Social media are the media: it's corporate malpractice to ignore the online conversation.

• Author: Levick, Richard S.
• Position: Excerpt from Leadership in the Digital Era

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One day not long ago, a top company in the amusement industry was advised of a forthcoming story in a leading national newspaper that would highlight disappointing financial results, calling into question the future of the company and even the industry itself.

Before the advent of blogs and other social media, the predictable corporate response may have been to lie low, hope the article didn't cause too many waves, and downplay the story with reporters who called for follow-ups. Maybe then such discretion would have been, proverbially, the better part of valor. Yet even then, such a strategy risked ceding control of the story to the media and trapping the company in a vulnerable defensive position.

Today's digital world increases that risk exponentially and, in so many cases, a defensive posture is the riskiest of all. Fortunately, the company we're thinking of took a very different approach. Armed with detailed information on all the bloggers covering its industry, with intelligence on which ones had already written about the company itself in a neutral or positive light, the company went on the offense with a concerted social media plan. A wise decision in light of research proving that, collectively, the bloggers had a readership many times that of the newspaper.

The day before the negative story appeared, the company sent each important blogger a personal note along with a link to a recent television interview in which the CEO, an articulate, confident leader, laid out a clear, persuasive case for why the company would surmount the difficult economic times ahead.

There was no mention of the bad news to come the next day. However, by the time that story ran, the blogs had been posting the positive message for nearly 24-hours, effectively neutralizing most of the damage among those readers who follow the industry most carefully. On the morning the news appeared, the chief executive made himself available to more than a dozen key bloggers for an online roundtable discussion. The bloggers were able to ask frank questions and get straight, unfiltered responses. The forthrightness paid off in respectful coverage. Note that this type of strategy could only come after careful preparation. You cannot use the social media to respond to a crisis at the same time that you are trying to figure out how the social media work.

This preparation starts with listening carefully. The 118 million blogs currently being tracked online...