Louis Halpern's View

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that…

We are ‘living’ more and more in the online world. Businesses are now aware that for them to truly interact with their target audiences they must build and maintain an online presence through social media, rather than just via online advertising. This applies to large, blue chip multinationals and ‘local’ SMEs alike, and has been addressed by many companies with varying degrees of success.

With a massive upside for businesses that successfully use social media, it is perhaps surprising that many employers are wary of getting involved. This may be attributable to a lack of appreciation of that potential or due to the fact that these employers do not fully understand how to use the social media tools available.

Ignorance is…

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated…

Last night over dinner I was asked by a prominent friend of mine if he should let his kids go on Facebook. At first, this may not appear to be such a dilemma, but when he told me why he was concerned, it was easy to understand his reasons for being so cautious.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Children should be allowed explore the world whoever they are. However, I can also see that if you are a celebrity or a billionaire, then you have a different set of concerns to us mere mortals. My advice was:

• Encourage them to create an account
• Discuss if they are also on other services such as MySpace, Bebo, etc
• Really, really only accept friends they actually know
• Learn…

Each email an organisation sends to its’ customers forms part of that brand’s reputation; not just those thought of as email marketing. What does the customer think about the email confirming a purchase? How about the emails answering questions post purchase? Do organisations even think of these as part of their brand building?

Organisations know their email marketing is operationally important, particularly to drive sales in this difficult economic climate. Yet only 23% of the respondents could calculate the value of an email address to an organisation. How do they make a return on investment argument within their company for email marketing?

They report on the Open and Click rates. These are the most common measures of success rather than being…