I think the short answer is if people are likely to talk negatively about your brand in any social space, short of the ideal solution of fixing why they are talking negatively about you in the first place, the next best solution is to try and contribute something positive yourself to the mix to help balance things out.

This is not to say brands should be spamming social spaces, as that’s obviously adding fuel to the fire. But as an easy example, GM proactively mobilizing their Flickr audience to post photos of cars and tag them, and GM doing this themselves via the photostream, helps ensure that searches for GM are going to result in mostly a lot of cool car photos.

Want a tough challenge though and a good example of a brand with an image problem on Flickr? Try searching for “Microsoft”:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=microsoft&w=all

On a more serious note, I think a another thing to look at is the massive presence Brands have on Flickr that they dont control, or perhaps need to work out how they can control / influence. I

Glad you enjoyed the examples, I agree 100% that they are a necessary complement to the theory.

Often times it’s the subtle things that make things a success or failure, and it’s hard to capture all of these in a complete theoretical framework. As you say, a screenshot often says a thousand words!

Cheers,
Geoff

This was a great, practical post. Thanks!

Eileen, many thanks also for the feedback and for forwarding it on!

Great job. It’s always useful to have practical examples and your analysis was spot on.

I’m forwarding the link to a bunch of colleagues.

Eileen O’Brien