Social media supreme court ruling can negetively affect your bottom line

Whether it be social media followers or a general fan base, for any consumer brand to partner with you as a celebrity or sports star, it all boils down to numbers. Here is a simple brand evaluation:

Personal brand attributes + Brand Equity + Fan base equates to your bank balance.

However if your bank balance is R0.00 it doesn't mean that you're a failure, it only means that you need to work harder to refine your personal brand, position yourself properly to attract a good number of fans/clients in order to improve the numbers reflected in your bank balance.

Social media high court rulings

In today's world information is easily accessible and what the media writes about you or content that gets posted online about you whether it's positive or not, is available for anyone to access from an average Joe on the street to a potential big paycheck from a corporate brand.

Prior to the growth of social media and content sharing sites, the only available medium for consumers/fans to lodge dissatisfaction complaints was through a PO box post. Thus most musicians, corporate brand execs as well as record labels executives were lazy and complacent.

©Gunnar Pippel via 123RF

The internet has bridged the gap in a vast way, in today's connectivity world fans/clients don't have to write a letter, purchase an envelope, post-stamp or even walk to the post office in order to be heard.

Today fans/customers are the judges, jury and executioners in the social media high court and you won't even be asked to plead. When the ruling is passed WOM (word of mouth & #trending) spreads in seconds reaching people in different continents. The thing is, once the story/content is out there it is open to different interpretations not even your PR press release statement will remedy the damage done to your personal brand or even worse your career.

The classic cases in sports will always be the divorce between Tiger Woods and Accenture after Tiger's infidelity came to light, and how about the breakup between Lance Armstrong and Nike after citing insurmountable evidence that the athlete took performance enhancing drugs.

Another example is Tony Hayward former BP CEO lurched from one mishap to another, lambasted for his claim on the environmental impact after the oil spill, to sailing his yacht round the clear waters of the Isle of Wight and claiming he'd like his "life back". As smart as he is he couldn't foresee how social media and the public taking his statement subsequently used it to force him to step down as BP leader.

The truth is that it may take years to build a reputation of a brand whether personal brand or brand personality, on the same note after any crisis that affects your personal brand it may take time to recover from it. Thus how you respond to a failure from any crisis, it may make or break the reputation or even worse costing your bottom line.

"The only common factor between supreme courts and social media court is that everyone is subject to the law; that no one, no matter how important or powerful, is above the law"

Supreme courts

• judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts
  
• legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reason
  
• to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and

• deliberative manner

Social media court

• judicial rulings based on opinions, peers influence
  
• emotions, ignorance etc.

In legal/law courts a case can drag for years before verdict can be passed by the presiding judge, on the other hand in social media court it only takes minutes for consumers and fans to pass on the verdict which can make it the #Trending topic for days.

Good publicity means precisely that

The phrase "Any publicity is good publicity" doesn't cut it in today's economic climate. Success is not only dependent on you being famous for the sake of being famous, today's new currency is leverage and your personal brand is precisely that.

When consumer brands and advertising agencies are looking for ideal brand ambassadors, they don't go to your manager for recommendation or let alone even bother to peruse through your biased personal website. They go to social media or online search engine sites and make a decision based on the number of fans, personal brand impact and your reputation.

The only information that your next big paycheck looks for is not on your personal biography, however it is information on the internet and imperatively how your fans perceive you will make or break your chances of amplifying your brand value.

"As a sports star or celebrity you are the business and product of the enterprise called YOU. Without you physically being active there is no income, in a nutshell you are a mobile business unit, YOU are not just a celebrity or a personality, you're a business on the move."