In the last days the news has been bad, and there have been some bad news, the worse of that is the Tsunami that hit Haiti. That has been really a bad happening, but there is the need to say that lot of things are getting done, countries and private companies are sending their support in every form possible. At the moment there is the need of everything and in moments like those is great to see how people actually help each other, even if divided by an ocean.

Anyway I’m going to analyze what’s going on around this happening in a way to make people understand how those emergencies creates a possibility on “Corporate Responsibility” for Companies. Basically what usually happens is that companies tries to act in an ethical way so to create a social friendly image around the brand, something that can be used in a way to cover mistakes and the profit that they are having, simply giving it back to the community in forms of things that can help the community that they are profiting on.

The second aspect is that to get the best on the image is to find something that people cares about, that are conscious about the problem, that people see the problem directly. Usually those ideas and needs are usually well covered by the media, giving in this way a bounce effect to the company in form of free advertising. Simply happens that the company uses the media coverage on a problem in a way to increase their good branding.

What actually (unfortunately) is happening in Haiti happened to create an impressive media coverage, and companies decided to move their means and their brands in a way to help those people. That is a good deed from companies, but there is the need to understand that they do that mostly on a branding side.

What happened in Haiti is something new, and like everything new attracts the attention of everyone, media start to coverage the news and keep giving updates, then after a couple of weeks the news is no more new, decreasing the interest of people and so the media. With this loss of focus slowly it disappear, making room for something else.

It’s sad to say that but in the world there are a lot of things that need attention to take care about, problems that companies should help solving before that the media arrives, but that wouldn’t give a good Return of Investment on the charity given, more the happening is covered, more ROI there would be.

How many of you know about the “Rwanda Genocide” happened in 1994? from what I can remember there wasn’t an huge media coverage, but something really bad happened. In this case there is an another factor that needs to be considered, that was a war, not an natural disaster. For companies could have been hard to find a side where to stay and support.

Even Tiger Woods after all the bad media coverage on him decided to donate $2.000.000 in a way to help Haiti. As can be seen from this quick post there is a lot of factors that needs to be taken care of when planning an emergency Corporate Responsibility plan, in this case companies are giving their best side in a will to help people.

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In the last days I have been considering the various evolutions of Twitter and I had some time to monitor the changes that those brought not only to companies that need to update their clients, but also to people and how they tend to use those features to save time and also to use them to get the best for their Branding Efforts.

Twitter introduced the List feature that is important in a way to categorize your friends for themes or any way you want it. like every person we own something that distinguish ourself from others (like a brand) and this idea can be categorized by people. Lists means that you can can put followers in more than a basket in a way to monitor their stream in the most effective way possible. For the ones of you that haven’t tried it at the moment, you can create public or private lists that I have to say are really important also for Public Relations and Brand Management.

On the Personal Branding monitoring, when you look the list that people put you in you can see a lot about the reputation that you have for them, and how your actions managed to create your personal brand. Looking for example I can see that some people insert (I feel honored about) in lists like Marketing and SEO (that is what I do for a living) and also in categories more personal like Suggested or Friends, this mean to me that I’m considered in a good way on my professional and personal side.

This is anyway only the surface of the Brand Monitoring, because we can use the same system of PageRank to understand the real value of our mention on that list. If you are insert on a list named SEO from a person that does SEO full time (and that is listed in other SEO lists), means that your effort in becoming a SEO are well spent, because he knows your value that is proven by his knowledge. The same happens for every other type of category that you want to be insert into, you have to monitor not only the lists you are into, but also the lists that the people list you are inside.

On Personal Relations, I will bring a personal example, I have a private list on twitter, and it’s called “Best Buddies” and this is a list of people that I worked or studied together, that I shared a lot with and I talk to them regularly, doesn’t matter if they are pro or not, they are people that i can call friends. Why this list is private? Simple for PR reasons. I don’t want that people look in this list and feel bad because they are not inside, some of them can take it as a personal thing, even if they know the reason. This is in my opinion a good opportunity to use private lists, so that you can monitor the people close to you and that you share things with and in the same way not make anyone feel bad.

As can be seen there is a lot that can be done with the right use of lists (and also ranking products that can be developed), there is just to understand what the goals are and which are the people that in your opinion are worth to follow to persuade your branding goal.

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