Non-Line Blogging

Don't believe everything you read.  Here is a story from PR Week in the UK

Thierry Henry Brand 'Not Irreversibly Damaged', Say Sports PR Experts

Synergy Sponsorship director of comms Stephanie Branston said: ‘The Thierry Henry brand is not irreversibly damaged. His value to sponsors will not suffer in the long-term although I would not envisage too many Irish companies beating down the door of Henry's agent this week offering brand endorsements.'

Now, I've never met Stephanie Branston and I wish her all the best in her career, but really, what planet is she on?  What do Audi and Coca Cola think about placement in photos like the one on the left...or the many others on-line?

So Stepanie, and anybody else out there in "PR", this is a quick lesson in what is happening to shatter Thierry's brand.  Goodness me, things move fast.  Just when I'm about to post this blog something else pops up worth talking about.  So, in the spirit of real-time information I'll make it as short and current as possible. 

This is not a lesson in how mean football fans are...it's a lesson in how quickly your brand equity can be destroyed on-line in front of global audiences.  (Insert your brand name for Thierry Henry and it may make it more of a lesson in how you need to keep track of on-line sentiment)

The story so far...

Thierry Henry, gifted, charismatic talisman of French football is taking a bit of an on-line kicking.  He helped France beat Ireland (and so gain entry to the 2010 World Cup Finals) with a deliberate hand-ball.  Cue much anger from the Irish, followed by much derision from the rest of the world (except France).   

Let's start off with a song.  After all, the Irish like a nice sing song...especially this cunning re-working of Michael Jackson's "Beat it" into "Cheated".  What do you think of that Stephanie? 

Next, the tweeters.  Here is the chart from this morning showing a search for the fabled French footballer...at least he's in people's minds!

Being able to track what those brand advocates are saying is pretty important and so here are a list of Twitter tracking tools for Stephanie to use as the day wears on...these are from the fantastic social media site Mashable 

1. Twitter Search: The simplest way to see trends on Twitter is on their official search page. Hot trends on Twitter appear on the search page and on the Twitter homepage, and clicking any will bring up a feed of the public conversation.

2. Twist: For those who are visual, Twist provides a graphical interface to see trends and keywords on Twitter. It not only lists out the hot trends over the last few hours, days, and week, but it provides embeddable charts and the ability to compare trends.

3. Monitter: Monitter is one of the best ways to track trends in real-time. Type in keywords and it will automatically update with the most recent tweets containing those terms. Add or remove columns to give you the right amount of information.

4. Hashtags.org: The popular webpage on Twitter hashtags also provides graphs on hashtag use just by hovering over the hashtag. There are also pages that show the most popular and newest hashtags, but their uptime is unreliable.

5. Tweetmeme: Looking for the most popular links on Twitter? Tweetmeme is the epicenter link sharing on the service.

6. Plodt: This website is a user-generated trend tracker based on tagging and ranking your tweets. It requires you to follow the Plodt Twitter account to participate. But even without participating, its timelines, tags, and statistics are still useful and interesting.

7. Twitturly: Twitturly is another way to track top-shared URLs. The interface allows users to see all of the active tweets that have shared a specific link.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/04/twitter-trends/

Next come the socially networked masses and  here is a selection of the Facebook groundswell.  Plenty of groups for Stephanie to join where she too can add her thoughts to why Thierry Henry is a good investment for brands right now.  Go tell 'em Stephanie!

16,265 fans for "Le Handball" group 

81,694 fans for  We-Irish-hate-Thierry-Henry-the-cheat group
    
60,913 fans for  La-main-de-Thierry-Henry (Can't work out sentiment of this one...French ironic seems best bet)

And already we have the first Facebook Application up and running..they must have been burning the midnight oil to get that one up and running

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=177803303259

Then after that we get the saboteurs hacking into Wikipedia.  Today, the Free Encyclopaedia page for our footballing hero says... 

This page is currently protected from editing due to vandalism.

Changed protection level of Thierry Henry: Excessive violations of the biographies of living persons policy: France/Ireland match fallout

And all we wanted to do was have a little harmless fun, and now they've taken our ball away.  Despite this, there have been a number of less-than-complimentary versions that have stayed live for a few minutes and it seems the challenge here is to share the "naughty" version with as many people as quickly as possible...as these tweets show... 

theneilthing RT @lucyporter @Mark_Wyatt: RT @rupinjapanThierry Henry's Wikipedia page http://tinyurl.com/yzmq56u - QUICK BEFORE IT CHANGES! (quite rude) 

Finally, it's time to turn our attention to the sponsors and see what damage we can inflict on them.  I think this is not a bad effort to have a dig at one of them and there are many other similar versions doing the rounds.

So there we are.  48 hours in the hands of the technologically democratised and Thierry Henry is probably worth a little less than he was.  The lesson for all of us is that we need to be able to track the social media world and be aware when a storm is brewing (start off with Google Alerts for your brand on the "as it happens" frequency setting).  Then we must recognise that it is foolish to underestimate quite how much power tweeters and bloggers and Facebook groups wield in today's networked society.  That's why sorting out your social media strategy for 2010 should be top of your list of things to do over Christmas...followed by your email strategy to keep in touch with all your customers.

Quite how much long-term damage has been done to Thierry will remain to be seen.  At least Stephanie's right behind him.  

Allez les Bleus!