GM's recent Chevy Tahoe debacle made a great case for how all organizations -- nonprofits, governments and businesses alike -- need to refine their media monitoring and PR operations for the social web.

For those who missed it, GM experienced a little digital road rage when it launched a promotional web site in partnership with NBC's The Apprentice. The web site offered consumers the chance to create their own ads for the massive Chevy Tahoe SUV by manipulating footage and other elements.

Environmental activists, consumer safety advocates and many others who just find the Tahoe annoying (ever been stuck behind one?) seized the opportunity to create ads slamming the Tahoe for its environmental impact and general evil SUV-ness. One web site created an archive for people to track their anti-Chevy works.

The result? GM got a ton of bad press, not the least of it for its slow response to the problem as it emerged. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to suggest that the campaign was doomed from the beginning, and to enumerate all the ways in which GM might have avoided the fiasco.

Realistically, however, most organizations are pretty much destined to make the occasional public misstep. As we all try to muddle our way through the increasingly daunting challenge of capturing the attention of a bombarded public, breaking through a wall of media-savvy cynicism, and engaging members of the public with the latest interactive tools, we run the risk of going beyond "edgy" and into the realm of self-destructive.

But that doesn't mean our occasional mistakes have to be fatal. As the GM story illustrates, our best protection is the ability to recognize mistakes when they happen and respond in real time.

Let's start with the first challenge: recognizing mistakes when they happen. To me, this is first and foremost a call for smart and serious blog monitoring. If you want to know when you've made a mistake -- or simply when public response to a "correct" decision could turn out to be a problem -- you should use bloggers as your early warning system.

You can use a tool as simple as a personalized Google home page or a Bloglines account to track a range of RSS feeds that will help you monitor your public image. (Just make sure that more than one person in your organization is doing this, so you don't miss an emerging issue.)

At the very least, you should be checking in daily on RSS feeds that search:

• your organization's name


• the names of your executive team members and public spokespeople. Set up searches on all the commonly used variants and misspellings of each person's name: for example, if your Executive Director is named Jennifer Smith William you should search on "Jennifer Smith William", "Jen Smith" "Jen William", "Jenny Smith Williams" etc.


• the names of all your major projects and brands


• the names of your major partner or competitor organizations, and potentially, the names of their executive team members

You can set up searches like these on Technorati, Feedster or PubSub.

You may need to experiment a little before you get the right search breadth for your organization. If your organization has a very widely-discussed brand, or a name that is also a common word, you'll need to add some additional search terms to narrow your search. For example, if you're Apple, you might need to search on apple AND (Mac OR computer OR ipod) -- and you're still going to get way too much, so you might want to add some additional keywords like "corporate", "advertising", "CEO" etc. to increase the odds that the blog posts you're finding will in some way bear on corporate strategy rather than "last night my dog ate my ipod".

With a strategy like this in place, an organization like GM would know it had an issue as soon as the first couple of "check out my anti-SUV ad" blog posts went online. In a case like the Chevy Tahoe campaign, that is the difference between knowing about an issue within a few hours versus missing it until it's had a few days or even weeks to snowball.

But knowledge is only as valuable as your ability to respond to it. Blog monitoring is a very easy strategy to implement -- you, or anyone else in your organization, can set up an effective monitoring page in a couple of hours, without the need for senior level approval. Whether you can respond to the issues you identify depends on your larger organizational culture: the speed with which you can get issues in front of decision-makers, the speed of decision-making and response times, and the capacity to implement innovative public relations strategies.

Returning to the GM examples, it's clear that their two biggest mistakes were in letting the story percolate into the general media before coming up with a corporate response, and in taking the glib initial position that "all publicity is good publicity". But the only way to get ahead of the story is to respond in real time, formulating a response to the issue as soon as it emerged in the first few blog posts.

Few large organizations -- and not that many small ones -- are able to make p.r. decisions in a hurry. To make effective use of intelligence gleaned from blog tracking, you need a lean decision-making process that requires sign-off from as few people as possible, executed as quickly as possible. And you need to get that process in place or at least underway before the next crisis hits.

Accelerating organizational response times typically involves a major culture shift. That culture shift remains the biggest obstacle that most public-facing organizations need to address before they're able to work and communicate effectively in an era of blogs. Whether you're working in business, government or the community sector, it's time to start thinking about how your organization can adapt its culture to the necessities of blog-era communications.