By Nicole Egan

With the growth of social media and digital communication, companies – whether they are actively participating or not — have to be attentive about their presence in cyberspace and become social media savvy in order to prevent a problem, or, address one.

Recently, some public incidents with social media made the “mainstream” news. Over President’s Day weekend, a passenger for Southwest Airlines was asked to leave a flight and buy a second seat because he was deemed “too large.” The passenger, who is a well known movie director, responded by angrily Tweeting about the situation and the company. Southwest Airlines addressed the problem on its blog and Twitter page, but the story made the headlines both on and offline.

Another example was Heinz, which suffered a brand hi-jack on Twitter. A man impersonated the brand on Twitter, created a Twitter page with a convincing handle (name), posted photos of the ketchup brand and tidbits about the company’s history, and linked to recipes on the company’s web site. He spoke positively about the brand in order to make it look like it was the brand’s voice.

After two weeks of tweeting, the man was contacted by Twitter that his twitter handle was in violation of trademark. Heinz had contacted Twitter about the impersonation, stating that they monitor the social media space and believe in transparency in social media. They believed that this twitter handle deceived their consumers, especially the Twitter followers, because he didn’t disclose that he wasn’t an official representative of Heinz.

Although, these incidents were negative for the companies, they were able to respond about the situations quickly. By utilizing the same tools, the companies were able to reach out to the same target audience who received these messages. This is an important lesson for any company about the power of social media. It’s important to monitor your company through every channel, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc., and clear up any misconceptions or issues before it hurts the image of the company.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Chit Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.