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When you engage in social media, be honest, care about your customers-and do the right thing. This is Business 101. Social media, with its new - school technologies, has ushered in a return to old-school business practices. I love that. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it. Offer to fix it - and then, do it. It's not good for business; it's great for business. Bring "old school" to "new media." Shakespeare aptly summed up effective brand monitoring and reputation management: "Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes." An effective online reputation management strategy is not something you can put off until tomorrow, because guess what? An army of empowered consumers are defining your brand. Today.

Gone are the days when you can issue a press release to respond to crises and be done with it. "Corporate statements" are now not only largely ineffective, they can be counterproductive. If I were advising Bank of America amidst their debit-card-distaster, I would have said, point-blank: "Look, you were being greedy. R5 a month to use a debit card? Come on. Consumers are already spitting-angry with banks. So, do something unprecedented. Set a new standard for banks: admit it. Apologize (and mean it). And, commit to not nickle-diming customers anymore. If you do that, you will win the hearts of millions. If you keep doing business-as-usual, you will continue to get pummeled - with increasingly devasting blows." You can turn your most vitriolic critic into your most vocal evangelist if you have humility and listen. Remember: social media is not a media. It's not marketing. It's a human relationship. Treat it as such, and your brand management strategy will be ...

You cannot control the conversation, but you can be part of it. If someone posts something negative about your brand, even if it's not accurate, others will pile on in a mob-like fashion. For every moment you allow that to continue, you risk permanent damage to your brand. But, you cannot barge in. Again: you may work for a 50 million rands corporation, but guess what? You come to the social media table with one vote, just like everyone else. Engage like a person, not a corporation - lest you merely fan the flames of public discontent.

Put your ear to the ground and start listening to what people are saying. Not doing this because you are "afraid of what you'll find" could be the death knell of your business. To move from good to great, you must face brutal facts and improve that which needs improving. Be unwavering on this. Perform searches for your company on the main social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIN. What are people saying? Is it accurate? Don't get defensive if you find something negative. In fact, those can be valuable business insights. If a blogger flames your company, don't ask: "How can we get rid of this post? Ask: "Are they right? What can we do to fix it?" Then fix it and let them know you're fixing it. I also advise against leaning too heavily on technologies for online reputation defense and "sentiment analysis." I speak from personal experience: At the time of this writing, even the very best technologies miss critical po...

You may have spent untold amounts on branding, website design and corporate communications, but these efforts pale next to the hundreds of millions of people sharing ideas and opinions in social media. They are talking in public about companies - and in doing so, they are defining brands. You need to accept this reality - and not cavalierly disregard "brand management" as a "nice to have." It's a "gotta have. Right now."