It's More Than Online Reputation Management (and Why "Podunk" Blogs Matter)

Meetings and Conventions Magazine has a great article this month on online reputation management for event planners. Most of the experts interviewed agreed that you should both be monitoring and responding to online conversations (whether glowing or scathing) about your event or organization.

By doing so, you get the obvious benefit of having your response right there in the conversation--this can be especially helpful in the case of criticism. But even more importantly, you get the opportunity to elicit more constructive feedback from attendees and potential attendees that you can use to make the event better. Not to mention that you also get a unique opportunity to build closer relationships with the very people you hope will come next year.

I think the term "online reputation management" falls far too short of the actual benefits you can reap from responding to and learning from the feedback that is out there. The term implies to me an almost obsessive need to control the message and bring it back to the corporate brand you penned in an office of executives during an all-day branding meeting.

Guess what? You can't control that message anymore--at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe you did once, back when information was a one-way street. (Remember those days? When public opinion was limited to a few opinion letters that were chosen by the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines?). Maybe you even had control for the eight hours you spent in your branding meeting. Now it's out there and you've lost it, but you've gained something far more powerful.

At least that's my "Podunk" opinion.

And that leads me to the other notable portion of this article. "Podunk" isn't my word. It came from the director of communications for the American Society for Microbiology who says her staff monitors for mentions of the organization's events online, but notes:

[G]enerally, if there's misinformation on a blog, we tend to ignore it... The New York Times is one thing. Somebody's blog in Podunk is another.

People, and especially directors of communication, who view blogs with this type of disdain seem to have their heads in the sand.

For one thing, your event is probably not going to be mentioned in the New York Times. Your group may be cited in the Times frequently as the leading group with expertise on your topic (and the American Society for Microbiology, the leading society on germs, definitely gets some well-deserved coverage), but you're unlikely to get New York Times exposure for your upcoming conference.

And even if you did, you're not reaching your specialized, target audience. I read the Times, but I won't be going to a microbiology conference just because the Times mentions it.

Who can reach that specialized audience? Trade publications, certainly. And blogs. Your members are reading niche blogs in their areas of focus. If you're not building relationships with those bloggers (and monitoring and responding to what is being said about your event and your organization), you are squandering great opportunity to promote your event and make it better.