What would you do when something negative is said about your brand?

It takes years to build your brand to what it is today. A lot of hard work but really it only requires one minor incident to bring it down. Similar to the notion of "trust". Trust takes a lot of time to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

My view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimise these negative effects, for example you can control the negative spread of viral marketing. Here are some of my tips:

1) Draft an internal social media plan for everyone in the company - this would signal to your team that your actions offline and online concerning your brand name is made answerable - of course most companies does not have a plan like this in place. But since the social media is growing at an exceptional rate don't we all need a plan like this? Ideally you should be on the online space listening to what's going on in the market place.

2) IF it does happen, you have to make sure we quickly respond to the problems. In the online word, speed is the most important:

- If you know the originator of the spread for example a blogger, you can perhaps contact the blogger to have a link back to our official response. Most readers/customers appreciate the other side of the story.

- If you don't know the originator (in most cases), you can draft a response on our website and submit that page to SEO. This would ensure that viewers/customers would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. 

- By using Twitter as an advantage. 

That’s all I can think of for now. But I am really interested to hear of what you would do or have done to control the negative bad mouthing of your brand name.