I’m at PubCon 2008, in the Online Reputation Management session (recap here) where Jessica Berlin, a Social Media Manager for Cirque du Soleil, just discussed how her company monitors, prevents, and resolves reputation issues.

They go to great lengths to find out who is talking about their company. They even rate their influencers by their reach or influence (backlinks as main indicator I think). Then they reach out to those people (big or small) and I’m guessing they offer them a second chance to have a good experience with another show. This is where that free ticket comes in, whether you’ve seen the show or not, you can probably expect to get contacted by Cirque Soleil even if you say something bad about the show with ever seeing it.

If Cirque Soleil tried to determine authenticity, like asking for a ticket stub, they shoot themselves in the foot even more by even “questioning” your authenticity. Will they pursue anyone with a bad experience? Or just influencers?

I seriously doubt that there is a significant percentage of people who blog/twitter/etc about Cirque Soleil who aren’t authentic in their opinion just to get free tickets. But I do think it is interesting that you can understand a companies internal strategies because of their openness like Cirque Soleil, that you know if you did say something you can expect some contact and some type of resolution.

Cirque Soleil is not the only ones out there doing this. Add to the list: Jet Blue, Comcast, Zappos, and probably many others!

Your thoughts? I’ll update this blog post when Cirque Soleil contacts me.