- Twitter to lose its reputation as a free speech platform?
- IIPM worried about Google Suggest, why is it so?
- Reputation Management Tip for 2012: Brands need to tap into social media search!
- Facebook Timeline and Reputation Management
- Apple Siri gender bias or glitch?
- Google+ vs Facebook – its not over yet!
- The Ethics of Self Promotion Through Charitable Causes (A Case Study)
- Google scraps sidewiki – will you miss it?
- Facebook, the trust factor
- BlackBerry Blackout- RIM’s Reputation Takes another Hit
Archive for October 2009
Google at last talks about reputation management
October 16, 2009 | 
Author At last google has talked about the importance of reputation management on their blog Google’s stance on negative results appearing in their search results has always been it’s not there responsibility to remove the site from their search results. Their take on it is that the business or person effected needs to contact the website owner and ask them to remove it from their site.
“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.”
The biggest issue for reputation management is people not even knowing what to search for to get help. I have asked many business owners / people if they have heard or know what reputation management is, and to date I have not had anyone heard of it. It was the same with SEO 10 years ago, no one knew what search engine optimisation was or involved. By google acknowledging this industry helps make people aware that there are companies like www.reputationmanagementfor.com who can help remove negative results in the search engines.
So lets continue to educate people and make them aware of the service reputation management companies can offer. Businesses know they need it, you only need to see site like TripAdvisor, RipOffReport, Scam.com to name a few sites that can often appear right below a companies main website. Up to 70% of people click on a negative search result if its directly below the company website. How many times have you checked tripadvisor before you book a hotel room?
If you are a business and have negative reults damageing your online reputation then search google for Reputation Management to find a company who can help remove or bury the negative results.
Importance of Reputation Management
Guess if someone searches for your product or service on Google what it is that you want them to see; something like a social media website linked to your website with couple of reviews on your product sounds great. And the last thing you can ever think about to see is some unanswered negative comments on those social or review website that you may come across.
But very few understand the importance of reputation management, though the word is doing the round for sometime in the corporate sector. Countering negative Comments is one such thing that makes it more important to safeguard your reputation. As always you cannot please everyone so we need to understand that it will be less pleased consumer or competitor are the one airing their opinion. As in every business it becomes vital to know what’s going at the competitors camp and the latest development in the market. So if you respond to positive or negative comments it becomes a great way to counter a bad situation and putting up a positive face.
Some competitors or disgruntled customers can even use your materials to be placed on their or review site which unfortunately again is a bad practice. The extent of harming your product or service is large, and the worst part is that you may perhaps not be aware what is happening?
We manage your online reputation by closely working with the company and get significant input based on the comments posted on the other website. To confront problems we keep monitoring such social website and work on strategies to influence readers and bring it to a level of acceptance and upkeep the goodwill.
Trafigura – You can’t beat them!
Once upon a time Trafigura was a small dutch registered oil company with some slightly dodgy business practices – such as dumping toxic waste of the coasts of poor African countries. No big deal to a large extent in so far as most of suspect a lot of chemical and oil companies do something similar. They even commissioned their own report to check whether they did indeed do such a thing in 2006 off the Ivory Coast. Nobody noticed them until they employed some solicitors (the infamous Carter-Ruck of London) and tried to gag the media from reporting on questions in Parliament. Now the cosy and dimly lit world of Trafigura has been blown into the open and their reputation destroyed.
- They dumped toxic waste that may have killed 15 people in Abidjan and caused 10000 more serious sickness. A UN investigation reported that “the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping”
- They tried to silence criticism and operate against the right of the media to report on Parliament.
Perhaps they and their solicitors thought that in the hyperconnected world of the Internet it was possible to gag everybody. The fact that it was reported on the House of Commons website was irrelevant if they could gag the Guardian newspaper. Doh!
The end result is a reputation destroyed in approximately two days: who will want to do business with them, or even be seen to do business with them? Once again Twitter and social networks proved that in a battle between business and social networks there is no stopping or controlling news once it is out. (see Daily Telegraph on trend topics on twitter)
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Journalists and Reporters, RM Commentary | 
Tags: Libel Laws, Trafigura | 
No Comments »
Who is Responsible for Reputation
Most commentators are agreed that reputation is a company’s single most important long-term asset, so you would suppose that if you phoned a company and asked for the person responsible for managing their reputation they would know who to put you through to. Not a chance. Ask for brand manager, sales director, PR wonk, bills payable and you are through (usually to an answerphone). Ask a receptionist for the Reputation Manager and they are stymied.
In truth, it is really only the business theorists who worry about reputations, within the company there is no evangelist or guardian for reputation. Companies are generally much more obsessed with their brands, and in the case of large companies whole directorates exist to police this entity. Directorates flanked by asinine designers and mid-level liberal arts graduates and a separate and expensive cohort of lawyers.
Some companies might argue that this is the responsibility of the CEO, but few chief executives spend time or have metrics for assessing and tracking the reputation performance of a company. The absence of metrics may be what make reputation management unloved: it is just too metaphysical for any jock manager to be able to get their heads around. I mean, nobody built a reputation around being a reputation manager in the way they do as brand director.
You could make an argument that reputation is an output of a company and in some sense not measurable, but then so is profit and every analyst in the world looks at that.
One of the issues facing a reputation manager is that reputation as a concept is seen as related to brand management and is subsumed with that “discipline”. This is a shame as brand management tends in practice to have a narrow view of the business and rarely considers how reputation is changing across time and in intensity. Brand managers also see reputation as a function of brand – look after the brand and the reputation will after itself. How wrong: you can rebrand but you cannot rerepute – in fact does not even exist. Yet rebranding is so often an attempt to fix broken reputations rather than broken brands per se. As a builder would say: you can’t paint a wall falling down!
Companies need to get serious about their reputation and the discipline of reputation management. They need to establish some tracking and they need to separate it out from brand management or public relations. All the activities of the enterprise impact upon reputation – what other people think about you. A truly great reputation is an oak forest – it takes a long time to grow but is difficult to cut down. You can lose a tree but it does not end the forest.
Corporate Avatars & Reputation Risk
Gartner Group – the once fashionable purveyors of reports on online business – have recommended that corporates get their heads around the use of avatars within corporate enviroments. (Press release here)
They have 6 recommendations for businesses as they point out that the use of avatars is becoming both more widespread and inevitable.
1. Help users learn to control their avatars. For most people, controlling and using an avatar is not viewed as intuitive or easy, but like any skill, after a few sessions a user can master the basics. The platform being used can also be an important factor, but improvements in optimizing virtual environment memory have lessened this issue.
2. Recognize that users will have a personal affinity with their avatar.Users often take pride in their avatar and dress them up or down. For enterprises, this is where dress codes can come into play, if the avatar is being used for company business. Early efforts with avatar appearance have often been viewed as an inhibitor to adoption but this issue should fade as quicker and easier methods of configuring avatars become available.
3. Educate users on the risks and responsibilities of reputation management. Organizations can avoid problems with employees mixing their personal and professional avatar interaction and activities by suggesting that employees use one avatar for their work interactions and another avatar for personal activities.
4. Extend the code of conduct to include avatars in 3-D virtual environments. Just as with social networking sites and individual Web pages where employees participate as representatives of their employer, an avatar’s behavior and appearance are a reflection of the individual and the company they work for. Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments. However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes.
5. Explore the business case for avatars. Justifying avatar use in a business setting is becoming easier, in part because avatar use is gaining wider acceptance. Training and virtual meetings are the top use cases, and one of the main reasons for the increased use of avatars is cost.
6. Encourage usage and enterprise pilots. Looking ahead, one of the biggest uses of avatars appears to be for online meetings. Web meetings are emerging as an important new use case for virtual environments, and this may be a good point at which to start learning about the issues and opportunities surrounding users and avatars. Enterprises may find that they have a willing and ready population of users who are familiar with avatars and their usage. Pilot testing is still the best option for starting to understand the issues that enterprises will face with increased avatar adoption.
Point three is an interesting case for how businesses interact with online worlds. 10 years ago it was common for individuals within business to use their own emails before businesses properly invested or managed corporate email systems (and it is still highly common in India). Are avatars a similar case or does this represenan example of businesses trying to shape the behaviour of their employees in what I thought was an old style.
Moreover do we associate an avatar which is a personal representation with a corporate brand? How far should corporate guidelines go before they become restrictive or constraining. Put differently, corporate guidelines are so often lowest common denominator and suddenly we start seeing citibank avatars looking all alike.
Avatars are behavioural and as such as part of the brand culture of a company. Getting employees behind a brand is the key variable in brand success and integrity. Avatars are not reputational as such. If they are weird or represent the male chairman naked and big tits – it will certainly cause a story and then reputation might suffer. But presently nobody mistakes an avatar for a person as such and what the avatar does might be offputting but it wont be seen as indicative.
More pertinently corporates have to tread carefully around how much they control employees in the online space. Corporatising avatars is more likely to cause reputation loss if it is not handled carefully.
Posted in Company Reputation, Reputation Online, Social Network Sites | Tags: avatars, branding, Social Networks, web brand | No Comments »
Brands Reputation Online
This is my 2nd post on the online reputation of the worlds top 100 brands, in this post I am looking at number 11 on the list HP brand.
- HP – They have a pretty good presence on the first page of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), they have their main site, sub domains and also smaller sites they run. The wikipedia page is quite negative about them, it word be worth seeing if they can push that down the rankings.
- Mercedes-Benz one of the few brands I have come across who seem to have a good handle with on and off line reputation management, maybe the car industry is so used to being scrutinized by motor journalists that they have got good at protecting their brand. One bad article at the top of a SERP could effect sales dramatically. What is interesting is if you search one of their products eg Mercedes-Benz c class then Mercedez does not dominate the SERPs as much. I would focus my efforts as people will tend to search by product rather than just brand.
- Gillette – Have done a great job on their overall brand name, with no negative results on the first page of Google. they have built sites for their products like Gillette fusion, so a big thumbs up, good job. One thing I spotted though on a quick search there are about 70 user-names still available on social media sites.
- Cisco – have got quite a few websites on the first page but the Wiki page is quite negative in parts. There are also about 50 user names for Cisco available on the top 120 social sites
- BMW – SERPs show BMW owned sites for most of the results and fan clubs which are positive, and the wiki page is positive. The specific products could do with some extra reputation management work as there is scope for negatives to creep up the SERPs. Also BMW is only 3 characters which causes issue for the social network sites that normally need a minimum of 6 digits. Suggest using their product names for user names.
Will continue down the list of top 100 brands in forth coming posts and make quick suggestions for brand protection.
Posted in Examples, Reputation Management, Reputation Online, SEO, Social Network Sites | Tags: 100brands, BMW, Cisco, crisis, Gillette, hp, management, marketing, Mercedes-Benz, reputation, social, social sites | No Comments »
Company and Brand Names need thinking through
Often in the passed before the revolution of the online world having a unique and memorable name wast often a good thing. How times have changed since the rise of the internet, or as it could be called nowadays the Customer Review Network. When deciding on a name you must consider the pros and cons. Having a unusual name makes it easier to do well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), however the big downside to this of course is it makes it very easy for negative comments in forums, blogs and 3rd party sites to start appearing on the first page of Google.
Here is a great example of 2 very well known restaurant franchise companies KFC and MacDonald’s. If you google these two names you will notice two different outcomes the first 3 or 4 results for KFC are websites managed by KFC however most of the results below them are negative. Do the same for McDonald’s and you will only get positive results, why is that? The main reason is McDonald is of course a Scottish name and a very strong one, so there are many groups like the McDonald clans, families and other businesses all trying to get to the top of the SERPs for the search term Mcdonald. Not only that, McDonald Restaurants are also very proactive on the net and have 100′s of websites which smother the first few pages of the SERPs.
So if keeping you company name clean on the net is number one priority make sure you choose a name that is quite generic but not overly broad, so for example Car Garage Ltd would be to generic, but Chicago Car Garage maybe OK. Also make sure you check the user-name is available using tools like http://knowem.com/ If you do a search on the main social network sites, it could be enough to put you off using that name if they are not available on sites like Twitter.
Posted in Examples, Reputation Management, Reputation Online, SEO, Social Network Sites | Tags: brand names, checking usernames, kfc, mcdonalds, protecting, SERPs, Social Network Sites | No Comments »
ReputationManagmentFor.com Voted Top Reputation Management Company
topseos Identifies Reputation Managment For .com as One of the Top 5 Reputation Management Firms for the Month of October / 2010
Reputation Managment For .com is named a superlative reputation management firm in the month of October / 2010 by topseos.
Reputation Managment For .com has secured the number 1 rank on this month’s list of the Top 5 reputation management firms. The monthly rankings list published by topseos is a guide to the cream of the crop internet marketing vendors in the industry.
“Reputation Managment For .com is honored by this recognition from topseos and we will continue to work hard to maintain and go beyond this position that we have secured”, said Mark Scott Director.
Reputation Managment For .com is included in this list for its consistent performance and the superior services rendered to its clients.
topseos seeks out the leading firms in the industry through a rigorous evaluation criteria that includes:
- Competitive advantage
- Superior services and pricing
- Customer and technical support
- Response to client problems
- Innovations that set it apart from the competition
- Overall efficiency
- Overall performance
As part of the evaluation process, clients of Reputation Managment For .com are asked to give feedback on general and project specific questions such as:
Rate your overall experience.
What type of needs analysis was conducted before work initiated?
How were your organizational goals aligned with the reputation management activities?
What activities are put into place to enhance your online relations?
How are reputation management activities reported and documented?
“The whole industry looks to us to identify reliable and accurate benchmarks and Reputation Managment For .com has proven by its performance that they deserve to be on this coveted list”, shared Jeev Trika, Partner at topseos.
For more information about Reputation Managment For .com log on to www.reputationmanagementfor.com
About topseos
Since its introduction in 2002, topseos has been identified as an independent authority on vendors who supply internet marketing products and services ranging from the best search engine optimization companies to the best pay per click management tools. In addition, topseos connects thousands of businesses each year that are looking for internet marketing services with those who provide it.
With dedicated online presence in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, topseos continues to make a global impact in the internet marketing arena.
Company Contact:
847-329-1159
service@topseos.com
www.topseos.com
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