The VDO: Staying Out of Trouble

If we don't want to end up with paying $300, 000 fines for using a fake blog like the 1st company that Andy mentioned, it's better to remember the following three guidelines.

1) Truthfulness in social media is required: No matter we hire who to do the jobs for us, it is absolutely OK as long as we tell people what the relationship of who we hired is to us.

2) The conversation has to be monitored and misstatement needs to be re-corrected: Basically, the message must be clear.

3) Social Media Policies and training program must be created.

The most important thing I learned from this VDO is that if we would like to be successful in business we need to be trusted by customer; otherwise, our marketing effort and dollars spent is useless. Andy emphasizes about the disclosure many times in the VDO. I can see how important it is. Naturally, people will trust and would like to do business with the one who show you the sincerity first. Therefore, there isn't anything negative when we disclose our identity to people. It just helps in creating the environment of trust between consumers and us.

Moreover, I learned that anything that is faked could damage the whole company because the company will lose reputation. Even worse, the mistake can't be removed from the history. Therefore, it may take forever to rebuild the reputation or never. So why don't we follow what Andy suggest?

Three additional recommendations from Andy are:

1) Never pay

2) Disclosure must be real and also clear to the end-readers: This is not a difficult thing to do. It starts with ten magic words, "I work for ___, and this is my personal opinion." We can also follow the three categories of the disclosure rules that Andy suggests,

- Who are you?

- Were you paid? Regardless of how much money has been paid, it should be mentioned.

- Is it an honest opinion based on real experience? We shouldn't let people write positive review about the product that they didn't even use.

3) Don't lie to your mom

In the short run, doing all of this may not generate bunch of profits, but will guarantee us that our company will be well supported, respected and finally will stay strong in the long run.