Generations of digital natives are moving up in the world believing a company’s online reputation has become synonymous with a real-world reputation. While the next generation might grow wiser, online reputation management is becoming crucial for individuals and companies who’s customers are of the first wave of E-commerce consumers. While an older generation might feel that managing your online reputation is shameless promotion, I would impress the reader to consider it a wise investment in the new reputation economy.
Professional connections begin within Search engines and Social Networking sites. Search is the cornerstone of reputation management. If you control search results about yourself or your company, you control the reputation. We have all heard about Reputation Management SEO.
So you’re all in on Digital? You’re determined to get ahead of the competition; you decided you wouldn’t perish because your more adaptable, and you’re ready to dominate in the 21st century.
But Digital Darwinism has many faces; it isn’t just about being left behind; or losing a franchise to a disrupter like Uber or Airbnb. Today’s businesses and entrepreneurs can also fall prey to digital brand attacks, deteriorating their most valuable asset, reputation.
Reputation is an old concept; recognized throughout many eras. There are traces of it going far back as ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Socrates wrote, “The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear”, British play writer underscored the horror of loosing one’s reputation in his famous play Othello “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I ha lost my reputation, I ha lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial!” and in more recent times, famous investor Warren Buffet “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Etymologically, the word reputation derives from the latin verb putare, to compute or calculate. As humans, we work hard on appearance to signal deeper qualities regarding who we are as persons.
Nowadays, the management of brand reputation is facing onslaught by multiplying constituencies with unprecedented zealousness and anonymity. Statements on the web can easily be made without consequences. Reputation damage can come from something a company or its members did not even do. Hurtful statements can spread on the web without necessarily being truthful. It happens every day.
In an economy where 70% to 80% of market value comes from hard-to-assess intangible assets such as brand equity and goodwill, organizations are especially attentive and vulnerable to online brand attacks.
Increasingly, I am meeting some digital marketers that understand the importance to plan against such attacks. They understand the law will not protect them fully when such attacks happen. They have a contingency plans, everything from crisis communication plan to social media monitoring software, CSR conversation recording and archiving, escalation procedures and they curate positive content in case they face the court of public opinion. They are getting ahead of the curve. I like to say that they are taking ownership. Perhaps because it just has a nice ring to it.
Still, most entrepreneurs and businesses do not have online reputation managers, individuals who will analyze and carefully manage the “findabilty” of positive information about them and their company. Managing the presence of online information about you or your organization allows you to “take ownership” of your reputation. When you don’t take an active role in determining what information about you appear glaringly, others may make that decision for you. “Others” include unconscious programs (“bots”) that continuously collect and index publicly available information online. They organize and rank prominence based on an algorithm. This is the case with Google.
So why prepare in such a way? Why is the law not sufficient when it comes to digital attacks?
We’re in the midst of a digital revolution. In the backdrop, civil laws and liberties applied to digital media are being debated and even revisited the world over. We’re figuring out that the web allows anyone to uncover and misuse information in ways laws could not have envisioned just a couple of decades ago. One example is the rise of digital extortion. Increasingly, crime syndicates are calling people with the threat of promoting information already in existence about their businesses. Since a third party published the information, this becomes a grey zone. Currently, website operators have legal immunity over what is posted on their sites (regardless of veracity). Remove the phone threat part and you end up with legitimate sites like Rip-off Report and Pissedconsumer. These posts then end up on the most visited website of all: Google. There is nothing illegal about these sites; thousands of lawyer letters have been written to them, hundreds of judges have thrown out cases against them.
There is also a rise in “for hire” anonymous reviewers who, for some sum of untraceable cryptocurency are willing to do others “dirty work” without any repercussions. Heck, forget about repercussions, nobody can even trace them. This repeated damage to people’s lives and businesses has gotten a lot of press lately, and has us thinking about some obvious need for oversight.
Laws like the right to be forgotten are seen as controversial and are emerging too slowly for many North American businesses and individuals. This is because first they run into our precious first amendment rights. It did not take long for lawyers, once again, to have emerged as the true beneficiaries of all this incongruousness. I am not saying lawyers have no role in reputation management, they do. But they are just a part of an overall reputation system. We will discuss the role of lawyers in reputation management.
Presently, for individuals and companies faced with irreparable damage, the journey to reclaim what is lost can be challenging at best. Both legal and technical approaches are often inadequate in so many cases. As we will discuss in this book, ORM is an unregulated industry. Ensuring your provider is technically capable is very difficult. You also need a company that is above-board, one that will protect your brand, your information and will not cause larger issues along the way or participate in fraudulent practices on your behalf. We will discuss hacking techniques and negative SEO in this book. We will also highlight the most important questions to ask when hiring a reputation management firm.
A casual look at rate my lawyer and reviews about law firms will equally find dissatisfied clients seeking help to the same problem. Ask yourself, if lawyers can’t make it go away for them, how can they do it for you? There is supercilious ideal of the Internet as a distinct dominion; defamation is not an easy case to prove, there are jurisdictional risks, timeline issues, there are backlash risks and the identity and motives of the real perpetrator hard to gather. In fact, much could have been done to prevent the problem or at least lessen the blow if positive information was curated in the first place.
Online reputation management (ORM) is both a complex and subtle thing. Fighting it demands a set of strong capable resources. Companies must approach ORM as a multi-disciplinary, cross-functional task closely managed at a senior level. The proper execution is to huddle legal, PR and technical professionals to formulate a multipronged approach to the problem. I have seen this work very effectively for several clients. A sophisticated CEO will launch against the attack understanding that time is money, and in the case of negative online reputation issues, this often equates to a loss of substantial money. I will discuss the economics of reputation management.
So how exactly do you manage this? What’s the road map? The technical resources in this area are scarce, few if any firms offer combined approaches. Moreover, marketing and legal professionals are often overwhelmed with search engine reputation management issues (SERM).
We have developed our own reputation management methodology described here openly for everyone, including our competitors, to see.