Managing your online corporate reputation

My latest opinion piece is up on Brandweek, this one based on comments made at the end of October by Disney CEO Robert Iger. Essentially I try to make the case that studios no longer can hide behind the movies they put out but need to be coming out and engaging with fans directly. Fans are doing this anyway, albeit indirectly, through the use of tags and other categorization of the blog posts, YouTube videos and other content they’re creating.

But studios haven’t done a very good job of engaging in consumer-level branding with the exception of Disney and maybe Universal with their theme park. Warner Bros. had their own stores a while ago but couldn’t maintain them. The online world provides a whole new realm of opportunities, though, for studios to make themselves valuable to consumers.

Who’s Watching Your Brand?

December 10, 2007

By Chris Thilk

A short while ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger was quoted as saying that the Disney brand itself was the most important asset the company had. With that intact, the company could release movies time and time again, maintain the theme parks and basically continue the company’s long history of success—especially among those looking for family-friendly entertainment. Disney was unique in that regard, Iger said, since other movie studios did not have that same sort of overall brand awareness among consumers.

The fact that people seek out Disney movies more than they do films from Universal, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox or any other studio is something that has its benefits but also its negatives. On the one hand a bad or controversial movie is unlikely to negatively impact future release. But it also makes it difficult to build up an umbrella brand on the level of Procter & Gamble, Disney or other ownership brands.

Online tools, though, have begun to do away with the positives and turn around the negatives, providing studios with an opportunity to start over with a corporate branding initiative.

In online blog coverage, studios are becoming more commonly associated with the movies they’re releasing. In some cases they’re being mentioned within the posts, but some movie blogs are also assigning posts covering a certain studio to a category with that studio’s name or otherwise tagging those posts with the studio name. Those categories, put together, become a page on that blog all to themselves. And because Google and other search engines love frequent updates, every time the blog pushes a new post under that tag or category it becomes a little more relevant for a search of that name or the name of one of its movies.

That means not only do studios have to consider how to market individual movies as a brand, they have to consider how what they’re doing is going to impact the corporate brand as well. Sorry, no more anonymity.

This might sound like a non-issue. After all, trade publications like Variety or major titles like The New York Times cover the studios as organizations, but stories about executive shuffles and such have the same mainstream appeal as if we were discussing the farm equipment manufacturing world. Industry coverage is industry coverage, regardless of the industry being covered.

But blogs have a different audience. Yes, there are industry insiders reading consumer-targeted blogs. I see a fair number of studio domains in the site traffic on my own blog. But they’re predominantly being read by members of the actual audience, the people each studio is hoping will go out and spend money on their movies. If they see a pattern emerging of one studio releasing consistently bad—or good—movies they’ll begin to view future news from that studio through that filter and make decisions based on it.

All this means is that brand reputation management is no longer something that can be relegated to the hinterlands of unimportance. Tagging and other social media tools are turning that into an issue that must be addressed. And as with everything else, it’s better to be in front of the issue. Studios should consider how they’re branded in the public’s mind now and chart the appropriate course.