Life would be much simpler if those responsible for defending corporate reputations only had to worry about good old-fashioned F-bombs.

But four-letter words are just one of a growing list of fears for marketers and corporate communications pros striving to keep their social media channels brand-safe.  What happens when an organization runs afoul of new standards, guidelines, codes of conduct, terms and conditions, or — this is where it gets serious — actual binding rules from a regulator?

Anyone responsible for their organization’s social media engagement, and those community managers on the front lines, should have a thorough understanding of why their activities are being scrutinized, and by whom:

• FTC — Most consumer marketers are well aware the U.S. Federal Trade Commission created Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising last fall.  What they may not know is that Washington is already starting to take action against companies for things like inadequate disclosure of sponsored posts and blogger payola.  Women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor was on the receiving end of one such rebuke (PDF).

• FINRA — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees brokerage firms and investment professionals, is worried about consumers getting duped through social media.  In a regulatory notice, “Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites,” FINRA warned the financial services industry they had better pull in the reins and increase surveillance on those selling stock, insurance or other similar investment products online.  Just last week, FINRA fined Piper Jaffray $700,000 for not archiving old emails.  Imagine what will happen when the regulator gets around to searching for a bank’s years-old Twitter posts or deleted Facebook wall posts.

• FDA — Long known for tightly restricting the marketing messages from pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held public hearings last year to better understand how social media changed the game for drugmakers, healthcare professionals and patients.  Even before new rules are published, a few gutsier brands are betting their one-way approach (brand talks but consumers can’t talk back) will pass muster.  Two examples: Johnson & Johnson’s ADHD Moms page and Boehringer-Ingelheim ’s DRIVE4COPD page, both on Facebook.

• Facebook — Much of the debate about Facebook’s new heft as a marketing platform has centered on rights of consumers to protect their private data.  Yet the responsibility for preventing abuses falls to the brands that use Facebook to reach consumers, and to developers hired to build applications on the platform.  Facebook is not a government agency or a utility company; it’s a private company.  Just like the Seinfeld episodes where Kramer, Jerry and George are barred from various eateries (i.e., Poppy’s Pizza and the Soup Nazi, pictured above ), it behooves social marketers to truly understand the letter and spirit of Facebook’s rules rather than risking a misstep on a platform used by 500 million consumers.

There, I’ve ranted about F-bombs for all this time without actually dropping one.  I’ll probably lose some SEO points for that.

Chief financial officers have dealt with auditors since the days of the abacus. Smart chief technology officers bring in friendly hackers to test the ability of firewalls to withstand cyber attacks. Facilities managers conduct evacuation drills.

However, aside from airlines and a few industries susceptible to high-profile incidents, it is rare to see mandated, periodic reviews of a company’s crisis communications plan.

Update with care

For organizations that have a mandatory annual review of their crisis communications plan, the task may be relegated to a junior staffer who lacks the skill or authority to make major changes. This is a mistake.

A rubber-stamp process that simply updates staff phone trees and media lists is dangerous because many of a company’s newest communications channels and techniques to reach stakeholders could be missing from a legacy crisis plan.

Many PR professionals used 2009 to experiment with social media, speaking with influential audiences directly rather than through one-way messaging with the help of mainstream media gatekeepers. The numbers told the story: As Facebook surged past 350 million unique users, a record number of daily newspapers folded in 2009, plagued by a deepening recession and debt.

As organizations of all sizes began building social media communities, their dalliance was often short-lived and lacked scale. Other organizations have proven that they are worthwhile enough to earmark significant marketing dollars.

Any 2010 crisis communications planning needs to consider an organization’s new social channels — whether on internal networks like Jive Software andYammer or externally via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Learn from others’ crises

Following the devastating January earthquake in Haiti, communicators who used social media channels not only reached customers and brand loyalists, but also reached influential mainstream media. For instance, when American Express waived fees for merchants accepting earthquake-assistance donations, the company found that their tweets quickly made their way in news coverage.

Pleas for doctors and nurses to help in Haiti also spawned rumors that American Airlines and JetBlue Airways were flying medical personnel to the ravaged nation. Within minutes, the @jetBlue Twitter feed, which has attracted an astonishing 1.5 million followers, dispelled the misinformation and directed would-be volunteers to an organization that validates credentials of nurses and doctors willing to help.

Of course, the nature of social media is that everyone is a publisher. Because consumers can generate content that is sometimes incorrect — or, worse yet, deliberately disparaging — organizations that embrace social media must be extra vigilant.

If left unchecked, third-party postings and comments on the wall of a brand’s Facebook fan page can spread rapidly and become amplified by a social media influencer or a mainstream outlet. The damage can be immediate and profound.

Use your own channels

Brands that are proficient in distributing their own content — from simple tweets to polished thought-leadership white papers, webinars and videos — should ensure that their fans and followers know about critical news as it happens. Waiting hours or days to comment leaves room for rumor mongering and speculating.

As we’ve learned from mature social media programs, like the one run by Ford Motor Company’s Scott Monty, the crowd generally accepts that instant answers are not always available during a crisis. Monty and his staff have earned respect from fans and followers by promptly replying, even if the Ford response is something as innocuous as, “I just read your tweet and am looking into the situation.”

For fans, just knowing that someone is on duty and moderating the channel may be enough to calm the frayed nerves of an angry consumer.

But being awake and in touch via social media channels is not enough to keep a corporate reputation intact while under siege. It’s one thing to promise a reply and something quite different if no one in senior management is willing to go on the record in social media, just like in mainstream print and broadcast. An organization’s social media team should have access to senior communications executives to address the issues of those making noise online. Common sense should dictate whether to do this outreach publicly or privately.

Tone down commercial content

On Sept. 11, 2001, my office window in New York overlooked the flashy billboards in Times Square. The brands advertising their wares in lights just two miles north of the World Trade Center should have been unplugged immediately. In reality, it took a day or two for most of the signs to go dark or for advertisers to replace them with appropriate messages of sorrow, charity or patriotism.

Just as airlines have long enforced a policy to immediately pull their ads from TV and print after any major crash involving a passenger plane, brands using new media must have a kill switch built into their crisis plans.

It was hurtful to see animated beer ads on Broadway on Sept. 12, 2001. As crisis communications plans are created and updated, it’s critical to remember the many consumer touch points between a brand and its publics: the Web site, ad campaigns, events and pre-scheduled company announcements unrelated to the crisis.

Stay aware, active

While I don’t know of a magical solution that lets a company’s entire marketing program instantly switch off, there are powerful tools to prevent gaffes within the most widely used social networks. Among the features that apply to crisis situations:

• Moderation consoles that capture posts and comments, matching them against “black lists” of words and phrases that an organization may not want on its Facebook wall. These tools also display comments made to pages that are only weeks or months old, eliminating the possibility of disparaging content being buried deep within a fan page. An “escalation” feature allows questions posed by fans to be e-mailed to experts for faster responses.

• Page management tools to schedule the publication of content in advance. Some crisis scenarios can be anticipated, so approved responses can be loaded into the tool for faster responses. These tools also let administrators suspend campaigns without the intervention of third-party vendors.

• Self-service application dashboards allow organizations to publish customized content quickly for their Facebook page. Using these tools, a company, agency or nonprofit could quickly move from a sales-oriented page to one that distributes information about an incident or engages fans to support benevolent nonprofits.

Many of today’s consumers gather information in real time. This can lead to big rewards for organizations that learn to behave like media companies, attracting an audience and then earning trust by communicating continuously through the good times as well as the bad.

(I wrote this piece for PRSA’s monthly newspaper, “Tactics.“  It was published in the April edition.)

Most academic institutions are highly structured organizations, not unlike large corporations and the military.

Students must abide by a code of conduct, faculty members have rigid tenure requirements, and campus security will boot and tow your car if you park alongside a curb that’s painted red.

The stakes are especially high for universities with prestige brands that have been built over centuries.  Harvard, with its $26 billion endowment and top rating among global academic institutions, has a long way to fall if its reputation gets tarnished.

Yet Harvard is also the place where great minds are encouraged to challenge the status quo.   It’s where Mark Zuckerberg, his roommate and their computer science chums founded Facebook.

It’s against that backdrop Brian Kenny accepted the challenge of becoming the chief marketing and communications officer for the Harvard Business School.

“We have to get comfortable being uncomfortable,” was the advice Kenny gave those who lured him to Harvard two years ago.

Among the tactics Kenny and his team have employed to battle what he calls an undeserved reputation for being “old and stodgy and technology-averse” are the use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and consumer-generated content.

Kenny and I spoke at a Business Development Institute session called “Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels into the Marketing, Communications & Service Platform.”

Every industry has its own vocabulary.

“ANFO” was lingo I learned in my first PR agency job, writing a monthly column called “Shot Rock” for Pit & Quarry magazine.  My account was a commercial explosives business that had been spun off from DuPont, and ammonium nitrate was a mainstay for blasters.

At UPI, articles we promised to write for newspapers were called “skedders,” because they were scheduled ahead of time.

PR Newswire loved to refer to its clients’  heifers.  It was newsroom lingo for “HFR — Hold for Call.”  Nothing to do with cows.

So when I took on my first operating role since leaving PRN, I expected that I’d have to learn a new vernacular.  Context Optional, where I’m vice president, strategic accounts, has developed many of the most popular branded applications on Facebook. Clients include Clinique, Target, OpenTable, Microsoft and the U.S. Census Bureau.

I’m no newbie to Facebook. But it isn’t until you look beyond your “wall,” “news feed” and “live feed” that you realize how damn confusing the platform can be for anyone — let alone a brand — trying to harness the power of the medium as a way to attract and engage fans.

Facebook does have a sales team to work with deep-pocketed consumer brands.  Often, though, CMOs want to do more than advertise to create a tighter bond with online consumers.

That thirst for engaging content has created a nice business for the select few who understand the always-changing technical underpinnings of Facebook and the rules concerning user privacy and best practices.

The fact that Context Optional has earned the coveted “Facebook preferred developer” label is just a starting point.  It’s my job to bring my new colleagues’ API-driven creativity to those marketing and PR pros charged with attracting and retaining fans and followers, and to do it in a manner that achieves business goals and is culturally acceptable on Facebook.

So I’m learning about the differences between canvas applications and apps that live on tabs.  I’m diving into Facebook “boxes” and trying to understand why they are about to be discontinued.  And just when I was starting to forget about the investor relations profession’s nightmare transition to the financial reporting language XBRL, I am told that Facebook code is written in FBML.

Luckily, the fans of Einstein Bros Bagels don’t have to worry about any of that to get a coupon for a free bagel and schmear.  All they have to do is click on the “free bagel” tab.  My new employer has handled the back end integration with Facebook to make this special offer work.  My guess is that the fan base will soon be well north of today’s 22,000.

The 548,000 fans of Chanel were awarded this week with the option to download screensavers that display the time with two vividly recreated J12 timepieces.  Budget-wary teens were given a fun set of viral “Stop Me From Spending” tools.  Still other soon-to-launch apps are aimed at Valentine’s Day, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and even a mobile phone texting competition.

Needless to say, I am having a ball working with brands to creatively earn the right to have a relationship with consumers on the Facebook platform and beyond.  Just forgive me if I don’t yet know the difference between a poke and a nudge.

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(Note:  I remain an active board member at dna13.)

Every time I walk through the cluttered aisles of the deep discounter Ocean State Job Lot in Rhode Island and see ill-conceived products like green tea soda or Maalox Whip, I smile and think of Bob McGrath.

As a young reporter at UPI, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Bob in his quirky Museum of Failed Products, in New York’s Finger Lakes region.  From eggs designed to cook in a toaster to New Coke, the collection of tens of thousands of consumer flops were a reminder that smart business people often make expensive mistakes.

The same thing happens in the B2B world — even on Twitter.

Journalist feed aggregator Muck Rack’s attempt to make money by sending paid content to its own audience of followers may be one such cock-up, though only time will tell.

Despite the fact that the @muckrack Twitter feed has fewer than 3,900 followers, Gregory Galant believes issuers of news releases will be willing to spend $1 per character on the chance that a tweet release will yield some coverage.  The minimum fee is $50 and the max is $130 to use the Muck Rack service, which precedes each paid tweet with the “RELEASE:” disclaimer.

While it’s certainly a wonderful aspiration to think that every journalist whose tweets, retweets and article links show up on Muck Rack will read each mini-release and dutifully click on each miniturized URL, the reality is that most of the followers aren’t even in the media, don’t blog and have only a small number of followers.

A much better approach for issuers with newsworthy items is to use Twitter Search to identify people who write about topics related to your news.  Follow those people.  Comment on their posts.  Build online relationships.  Contribute to the conversation.  That way, when you have news, they’ll find your release interesting and may actually retweet it — free of charge — to their followers.

That’s called earned coverage.  I promise you’ll like it more than green tea soda or Gerber’s failed baby food for adults.

Graphic from Time

Pfizer’s Twitter feed seems to be benefiting from the same ingredient that powers its blockbuster erectile drug.

After only six days @pfizer_news had jumped to 631 followers by 8 o’clock this morning.

Kudos to communications SVP Sally Sussman and global media VP Ray Kerins for prevailing in a heavily regulated industry whose litigation-wary greybeards are notoriously conservative when it comes to social media.

Pharma lawyers have argued that any communications through channels feeding directly to patients — without the traditional bureaucratic review of copy, photos, video and other content — could go south quickly.

“What if” scenarios abound.  In a litigious world where the prescribing information required by regulators is often the size of an encylopedia, it’s easy to see a plaintiff complaining that he or she notified a drugmaker about an adverse reaction via Twitter but got no reply only to suffer….

For those and many other reasons, pharma has arrived later to the Twitter party than many other consumer-facing brands.  Those brave enough to tweet about remedies, clinical trials and medical conferences have taken markedly different approaches.

The most conversational pharmatweep this far is Johnson & Johnson’s Marc Monseau, who is followed by 1,745 and follows 1,096.  He has updated 316 times since launching the @JNJComm feed to supplement the New Jersey firm’s two-year-old “JNJ BTW” blog.

Novartis, based in Switzerland, has published 86 updates on its @novartis Twitter feed since November.  Unlike Monseau, there’s no named personality behind the tweets,  which are mainly 140-character teasers of releases on the Novartis media web site and some occasional industry news.  The lack of interaction is stark — with the company following only 10 on Twitter despite attracting an audience of 2,328.

Germany’s Boehringer was lauded by Jim Edwards on the life sciences news site BioValley Basel for allowing its Twitter personality — 2,178 followers and following 1,657 — to “engage in some harmless banter” rather than toeing the corporate line.

Merck seems to be using the Twitter community only as a recruiting tool, but I question how many Twitter users want to work for a company that’s afraid to engage in a more meaningful way.

In New York, Pfizer’s new Twitter staffers were quick to reply today when I sent a direct message to ask why there were a separate @pfizer (”it’s not Pfizer and not official”) and @pfizer_news Twitter pages.  That kind of willingness to snap quick replies to customers, media and others can only help build trust and goodwill with everyone except the legal department.

A billing mistake resulted in Josh Muszynski’s debit card being charged more than 23 quadrillion dollars for the pack of cigarettes he bought at a Manchester, NH, gas station.  The error was compounded by a $15 penalty for overdrawing his account.

Even though the episode played out in the media — including local broadcast and print outlets and an AP story — it did not snowball into a reputational disaster for Muszynski’s debit card issuer, Bank of America, or Visa.

Why?  Because the mistakes were quickly fixed and apologies appeased the aggrieved customer.

With so many instances of consumer wrongs not being righted quickly enough — inspiring wonderful music like “United Breaks Guitars” — I am happy that things do get handled correctly and compassionately on occasion.

AT&T gets kudos from me for issuing a credit of almost $900 for data roaming charges on the new iPhone I was using on trips to the UK and Canada last month.  I fully expected phone calls to cost a pretty penny outside the United States but wrongly assumed I’d only get dinged when I hogged lots of bandwidth, like watching videos, which I didn’t do.

Sadly, I hadn’t told my iPhone not to retrieve mail every three minutes.  Nor had I realized early enough that Twitter and Facebook updates and Web usage would fall outside my all-you-can-eat domestic plan.  It wasn’t until the SMS alert popped up that I realized an international data plan would be needed to keep me from racking up massive fees. AT&T kindly offered me a free call to a U.S. phone number to speak with a customer service agent, but the projected hold time of 20 minutes meant my battery would run out before I could see how much I had spent.

Back in New York, my call to AT&T yielded good results.  The rep understood that my 48,000 kilobites of data usage would have cost me nothing if it had occurred in the United States, and that a plan costing less than $60 could have saved me from the $900+ gouge — if I had been counseled prior to my trip.  He recommended a credit be issued.  His supervisor agreed.  Two days late, I received an SMS and phone call saying my credit had been issued.

AT&T has taken plenty of flack for network performance and customer service.  In this case,  they did everything I asked, without argument.

Now, the company needs to start using Twitter as a conversational  tool rather than simply as a way to announce information. AT&T clearly has employees, policies and a culture designed around customer satisfaction.  Using Twitter to build community around the AT&T brand would make the organization’s  hard work visible to all.

A comment made by Brian Solis at this week’s Media Relations Summit in New York triggered a walk down memory lane, or at least a flight over an island my avatar once visited.

Brian and his co-panelists were chatting about the current popularity of Twitter when he declared that the only completely worthless foray into social media thus far has been Second Life.

His slam on the Linden Lab virtual world stuck with me while full-time tweeters for jetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and Ford Motor Company received accolades for their stewardship of their respective brands.

Before joining Ford, Scott Monty worked with the self-described “social media insiders” that launched the agency Crayon by holding an event on the virtual island “Crayonville,” inside Second Life.

While Second Life and its currency of Linden dollars did not scale into a viable mass-marketing medium, it earned plenty of mass-media coverage and spawned experimentation that helped define a new career for people like Monty, jetBlue’s Morgan Johnston and Southwest’s Christi Day.

I was fortunate to work in a corporate environment with a long history of skunkworks projects.  PR Newswire EVP John Williams created an interactive T-button for press releases while most people were still using 9600-baud dial-up modems.  So flying around in Second Life in 2007 was not only  acceptable, but almost expected by PRN clients who were happy to see a partner willing to explore a world where avatar anarchists routinely trashed corporate buildings and disrupted attempts at commercialization.

What did PRN do in Second Life?  We gave away public toilets and changing rooms.  Of course, these rest rooms featured video display boards that carried the headlines of press releases originating from in-world businesses as well as out-of-world copy pertaining to social media.  We didn’t charge for distribution of releases inside Second Life, instead opting to collect donations for the Denver-based charity Water for People.  We also created the position of Ambassador to Second Life to build relationships with the owners of media properties and businesses in the community.

Needless to say, there wasn’t a sustainable business model for PR Newswire and most other companies inside Second Life.  But it was far from a failure on many levels.

Our “ambassador” picked up skills for one of the hottest customer service/PR/marketing jobs today — that of community manager within a social network like Twitter or Facebook.  A clean-water charity received a nice corporate donation.  Employees and select customers got the satisfaction of knowing PRN had dippped its toe in the water from an imaginary pixelated island to see if there was any business value.

In a way,  Solis, Crayon and other bleeding-edge marketers were also winners.  Sure, they were mocked for Coca Cola’s “virtual thirst” vending machines and Nissan’s attempt to give avatars Sentras to drive, but many of us were envious of their creativity and that they worked with clients who embraced new ideas.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

Sometimes fast isn’t fast enough.

As the Rochester, N.Y., reporter for UPI in the ’80s, it used to embarrass me to get a message from BROOKS-NXF (Dorthea Brooks on the New York Financial desk) saying Dow Jones had issued a snap on Kodak’s earnings, and that I should quickly match the story.

Sure enough, an envelope would arrive a few minutes later — via taxi cab — containing the Kodak press release.  For the next couple of quarters, I joined the queue of cabbies in the lobby of Kodak’s headquarters and got the release handed to me personally by the secretary of the PR department, and then dictated a lede to NXF by phone.  I started beating DJ, Reuters and AP.

Kodak’s subsquent use of PR Newswire, and PRN’s willingness to install a feed into my tiny UPI bureau, evened the playing field, though it probably drove a few angry taxi drivers to start buying Fuji film.

AP, Dow Jones and their ilk were built around speed, but subscribers gladly handed over fistfuls of dollars to be first with market-moving information.  No longer.  Not only are Internet delivery speeds faster today, but the democratization and demonetization of information means there’s virtually no barrier to being a publisher or consumer.

Sure, the media elite squawks a lot about the lack of fact checking and quality control among non-professionals.  But I firmly believe in the wisdom of the crowd and am perfectly happy to rely on Twitter or Wikipedia as a primary source of data, knowing that things might be wrong at times — in the same way the mainstream media makes mistakes.

My love affair with new media channels flared this morning while I was sipping my first cup of coffee.  Noisy fire trucks outside my window prompted me to check the live audio stream of FDNY radio transmissions on TheBravest.com, which was bustling with activity because a five-story building had collapsed minutes earlier in downtown Manhattan.

This site has become another prime example of nano-targeting in media.  Its user base is mainly off-duty firefighters, who use lingo like OMD for unoccupied multiple dwelling.  What amazes me is the technology smarts of those operating this site, which is supported by ads for calendars featuring photos of scantily clad female firefighters, and the books and gear used by first-responders.  Within 15 minutes, TheBravest had linked to the web video streams being webcast  by the helicopters of two local television stations, and live web chats were under way among site users commenting about the use of search dogs in the rubble of the building.  New media had connected to mainstream media though, of course, TheBravest wasn’t paying thousands of dollars an hour to charter the copter, hire the camera man, downlink the feeds, etc.

Similarly, did I turn to the tragically understaffed Cleveland Plain Dealer or Akron Beacon Journal for coverage of Saturday’s riot at Kent State University?  No, it was the @kent360 Twitter feed that provided provided the first details of police using rubber bullets to quell student unrest on a hot April evening.

For those who lament the loss of command-and-control newsrooms, these are sad times.

Yet I see the glass as more than half full.  Consumers can quickly get the news they seek, on virtually any topic at any time.  And the new breed of PR pro can truly brand themselves as domain experts and connect directly with the influentials in their sector — armed with nothing more than a Blackberry or iPhone.