Archive for September, 2009

By Nicola Ford, Head of Editorial, Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment (TMDR)

Consumer blogs, discussion forums and feedback ratings are just some of the opportunities the internet offers to consumers who want their voices to be heard. With as little as a 30-second registration process, disgruntled consumers can now have a serious impact on the reputations of previously almost impermeable corporate giants.

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of protecting a brand, product or business across the internet – both limiting damage following negative press or public response, and also reinforcing and promoting existing corporate values.

The proliferation of user-generated content online means all organisations both private and public need to take ORM very seriously. And it’s big business, in 2008 the UK ORM industry was worth £60million (source: Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide 2008, e-consultancy) – and as the internet continues to expand exponentially, so will the number of companies that need ORM.

Moreover, as companies continue to downsize to survive the recession, reputation management is increasingly important. If you don’t treat your exiting employees well, they might try to damage your reputation online, and your remaining employees might leave once the economy picks up. Companies need to safeguard their reputations for the future so they attract the best candidates to work for them.

But it’s not just organisations that need to worry about online reputation. With, on average, 80% of employers checking people online before interviewing them using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, candidates need to make sure their online ‘brand’ positions them correctly.

Most people take a reactive approach to their online brands only removing content they don’t want people to see. And although this is definitely part of it, it’s those people who are proactively building their online brands that will reap the biggest rewards – one of which is recruitment.

It’s estimated that 70% of all job opportunities are never advertised – in today’s tough market, jobseekers need to tap into this hidden job market and online networking is a great way of doing this. It’s not just making sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date – it’s about positioning yourself as a credible player in a particular field. There are a variety of methods to build up your online following: blogging, participating in discussion forums, Tweeting and so on.

A successful personal online brand does take time and effort to establish itself but the benefits can be great. By establishing a great online reputation for yourself, you should attract companies, professional contacts and friends with great reputations in return. And if that’s not enough to convince you, think of the alternative – competing with the majority of people for the 30% of job opportunities that are in the public domain…

And fortunately, there’s help available to make sure your online brand positions you as the sort of employee companies want to recruit. Services like Workthing which provides you with all the tools and advice you need to take a proactive approach to managing your reputation online.

A great example of a company who has managed to keep itself clean of a massive backlash on line is Getty Images.  They have at least 5 pages showing up on the first page of Google for Getty Images, the other results are all positive apart from Wiki which is a balanced view (possibly).

So a few years back Getty Images started :

This is taken straight from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images

Copyright enforcement

Getty Images uses a firm called PicScout to scan the web for unauthorized and unlicensed usages of its protected images. Websites that are found to be in violation are sent financial settlements that retroactively licensed the image. However, the settlements also demand damages, which are said to have been incurred against the copyright holder. Thousands of these letters have been sent out, yet according to the Wall Street Journal in October 2005, Getty had not taken any of these potential cases to court.Reference 1 and 2 However, Getty published a notice to its contributors describing how a court decision in New York makes it more difficult to obtain damages for infringement. Reference 3 The article does not state whether Getty Images was a party involved in the court case.

Recently, Getty Images lost a lawsuit in Germany^[14]. Getty claimed unauthorized usage, but the defendant could prove authorized usage as he had bought a retroactive license directly from the photographer.

There has been many sites and forums talking about how Getty handled this and complaints of their hard handed approach,

Here are a few more websites discussing Getty Images:

• extortionletterinfo.com/
• internetmadness.blogspot…getty-images-are-trying-to-getty-me.html
• forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1014&message=27828081

So Getty Images theoretically should have got hammerted both off and online, but because they have a very strong brand, very succesful website (s) they were able to keep any negative results from appearing on the first page of Google.

The lesson that Getty shows here, if you are prepared and allow for Reputation Management in your on line marketing budget then you can easily stop, reduce and help prevent negative results costing you more in the long run, even the Wiki discussion page is lacking any real chat about it.  It could have been a lot worse when you think about how the people Getty were going after quite often were “Internet people”, I’m not saying what they did was right or wrong.  What Getty did show is that if you have a Strong Brand, well designed website you can hide most negative things, remarks, blogs and comments.

I heard a story on the radio the other day about abbreviations and i thought what can start out as an innocent mistake or interpretation can get you into so much trouble!

Take for example LOL, quite often people think it stands of Lots of Love, but on the txt and internet world its stands for Laughed Out Loud.  So when the husband sent a card to his father in law, when his wife died (his mother in law) and put thinking of you LOL, you can imagine how it was taken.

So here are some useful terms and some not so useful

• SEO – Search Engine Optimisation or if you are in the US Search Engine Optimization
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing
• RM – Reputation Management
• ORM – Online Reputation Management
• URL – Uniform Resource Locater (in other words your web address)
• PM – Private Message, often used on forums
• BRB – Be Right Back
• SERP – Search Engine Results Page
• TTYL – Talk To You Later
• BTW – By The Way
• NIKE – National Indian Knitting Enterprise
• SWAT – Special Weapons And Tactics

There are countless more, any many I could not place on this blog…

Don't let IT run your SEO

Again I had another client make the same old mistake and let the IT and design guys build and manage their website. This mistake I just spotted was after I noticed that their website had dropped off the face of search results. They had set the robots.txt file to Disallow: / this basically means it stops search engines like Google to spider and index your site in the search engine results. In other words it turns the site off to Google, and the reason was? Because Google was visiting the site a lot and using bandwidth!!! I know many people who would love to have that negative. This is a bit like spending a huge amount of money in newspaper adverts and not putting any contact details on… absolutely pointless.

So don’t allow your IT department or designers to make decisions without consulting somebody who knows how the search engines work. You can have the sexiest best looking site ever, but if no one can find it, then it’s totally pointless. I would not try and fix my car, I would get a garage to do it, and here are 3 reasons why:

1. It would take me ages to work it out and the cost per hour I would be loosing not focusing on what I am good at would far out way the cost of getting a garage to do it.
2. The garage could probably spot the problem with in minutes, where it could take me weeks…
3. Even if I did fix it, did I use the best material, etc

So please don’t let your IT department manage your website and make critical decisions without get proper consultation, correct search engine marketing can make a massive difference to the success of your online marketing.

I saw a news article on the BBC about the top 100 brands in the world and thought it would be interesting to see how their rankings were reflected on the Internet in terms of Reputation Management.  I got the list off Interbrand which runs a report each year.  All the main brands have a http://en.wikipedia.org page but I decided not to list every Wiki page, you can easily find them yourself. The results are from the searches I did on Google.com

1. Coca Cola – Number one in the report, it looks like they have about 4 websites on the first page but this massive giant still has a negative result number 7 http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-coca-cola.html
2. IBM – One negative from the same site as Coca Cola http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-ibm.html Number 5, International Brotherhood of Magicians number 8, so as long as you don’t annoy one of these magical guys you should be OK
3. Microsoft – They pretty much dominate the first page through all the sites they run from bing to xbox,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft being the main issue
4. GE – So far is doing very well like Microsoft however they also have negatives about them on the Wiki page
5. Nokia – Have done a great job with their reputation online dominating pretty much the first page, again a wiki page with negative content is still available.
6. Macdonalds – falls into the category of having a name with a lots of other people (Scots) and businesses helping drown out negative content.  Of course there is a wiki page but on one of those rare occasions the page is about Kevin B. MacDonald so well done Macdonalds the only company so far not to have anything negative on the first page in google.com
7. Google – Guess what there is not one negative piece of content about Google not even a wiki page, I wonder how they manage that
8. Toyota – At the time I did this research Toyota had a couple of negative news stories, wiki page and this one http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10353116-54.html number 10
9. Intel – Intel have a clear bill of health apart from Wiki page
10. Disney – Have done very well, even the wiki page was number 9 in the results, a few negative news stories but not directed at them, well done!!!

I will look at the following 90 brands over the course of the week and give feedback on any that really stand out.  What is amazing is how much weight Google gives to Wiki pages.  Many of these wiki pages include previous law suits of the companies involved (many years out of date), I have no real understanding why they add such information, or even why they list companies in the first place.  It is the easiest way for someone to get negative content up the search results by adding a page to Wiki.   I thought encyclopedia’s were about how fast a Cheater can run or the Roman Wall, not how a company has had previous law suits against it.

The old saying unfortunately does not ring true, words will hurt you a lot on the Internet.  Quite often we have clients coming to us after negative press has been at the top of the search engine for a while.

Bad press is often found on very active websites like News or newspapers sites, many of these sites have cotton on that if you encourage remarks and feedback then the pages will do much better and move up the search engines results.

By dealing with these types of sites quickly and burying them further down the search results will stop people possibly adding remarks and more importantly your customers finding it.

Asda are a great example of this see how this Chicken Licking staff member caused a massive stir, licking chickens and The man is also filmed urinating in a bin, playing cricket and football with in-store goods and poking a finger in the chicken..

Obviously ASDA have totally condemned this, but still the damage has been done, only time will tell if the articles move up the search engines or disappear after a few days depending on how ASDA deal with it.

So to stop bad press staying at the top of search engines you must deal with them quickly and try and remove them from search results as quickly as possible.

It’s funny how the simplest lack of customers service or badly run service can get round the Internet.  There are some people you just want to avoid offering bad service to like Matt Cutts, check out his U.S Airways Frequent Flyers Programme post.

In todays world of instant communication, it does not take long to get word out and if you have a massive following like Matt Cutts or Stephen Fry even quicker!!!

Hopefully U.S Airways will pick up on Matt’s post and respond accordingly.  The airlines seem to really suffer when it comes to customer service, British Airways is great at loosing bags, Delta Airways serves pizza and lands at the scruffiest terminal in JFK.  I think the airlines need to work harder on their reputation both on and off-line.

Reputation management and customer service run hand in hand, It’s simply because customers are turning their backs to businesses that do not deliver value and good customer service adds value. There’s no way around it. It’s not about being cheap or their would not be business and first class, it’s about looking after your customer.

Here are some Do’s

1. If you promise something to a customer make sure you come through, if you can’t take the time and effort to explain why and offer an alternative or full refund.
2. Keep customers informed and make it personal

Here are some don’t s

1. Avoid not communicating with customers, even if just to say sorry no update
2. Don’t give bogus reasons, be honest
3. If a refund is due, don’t drag it out, just pay it

By no means is this an exhaustive list of costumer service points, just the ones that really annoy me.

Journalists and reporters will dig deeper than your normal websurfer as often they need to dig deep to try and find a story.  Journalists are trained to search and find facts, figures,  documents or articles they can use and also reference.  It’s critical for any celebrity or politician that they understand how any investigative reporter will search as deep as possible.

Journalist’s attitude is there really is not thing as a small story, so if they find anything about a celebrity, it can quickly flare up into something you don’t want people to know.  Although there maybe less journalists out there as papers scale down, what has replaced them is the millions of bloggers, and now more than ever they are realising how effective a good blog posting can be to attract traffic.

A reporter can reference a website, article, forum even if the information on the 3rd party site is incorrect.  If you can get the 3rd party site to take down or remove the content then you have to ask the newspaper, reporter also to do the same.  This can be very time consuming and costly.  Also if you are well known celeb the last thing you want is to bring even more limelight to an article if you have to take them to court.

Reporters will go past page 1 and 2 in google search results, often page 10 to 20 is still in the radar, we combat this by filling the search results with positive content.  We have a team of 50 staff who are trained in burying negative bad press online.  The easiest solution is to take a preemptive approach and before negative content is allowed to move up is flood the internet with positive stories.

What we will do

• Control and set up social network sites
• Publish articles online
• SEO your own website(s)
• Release press releases online
• Monitor the net for any rising issues

Give us a call or email us confidentially:

Call: UK +44(0)845 862 1893 – Mark or Sholto

Call: USA +1 646 723 3965 – Alex

or email: confidential@reputationmanagementfor.com

Most public companies use (IR) investor relations companies to ensure they are communicating with their shareholders.   The influence of financial social media sites is very real and CEO’s should be paying attention to all comments that are being made.

I was researching a trade the other day and I realized that I was paying attention to comments on google finance www.google.com/finance The post was anonymous BUT I still paid attention to it, why?  It seemed authentic from an independent investor like me.  Sites such as www.seekingalpha.com have independent investors giving you detailed explanations of their trading strategies and what stocks they own.  Do companies really understand the impact that “chatter” on financial blogs, forums and social media sites can have on their stock?  Do the IR firms even have a strategy for this?  If you do I would love to hear from you.

I found an interesting example the other day;  NYSE: YUM   Yum Brands is a ~$15BN company, one its main assets is Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Type the keyword “Kentucky Fried Chicken” into google and on number  5 or 6 you will find negative posts from websites called www.kentuckyfriedcruelty.com Why would their PR company or IR company not deal with this?

Maybe if you are a $15BN stock NYSE: YUM you don’t bother but I am amazed that thinly traded OTCBB and pink sheet stocks are also not handling their online reputations.  IR and PR companies should be proactive and be working with leading online reputation management firms.

America should have been talking about the Obama Health plan, instead the focus is on those two words of Joe Wilson (Representative for North Carolina) who shouted, against all decorum, at the President – “You Lie”.

Wow did he do himself some damage! Constituents like their politicians to be passionate, but they also like them to respect the country. Shouting at the president broke that taboo and with it he has done his reputation as a politician some serious damage. (see our articles on Politician’s Reputation Management for more on this).

Normally, politicians destroy themselves with women, wine or money or some combination of the two. Voters don’t like it, but sometimes they shrug it off with a, “typical…”

What a politician says is very different and impacts much more widely on the reputation and attitude of voters. Witness California’s Mike Duvall. What has upset people is not that he an affair (or two) but the derogatory way he discussed it with a colleague and was overheard doing it. That was low and has killed him.

So politicians protect your reputations as follows: it’s not what you do but what you say that matters. Its also what you don’t say or how you respond to questions that matters. Witness Teddy Kennedy’s failure to answer questions after Chappaquidick and the  uncomfortable body language that spoke volumes about his guilt.