and not always a bad thing for the brand or the customer. If it helps highlight a problem which can be put right, the brand becomes hero rather than villain and the customer walks away happy that they’ve been listened to by the corporate giant.

By contrast, not engaging with customers online, can make brands look as if they don’t care, or worse, arrogant and out of touch. Some organisations will only find this out when something goes wrong unfortunately and then it’s often too late. Look at what Toyota are suffering now (1) because of a reactive communications strategy, research by Brand Finance suggests they’ve lost $4bn off their brand value.

To use a banking analogy, ignoring online reputation is like making out a blank cheque from your brand equity account and allowing your enemies to decide when to cash it in and for how much. Not a good idea, no matter how fancy your chequebook is.

(1) This blog was first published in February 2010 by Stopgap

Whatever we think of this as a PR move – and it’s an interesting one – it serves to underline the impact that key social networking sites can have on brand reputation. Mumsnet receives more than 1m unique visitors each month. Its discussion boards attract about 20,000 comments daily. Even the upcoming General Election has been dubbed the ‘Mumsnet Election.’

George at Asda, Boden, House of Fraser, Mothercare and Start-rite have all signed up to the site’s ‘Let girls be girls’ campaign, after members expressed concerns about products on sale in high-street stores. It aims to get retailers to agree to end the ‘premature sexualisation of children though their products and marketing.’

Writing in his Editor’s comment this week, Gareth Jones of Marketing magazine is sceptical as to whether Asda’s decision represents an intelligent PR coup. “Mumsnet is a hugely powerful force that brands should seek to harness but, in this case, it seems George at Asda may be going a step too far,” he says.

However, putting aside the issue of whether or not it should be up to an independent government body as opposed to a commercial organisation to make such decisions – which seems to be his primary concern – what is for sure is that Asda’s move represents a bold acknowledgement of the importance of online reputation management in today’s digital world.

Microsoft has knocked Google off its top spot in the 2010 Business Superbrands survey.

Google, ranked first in the two previous surveys, changes places with Microsoft who were in fifth spot last year.

New entries to the top ten include BlackBerry, 42nd  last year and British Airways, back to eighth from its worst position last year – 36th. Rival Virgin Atlantic however, also appears, above BA, in fourth position.

Revealing the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 biggest fallers includes UBS and Morgan Stanley, with the Royal Bank of Scotland falling out of the top 500 altogether.

Proving that a re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva, the re-branded Norwich Union, is the second highest riser in the top 500 climbing from 315th to 144th.

The biggest year-on-year riser is Premier Inn, which has jumped a significant 197 places to 240th. Other fast risers include DHL, BDO the accountancy firm, and trade media title, Management Today.

Brands are ranked by a panel of judges and 1700 business people for quality, reliability and distinction.

In private banking, one name soared above them all, a name guaranteed to score big yuppie points with the stripey shirted city aspirants of the day.

In 2010, that bank’s reputation is in danger and in this guest blog for Stopgap Group, Furlong PR CEO Ross Furlong lays out why venerable institutions need to wise up to the new world of online reputation.

Such scope for personal expression may not last long. The LA Times has issued updated  social media content guidelines for their staff emphasising that just about anything they post online both personal and work related, reflects on the reputation and credibility of the newspaper.

“Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job,” says the first guideline.

It goes on, “Your professional life and your personal life are intertwined in the online world, just as they are offline, attempts, for instance, to distinguish your high school friends from your professional associates are fine, but in all spaces one should adhere to the principle that as an editorial employee you are responsible for maintaining The Times’ credibility.”

The guidelines extend even to retweeting posts on Twitter:  ”When transmitting information online..as in re-Tweeting material from other sources..apply the same standards and level of caution you would in more formal publication.”

While social media is banned in many companies for productivity reasons – 54% of US companies according to an October survey, online reputation by contrast is hardly monitored at all. And which one is more important? Warren Buffett’s annual memo apparently always contains a variation of this line:

“We can afford to lose money–even a lot of money. We cannot afford to lose reputation–even a shred of reputation.”