Topic: Social Media Intelligence

When a brand crisis hits, time is not on your side. As our Corporate Leaders Risk Survey reveals, CEOs know all too well the high price of identifying and responding to a risk too late. They also recognize the role that digital chatter plays in accelerating risks. When the race is on to prevent a brand crisis, it’s better to be the hare than the tortoise.

CEOs are wrestling with a new form of risk outside their organization’s regular register. Agenda-driven actors and groups, intent on doing harm to brands via social media, are now commanding CEOs’ attention for the first time. How did these groups become top of mind with CEOs and what’s really at stake?

The UK Government just took another meaningful step toward addressing online abuse, drafting a Bill designed to deliver comprehensive legislation across a range of online harms and putting digital platforms on notice, especially social media sites.

Sports exert a powerful influence on life, imparting values such as teamwork, perseverance, and fair play for those who participate and spectate. Pro sports have continued to step up and shine a bright light on the ongoing international movement for anti-racism and social justice.

Even with life thrown out of whack by the pandemic, holiday shoppers experience a Pavlovian response when they hear those two little words, “Black Friday.”

If you’re not looking for it, you may never see one red laser dot trained on your brand, but of course, you would notice 10 million of those dots. By then, though, it’s likely too late to avoid harm from an orchestrated, grassroots attempt to take down your brand.

Social media platforms are bracing for what is widely expected to be an inflammatory and highly contentious election period, anticipating a firestorm of hostile online exchanges about politically- and socially-charged issues. Against this backdrop of belligerence, brands could face unprecedented reputational risk, which very well could originate from the organization's most valued stakeholders.

As long as social media has been around, brands have worked to interact with consumers online to figure out what they want and how to satisfy those expectations. This has traditionally been achieved through social media listening and monitoring. These tools have provided a way for companies to understand what’s happening on their brand-owned social media channels concerning their products, services—and even competitors.

The internet has transformed the way the world does business. In just three decades, it has given organizations of every size easy access to a global marketplace, streamlined internal and external communication, and taken consumer engagement to a new level.

Every year, Nielsen takes a measured look at corporate social responsibility initiatives to see if they change the way organizations perform, both in reputation and with increased sales. What they find, year-after-year, is that consumers are willing to pay extra for products and services from companies that support their same values.