Social media puts your reputation in the hands of millions. But how do you manage them and leverage what they offer in a cohesive way? PR Week reports 85 percent of CEOs look to public relations counsel to manage reputation and brand. That counsel extends to social media.

During a recent PR Newswire webinar, I listened to representatives from Dell and Johnson & Johnson share how social media plays a role in monitoring and managing their companies’ reputations.

“Does social media work? Absolutely!” says Dell’s Richard Binhammer. “Our participation has driven negative comments down and transformed some of our biggest critics to our biggest fans.”

Johnson and Johnson’s Marc Monseau says it’s somewhat surprising we got to this point (using social media) because, as a health care company, we live in a highly regulated industry.

“For our products we have a number of obligations to regulators around the world,” Monseau recounted. “When we know of a side effect, we must report the adverse effect to regulators. This makes online conversations more complicated, particularly hosting conversations, where people could be posting adverse effects to your site.”  

J&J found messages were not being conveyed in traditional media. Simultaneously, they noticed growth in social media tools to share health care information. Before they could inject themselves into the online community conversations, however, internal coordination with legal and regulators preceded moves into the social media arena.  

“We started with a basic outreach blog on the history of J&J,” Monseau described. “Pretty safe ground, discussing 120 years of the company. Talking about people who had been dead for a century hardly is risky.”

“It gave us an opportunity to pilot our online presence and find our voice,” he continued. “After six months, we launched a forum to address inaccurate media reports and perspective of our operation and our strategy. Most of this was not being covered by traditional media. But most importantly, we were able to make connections and build relationships with key bloggers and leaders in online forums. These communities are much broader than we expected.”

Success indicators of J&J’s foray into the social media sphere are leading to momentum behind the use of social media tools in this large corporation. For example, a story in BusinessWeek on J&J’s plans to reduce its environmental footprint was filled with inaccuracies. Traditionally, the company could have ignored it, written a letter to the editor or called for an editorial board meeting to set the record straight and call for a retraction. Instead they decided to use J&J’s corporate blog to refute, line by line, inaccuracies in the BusinessWeek article. The viral power of bloggers, who picked up the refutation by J&J, swayed many hearts and minds online.

Emboldened by its successful implementation of social media tools, J&J launched a channel on YouTube to provide unbranded videos to help people improve their lives based on the vast knowledge possessed by J&J.

“We leveraged our depth of knowledge to form relationships with key communities such as mommy-bloggers and nurses,” Monseau says. “Now we ask moms to discuss their issues with us on our blog.”

J&J is just now getting into Twitter (which might be why this result occurred), but has found it useful to discuss information about the company and correct misperceptions. A recent campaign launch by SC Johnson was being chided by a blogger who confused “SC” Johnson with J&J.   

“As an organization, we are finding more acceptance and understanding of things we are doing and our brands,” Monseau concluded. “One blogger questioned our motives for one online community, and, in fact, another blogger came to our defense.”

From my perspective, this webinar pulled back the curtain on the evolution, acceptance and successful usage of social media to develop and protect reputation in the wild-west world of social media. Many other services offer free webinars on similar issues: Cision, BusinessWire, Vocus and PRSA to name a few. Let me know what you thought of this post.