What Happens When You Avoid the Groundswell

Janet was good at representing Exxon Mobil Corp on Twitter. She responded to people's inquiries, provided interesting facts about the company, and even talked about the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill. The problem, though, was that Janet was not an Exxon employee. Nor was she affiliated with Exxon in any way, shape or form!

As you can imagine, this scared the pants off of corporate giant Exxon, who takes great care in controlling the messages they send out to the public. They've designated only a handful of employees to deliver such messages. When the story broke in 2008, "Janet" was using http://twitter.com/exxonmobilcorp to falsely portray Exxon, even using a background picture of Exxon gas stations. Exxon reps commented at the time that they were not using Twitter or any other social networking tool, and clearly weren't monitoring the buzz about their company online, avoiding the groundswell completely.

Brand jacking is not something new to the web - because it's so easy to set up a profile, anyone can be pretend to be an employee from a company in just minutes. (See a list of official Twitter brands here.) Rather than following the steps outlined in Groundswell to listen, talk, energize, support, and embrace their online constituents, Exxon chose to deal with the situation behind closed doors - contacting Twitter to have the false feed removed because of copyright infringement of the photos and immediately talking to and responding to questions from the press.

What they should have done is participate in the groundswell from the beginning. Large corporations should invest the resources and budget to hire someone to maintain their online presences and snatch up corporate names like "exxon mobil corp" on Twitter and Facebook before brand-jackers do. They should think of a strategy for their online presence, engage their audiences, and participate in discussion. This incident cost Exxon its brand identity, called attention to their non-engagement online, and fooled the Twittersphere, costing them the precious trust of the online community.

As of today, it appears that Exxon has set up an official Twitter feed. Like Groundswell says, you cannot ignore this trend.