Running a business is hard work. Ruining a business is easy.

Thanks to social media, one angry customer can tarnish your brand’s reputation on a global scale. One complaint to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or an e-mail list and people far and wide know about that customer’s experience. Readers might chime in with their own stories. Potential customers hear the bad buzz. Soon, you’ve alienated a giant customer base.

The most frightening part? Without monitoring your brand online, you may never even know it.

- The Domino’s Pizza YouTube Fiasco

This may sound like a nightmare, but consider the case of two Domino’s pizza employees. After filming a few health code violations, such as shoving cheese up their nose and some unsavory acts with a salami, they didn’t just serve the fouled food to customers. They also served up video clips on YouTube.

The result: 728,000 hits in a few days, and wall-to-wall media coverage on cable news.

Domino’s fired the disgusting duo and responded with a publicity blitz. But the lesson was clear, as summed up by Domino’s Pizza spokesman Tim McIntyre: “Any idiot with a webcam and an internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand.”

Being aware your brand’s perception online is crucial. Luckily, it’s easy to see what the world is seeing about your brand.

Here are some tools for monitoring your brand online.

- Google News Alert

Google has created one of the best mechanisms for monitoring your brand: The news alert. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and type your brand name into the search field. Select a comprehensive search. Google, which is already scouring the Web, will tell you if it stumbles across your brand.

Another Google tip: Run searches for your brand, followed by the word “sucks.” Angry customers seem drawn to this particular phrase. It’s common for a site to use this title to attract Web hits from other angry searchers. This can lead you to beehives of negative buzz.

- Twitter

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, you should be. It’s designed to send short messages to a large number of people in a short time. If you manage to spawn a dissatisfied customer with a cell phone who can whip up a good one-liner at your expense, the damage can spread far and wide – fast.

Luckily, there’s Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com/

Twitter Search lets you type in your brand or product name and see what people are saying. It’s sorted by recent posts, so you can keep an eye on new posts just by refreshing the page.

- Someone has trashed my brand online. What now?

Google and Twitter can help you monitor your brand name online. But what do you do if you find yourself at the butt of a bitter ‘Tweet’?

The answer depends on the severity of the attack, but many companies tend to overreact. A negative response can compound the problem. If you ignore a complaint and ask a blogger to take down a post or Tweet, most are savvy enough to know that if the story is true, they don’t have to comply. And your letter may make great fodder for their next post, which can only draw more negative attention to your brand. Now, you are not only branded by a bad customer service experience, but as an internet bully. Instead of just alienating potential customers, you’ve now alienated droves of free speech advocates, cyberlaw experts and bloggers.

This approach rarely ends well.

- Good online brand management is good customer service.

Instead, consider what successful businesses have done with angry customers since the dawn of free enterprise: Provide excellent customer service. Just as the customer’s perceived slight is amplified when it’s posted to a social network or blog, doing the right thing in the eyes of a customer can reverse bad karma relatively quickly.

If you can, address the complaint and offer some kind of solution. Odds are, the blogger will appreciate the response and share it with readers. Some consumer blogs seek out these kinds of stories and post them, giving you an opportunity to make a bad experience work in your favor.

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