In today’s real-time brand management world, separate teams often control strategy and channel tactics for SEO, PPC, public relations, online reputation management and social media. In many cases, however, out-of-box thinking and creative silo-breaking to cross traditional boundaries can yield sweet marketing fruit.

Today I’m going to explore the systematic use of paid channels like AdWords and Facebook ads as channels for intervening in quickly moving public relations incidents. Ads can play an important role as powerful tools for supporting the usual tactics of social media and reputation monitoring/management campaigns. I’ll cite real-world transient PPC mashup scenarios for your own brainstorming.

What is a transient public relations event?

Positive and negative short-lived incidents come at businesses in waves, and often require a marketer’s fast attention. Sometimes they’re planned and other times not. Examples include:

• The New York Times features your brand on the front page Sunday morning.
• Your construction project will block a major city street and the public needs information.
• A brand’s rockstar sports-icon spokesperson gets busted for driving under the influence.
• A Mayo clinic researcher announces a breakthrough in the effort to cure breast cancer.
• You just opened a new manufacturing facility, gainfully employing dozens of local citizens with good jobs.
• Your CEO was just invited to a business lunch at the White House.
• The local university’s women’s hockey team just won the NCAA national championship.
• Any event, either abrupt or planned, that falls under the seven classic nodes of public relations.

Just like classic works of literature, these examples of transient public relations events have beginnings, middles and ends. When these pre-scheduled or accidental ephemeral happenings rear their pretty (or ugly) little heads, we must deal with them, maximizing potential benefits and/or minimizing real damage.

When it comes to transient PPC, we start by boiling things down to straight business objectives by asking the following questions about the episode at hand:

• How does the event affect the public’s perception, aligned with or contrary to our brand’s business objectives?
• Is rapid communication required to serve our customers, dispel misunderstandings, celebrate a victory, diffuse anger, communicate crucial information, stake out positioning to preempt an expected response or reap the benefits of something wonderful? In other words does the transient event warrant a response, to our advantage or defense?
• Would instant keyword domination in search engine results (SERPs) by PPC, in Bing, Yahoo and Google, give an edge in propagating our brand’s message? Is PPC appropriate in this instance and can it be executed tastefully to the brand’s advantage?
• If so, what is the appropriate keyword grid? Should the PPC net be cast further than direct brand name searches?
• Where should the traffic go? There are those who believe that PPC traffic should always point to a brand’s website landing page. Sometimes, though, the best path to branding efforts is to vector traffic to public social media profiles, independent publishers, federal agencies, news stories, press releases or other reputable third-party sites that offer independent opinions or validation.
• Would a Facebook ad be tactically useful and fitting? With over 300 million users, certain constituencies are readily accessible to the savvy marketer’s guile via Facebook advertisements.

Implementing a successful transient PPC campaign

Responsible run-and-gun PPC starts with an open mind and pre-planning. Scheduled events, like the corporate charity ball, product release or new vice presidential hire are theoretically easy. Break down traditional big brand barriers and encourage PR, marketing, advertising and event planning stakeholders to organize PPC support ahead of time.

PPC support of “events of the unplanned kind” can originate as part of the normal reputation-monitoring report and react grid. As a general rule, keywords that alert the online reputation management team about positive or negative situations are reasonable candidates for PPC targeting. It’s normal for brands to judge a suitable response to evolving situations.

Here are a few examples of transient events that could warrant a PR response. I’ll break each possible PPC campaign down by trigger event, keyword grid, goal, alternate goal, message, alternate message, destination URL geo-targeting and run length.

Example #1 – Trigger event (unplanned): Mid-authority blogger writes a complimentary article about a brand’s products and links to lead generation page.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, category keywords.
• Goal: Send quiet traffic to reward blogs that support the brand. Garner good will in blog community. Delight bloggers who probably watch analytics and monitor their reputation.
• Alternate goal: Drive secondary traffic from blog post we’re supporting, back to our lead generation page.
• Message: “Introducing the [blogName] blog.”
• Alternate message: Use of the brand name.
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: One week, with a goal of diverting 30% of our normal direct brand searches to this blog.

Example #2 – Trigger event (planned): Brand’s parent company is hiring 45 new full time employees in a community of 65,000 and plans to build a new factory.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, name of city, city services, HR recruitment searches for factory’s skill set.
• Goal: Brand quality of life and company commitment to community, visitors, locals and potential employees.
• Alternate goal: Raise awareness of brand/company to locals plugged in enough to seek out city services by internet search.
• Message: “[Brand], Proud to be a member of our community.”
• Alternate message: “We’re hiring.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: One month – two weeks prior to factory opening and two weeks afterward.

Example #3 – Trigger event (unplanned): Brand product results in a child’s death and a product recall.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, “child’s name,” [cause of death]
• Goal: Reassure the public, clarify what products are affected, and provide vital information for safety.
• Alternate goal: Links for SEO, with a plan for diffusing unflattering keywords from news and other high authority sites.
• Message: Disseminate straight-up information.
• Alternate message: “[Brand] cares and operates in the interest public’s safety first.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: Indefinite as defined by daily SERPs testing, analytics, buzz, etc.

Example #4 – Trigger event (unplanned): The New York Times features your brand on its front page Sunday morning.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, keywords customers use to vet the featured product (e.g “[product] review” and “[product] information.”
• Goal: Brand the product/company as worthy of such acclaim, to folks searching specifically for the brand.
• Alternate goal: Secondary traffic.
• Message: “Check out [brand] [product] in yesterday’s New York Times.”
• Alternate message: “[Brand] is notable, legitimate and mainstream.”
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: 1-3 weeks.

Paid search campaigns can be a valuable weapon for influencing perception with transient events, which traditionally are associated with public relations. Though not always appropriate, instant prominence via paid listings in SERPs can be a useful arrow in the marketing quiver. To be successful with such campaigns, it’s important to communicate clearly with other departments and pre-plan goals and tactics.

When naming products, it’s always prudent to investigate potential online marketing challenges and pitfalls before launch. Failure to do so may preemptively damage your marketing team’s ability to cast an appropriate branding net.

Traditionally due diligence surrounding the naming process involved trademark search, category and creative considerations. Now that’s no longer enough. Crucial naming decisions must also include rigorous SEO, social, reputation and paid search analysis. Here’s a checklist of factors to take into consideration to assure your product name is search-friendly from the outset.

SEO matters: What words do customers use?

Mining fairly absolute demographic research, regarding how customers ask for things via search, is a timeless foundation. For more than a decade advertisers have had excellent perspective regarding users’ search vocabulary. That said it’s astounding how many well-meaning folks waltz into our office with new product names without nary a regard for easily available data!

Say your product is a business or package about fixing automobiles. A quick look using any number of free keyword tools, reveals that “auto repair shop” is a much more popular concept amongst searchers than “car repair shop.” In fact, pretty much any comparison between “auto” and “car” including clarifiers like “manuals” and “estimates” skew decidedly towards the word “auto.” While it’s obviously important to also target potential customers who prefer the word “car,” it makes sense to name the product itself using the word “auto.”

Include category names & partials when possible

Since any product’s name itself is often cited as anchor text in reviews, rants and blog posts it is often beneficial to include a category in the actual product name. First instance, consider calling your new pole vault product a “Mambo Track & Field Stick” or “Mambo Track Stick” instead of just a “Mambo Stick.” This helps solidify the product’s place in-category as associated links roll in. Partials are beneficial too, as Google likes an assortment of relevant anchor text pointing at your site.

Identify social media profiles that are already taken

There can be significant SEO and social ramifications if a malevolent soul squats on your product’s name in social media properties. In fact one of the first places we look to solve reputation management issues are social media profiles in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Knowing about profiles in more obscure sites that focus on a niche can be useful as well. It’s essential to evaluate the social profile landscape as one chooses a product name.

The word “Triton” has been used by many product names over the years. It will probably be used for others, where the category of products and services is unique under trademark law. We use a service called KnowEm to check user names to see if any have been taken for our proposed product name. Note that while many communities don’t have a “Triton” user, Twitter does. For us, that’s enough to invalidate a proposed product name.

Determine whether there’s existing reputation baggage

A new product should start off with a clean slate. A decision to create another “Triton” product in a new category (or any name similar to or including pieces of others) starts off with the baggage of all Tritons’ that have gone before. Even though the bad sentiment surrounds other products that only contain our new name, count on some users dismissing a product out-of-hand at first gape, without taking the time to differentiate.

Check searches for your product’s new name on “[name] sucks,” “[name] horrible” and other words people search with when they’re mad. Choose product names that leave baggage at the door.

How competitive are the organic SERPs?

Say someone’s considering naming a new restaurant “Blue Fondue” and everyone loves the name. Though there are no apparent eateries by that name on the first page of Google search results, there is some of out-of-category competition to complicate things.

In this case the web design company-competition is only slight, with some but not much authority, so good SEO will bear fruit and place our new restaurant on page. Don’t forget to check Bing and (yes, at least for now) Yahoo.

Try to avoid ambiguity, even if clever

Should a sleek new wine-category refrigeration device be a wine “cooler” or “refrigerator?” Well, the research is a bit fuzzy. There is a popular bottled drink category called “wine cooler,” the keyword also means refrigeration device and the research is therefore not conclusive.

In the old world we’d be tempted to call this thing a “wine cooler” for the double meaning cute factor. In the new world we might not want to take on “wine cooler” SEO, not because it could not be accomplished, but because the stress is optional.

Don’t neglect YouTube!

Depending on which stats you believe, YouTube is the second or third most used search engine in the world. To not check YouTube SERPs for competition is reckless. Here’s the “Triton” search. Let’s not call the thing a Triton, OK?

Can you secure the literal keyword domain?

Lots of evidence suggests that exact match keyword domains are the fast track to ranking even in competitive SERPs. As a standing rule, we don’t encourage clients to create new product names where unless the literal domain is available.

At very best, failure to consider search when naming products can make the marketing process unnecessarily difficult. Worst-case scenarios include difficulty ranking for the product’s name and other lost opportunities.

Obviously, using well-trodden names as a component of a new product’s moniker is a more risky proposition than making up new names. One solution that works well is to make up names like “The Mighty Rankinstanker” or “My Fuzzy Mistbinger.” :)

In addition to traditional category, creative and legal people, engage your search team early in the naming process of a new product to maximize chances for overall marketing and promotional success.

Marketers nearly all agree that properly published recurrent content feeds, pumped into  social channels and Google’s index, serve SEO, branding and public relations stakeholders alike.

Social media channels are huge: 300 million people use Facebook and Twitter alone. Figuring out how to share content and be a good citizen in these networks is easy. Techniques for building distribution networks can be also be quickly mastered. That said, sourcing existing business communications, to facilitate the transition from “traditional” brand PR to social PR, requires planning, guile, guts, commitment and skillful execution.

Brand distribution networks

Social media pros (and tons of everyday users) know how to wire up personal distribution networks spanning Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and other feeds and feed readers. This simply means recruiting a group of users, spread across social platforms.  Give your brand’s “friends” a reason to subscribe to social feed(s). “Social feed” means any content stream where “submit” means publishing by an RSS feed users can subscribe to. In addition it’s great to publish permalinked posts of feed items, for indexing by mainstream search engines.

If 5,000 total unique friends subscribe to a feed, each of them averaging 500 unique friends themselves, then the second degree of separation is 2.5 million users.  The theoretical third degree is 1,250,000,000 (yup, that’s 1.25 billion). “Viral” means sharing content your friends think enough of  to pass along to theirs… and so on. It only makes sense as a PR channel.

Here are some examples of personal distribution network nodes: LinkedIn users can subscribe to and display feeds in their profile. Blog posts can be pulled into Facebook profiles as notes, which are indexed in Facebook organic search.

Try displaying your Flickr stream headlines in LinkedIn. Google Alerts are available by feed and can be used to populate blog sidebars, Twitter search feeds, etc. Don’t forget Google’s mainstream search engine results. If your feed also publishes to a blog, the posts can drive keyword traffic—always a good thing.

Where should feed content come from?

Nearly every brand has numerous daily human-to-human communication feeds, both in-house and outbound. The marketing department talks to customers, support folks to struggling or unhappy customers, PR to journalists and lots more. The intersection of social media and PR is about distributing these existing channels to subscribers surrounding seven classic nodes of public relations:

1 – Media relations. As long as there have been individuals and crowds to listen, there have been reporters.  Since brands rarely want journalists to hate them, maintaining relationships is important. As other writers deem your news meaningful, they’ll subscribe to your news feed.

It surprises me how many mentions and links our blog has received without our promoting individual posts. We’re lucky because writers consume our feed and watch for material that will interest their readers.  The same can happen for your brand.  Feeds are essential for media relations.  Poll every potential stakeholder in your company, from PR to tech, and organize funneling any news to be published by feed and permalink.

2 – Community relations. Most brands “live” somewhere. The cities they live in (and market to) comprise their physical communities.  Since social media sites are communities too, reaching out is a process that helps solidify the public’s perception of a brand.

Where the brand truly reaches out to community, it’s important to discuss any initiatives online. If a new factory raises environmental concerns, speak directly to issues.  If your parent company  helps build a city food shelter or supports lymphoma research, share the heartfelt story online. The public eats that stuff up.

3 – Customer relations. Brands have to keep customers or they cease to be viable brands. Customers as a rule are a snarky lot.  To keep them happy, reach out without fail to preempt concerns; listen, provide crucial information and serve their needs.

Publish serialized FAQs, debunk myths, ask for feedback and offer more channels by which to interact with the brand and contact brand owners.  Social media networks are awesome conduits to listen and hear customers.  We all know that one malevolent user can takes a beef public and ruin out day. Be prepared to meet and great customers on their terms and publish matters important to them via social media.

4 – Internal relations. At first glance internal relations seem like a private affair. However that’s not always the case. Feature cherished employees in public feeds and serve worker populations with any important information suitable for public consumption. We’ve seen posts, as mundane as where .edu workers park their cars, result in organic traffic which converted.

It’s interesting to note how internal relations can cross over to community relations.  Sometimes individual employees take on personal causes on their own. Engage them as emissaries of the brand’s parent company to reap the benefits of mutual support.  Publicizing employees’ actions above and beyond the call of duty rallies other employees and piques community interest. Whole families engage and there can be a lovely ripple effect.

5 – Human interest. Did someone use your product to rescue a cat from a tree or fish a diamond bracelet out of the bathroom drain? Maybe a founding family member passed away and their story speaks volumes about brand integrity. Inquiring people want to know! If someone survived cancer, climbed Mt. Rainier or won the lottery, humans love a good story so stay aware of hyperbolic content in whatever topical niche’ feel your brand is known for.

6 – Crisis management. Bad things happen to good brands. Recalls, riots, explosions, failures of executive character—you name it—things can go wrong.  Many crises require the quick broadcast of information to serve and contain damage to the brand.  These days there can even be SEO benefit to serving crisis-content in feeds.

Links received from fda.gov, irs.gov or fbi.gov, though damaging at first, can be effectively channeled after incidents wane. One site we work with made massive SEO strides after a PR disaster because of link juice provided to the whole site.  We diffused semantic damage on the inbound anchor text and distributed power deep into the site.  Effective use of content, fed to the public, can help spin gold from garbage.

7 – Investor relations. If your brand’s parent company publishes a public annual report, there’s a good possibility that periodic teases, report schedules and other salient financial data will matter to someone, or possibly to many.  Investor relations are an obvious place that publishing by feed could be useful.

The next old PR thing

There’s near consensus amongst marketers that publishing recurrent content feeds, pumped into social channels and Google’s index, serve SEO, branding and public relations stakeholders alike.

Keep in mind that what worked yesterday in person, in many cases, essentially works the same way now online—just on a larger scale with better analytics. Also there’s no doubt that information moves at the speed of light in modern social media.

Ask, “What communications already emanate from our brand that might serve, inform and delight users, even to the extent of viral proclivity if published properly.”  Look often to classic public relations nodes to source business feed content.

No discussion of social media’s effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook’s well-laid play for “search” domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google’s public algorithmic crawl.

With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users’ network levels, Facebook’s internal community-search platform may well threaten other search models by sheer magnitude of participation and users’ trust of their friends, extended networks and themed groups.

Why SEO for Facebook is now crucial

Whereas most SEOs think “Google” and other mainstream engines when gauging the effect social media profiles on organic SERPs, Facebook is quickly becoming a massive walled-garden parallel organic internet. Think Facebook internal search results won’t matter? Think again and start “optimizing.”

According to its publicly released statistics, Facebook claims 120 million of its registered members log in at least once each day. Every month friends share 1 billion photographs and 10 million videos. In any given week users post over a billion content blocks, news stories, links and blog posts. There are over 45 million active user groups. Little-to-none of Facebook’s is activity is indexed by Google and other mainstream engines. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s members-only organic search results deserve attention!

At the root of this new consideration is the reality that Facebook is now allowing users to search the last 30 days of their news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by friends and the Facebook pages of which they’re fans.

Check out my personal Facebook search results (from among friends) for “Indian food.”  I see my friend Reem ate Indian food  for lunch.

If other users have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook Pages, groups and applications. Also note the cool ability to filter your personal  “search visibility” by various Facebook internal channels: links, status updates, wall posts and notes.

There are  commercial results in my Facebook wide “everyone” SERPs from a restaurant promoting their participation in the San Francisco Food Festival.

Here’s another commercially-tinted result, R2 Indian Buffet. The listing was was sourced from R2’s Facebook Indian Buffet page.

Look at these 2 results for the search “seafood in New York.” Chef Andrew Hunter’s listing comes as a result of his using the words “seafood & New York” in the most current wall post.

Next, Andrea Cohn’s profile comes up #2 for “seafood in New York.  She’s promoting the Bongo seafood lounges, in West Village and Chelsea, with a wall post of  a martiniboys.com listing. Facebook is showing the title tag of the Bongo post Andrea bookmarked.

One other important observation: Bing is the official Facebook “web results” search engine. With the recent Microsoft/Yahoo deal Bing will be also be powering Yahoo. Consider the branding and traffic implications of Bing powering Facebook behind the garden wall, especially when one click actually takes users to Bing.com.

Ten Facebook SEO tips

1. Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur.  Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag.  If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs.   It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7. Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.”  It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9. Contribute continually.  A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10. Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

A crucial new channel for search marketers to master

All of this has potentially massive repercussions for how marketers view Facebook chatter.  By really digging deep into how Facebook is searching internal content, you’ll be tapping into the next level of the web’s development, uncovering a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others. This is clearly an important search frontier.

Dig around. Learn the specifics in form and functionality of Facebook’s newly enhanced organic search results. In order to “optimize” for Facebook internal search, it’s important to learn precisely what areas of participation to focus on for the most influence. Facebook gives us a bit of ranking criteria information regarding how the engine is wired. Facebook groups will matter more than before, as a result of the new search algorithm, if & when Facebook internal search achieves wider adoption.

As always in social media marketing, leveraging friends’ (and your own) recommendations, without being a spammer, is sticky business.  Follow the timeless axioms of social media participation. give more than you take by contributing unselfish & recurrent content recommendations for others to consume. Be holistic in how you promote your own content and (as always) think in terms of supporting the community first.

On Monday I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to a crowd of about 250 local search marketers at SEMpdx Searchfest in Portland. The audience reaction to my session, entitled “The Dark Side of Reputation Management,” highlighting a stark reality out there in the corporate trenches. While nearly every hand in the room enthusiastically shot straight up when asked if they “believed their company should be leveraging social channels,” fewer than 10 were actually engaged in social media marketing—let alone proactive reputation management.

Many were concerned with potentially negative results and cited fear of user-generated negativity as a primary factor limiting willingness to venture forth into social media channels. Some had horror stories to tell. Here are key takeaways which emerged from the session—valuable lessons for any search marketer thinking about using social media as a lever for reputation management.

Expect to make mistakes. First, any active social marketer can expect to make mistakes which cost sleep, cause angst, and alienate others—it’s the reality of the game. Subscribe to the theory that “nothing ventured is nothing gained” and forgive yourself in advance for inevitable screw-ups. Social media is just that: social. Humans tend to be unpredictable, especially in groups. Anyone who dives into social media without accepting that the results will be a mixed-bag-learning-curve risks being prematurely discouraged at inevitable rejection. Hell, several record companies said “no” to Elvis. Not everyone is going to love you.

Do not lose your cool (or, stupid is as stupid does). This can’t be stressed enough. No matter what the appropriate PR crises response turns out to be, there is seldom equity in hasty emotional comebacks. It rarely works to respond during the heat of anger, so get a grip. When rejected, it’s normal to feel hurt, anger, sadness, and even rage. Count to 350, wait until tomorrow, eat some comfort food, or find another way to chill out.

It’s true that some disasters require an immediate online response, but these instances are truly rare. There’s nearly always 5 minutes or 2 hours available to wait without impacting the ultimate outcome. Pay attention to emotional red flags and be the most mature party at the table.

Fight fire with water, not fire. When some social media twit unfairly flames your company (or you personally), it’s tempting to nuke them. Search marketers often have access to authority websites to get their retribution tactics indexed prominently in the organic SERPs. We know the forums to post to, blogs to comment in, and have a good understanding of what it might take to completely trash someone in revenge.

As human beings, we’re wired to defend the home turf by any means possible. That said, take a moment to distinguish the degree of response necessary. Fight the heat rising off the back your neck whilst your ears turn red and ask if a “high road” response will suffice in this situation.

Often we advise clients to actually thank the flamer for initiating what could become a productive dialog. There’s very little comeback for the provocateur if his or her rant is met with the response, “Thank you for the insight. We appreciate you raising your concern.” We’ve seen multiple cases where this tactic converts the provocateur to a friend. Online or off, this approach is a timeless technique for dealing with angry customers.

Don’t anger the natives. Preempt debacles by holistically participating wherever online networking takes you. Many—OK, most—passionate social community members either dislike or downright hate marketers. Their concerns are valid in many cases because average-to-bad SMO wanna-be media marketing moguls seriously abuse the privileges of membership. Be a responsible social media marketer.

Reckless or selfish SMOs dilute the neighborhood content stream, wrecking it for everybody. This common phenomenon particularly irks long term tagging and bookmarking site users. Be cognizant of the norms. Give exponentially more than you take. Respect the indigenous cultural and join in to preserve what’s best about the community. Give a hoot—don’t content pollute. Never spam.

Don’t bash the hornets’ nest (i.e., intentionally provoke). I should take my own advice about this one and will vouch for the fact that troll hunting makes for excellent sport. Don’t do it. One obvious method for avoiding a fight is not to start one. Taking the initiative to preemptively attack someone who hasn’t bothered you is an unfortunate tactic favored by losers.

Get input from others. It’s uncanny how approachable the “stars” in our business are to unknowns in need. My social media inaugural foray was to blithely attack Yahoo regarding early Panama geo-targeting application screw ups. It was very intense.

After quite a row in a SearchEngineWatch forum where Yahoo spin doctors were doing damage control at my expense, I actually approached Danny Sullivan, as I had heard him speak on this topic. He was completely unselfish and helpful in bringing the entire affair into perspective. I learned a thing or two about the mutually supportive qualities of our community.

These days, there are a number of highly qualified social media experts frequenting the halls of Sphinn. I have never met a competent SMO who was unavailable to a respectful approach seeking insight in a difficult situation. When you’re in over your head, get advice from a master.

Don’t try to save the world if the injustice does not really matter. Get over it. You’re not Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha, or Muhammad. It’s not your place to solve all the injustices on this green earth. Saving the planet is a time consuming endeavor and should only be partaken in the rarest of circumstances.

True, some causes call for a good fight. I admit it that my massive personal investment in fighting StumbleTrolls was a gut reaction to being a Jewish man publicly flamed with profane, murderous, and violent Nazi hate rhetoric. That fight was a once in a lifetime event where I put public reputation on the line for something I deeply believe in. That should be the criteria for using social media and SERPs for personal or cause-related warfare.

Cast your ego aside. A savvy lawyer gave me incredibly useful advice at my wedding. He said, “When my wife and I disagree, I tell her that she ‘might’ be right.” He pointed out that responding with a non-binding statement ceding to the other’s perspective really gives nothing away at all except respect. Success and peace is what matters, not who’s right.

When you are attacked in social media and every fiber in your body wants to throttle someone because they’re so totally wrong, check your ego and take a breath. It doesn’t matter if your side “wins” if the flamers have already burnt your reputation down. It’s rather difficult to unring a bell.

Pre-plan to deal with crisis & opportunity. Ideally, it’s best to have a contingency plan in place for when things hit the fan. We teach clients to create a designated PR council, of which we’re a member. Depending on the size of your organization, this could be as basic as running the situation by your spouse or as complex as assembling the board of directors. Regardless of what’s appropriate in your situation, think ahead and have your resources lined up and ready to go.

Out there on the street, there’s a palpable fear of user-generated media. Most marketers understand that at least some component of their marketing mix may indeed be somehow rooted in social media. A commitment to preemptive and responsive tactics to deal with negativity can be essential to overcoming apprehension.

Marty Weintraub is publisher of aimClear Blog and President of aimClear Search Marketing Agency.