Archive for December, 2009

Johnson & Johnson is doing what a company should be doing during a crisis. The top brass have decided to voluntarily recall the Tylenol Arthritis Pain Caplets due to complaints of mouldy smell that can cause nausea and sickness.

The Food and Drug Administration is a strict watchdog when it comes to complaints. The website has “Report a problem” tabs where anyone can make a complaint. If anyone’s on the watch it’s the FDA and so a company like J&J wouldn’t want these complaints to snowball into a reputation management nightmare.

The prudent thing to be done is to make a recall of the suspected lots, claim that “these are minor problems”, assure people “there is no cause for worry” and finally fix the problem. J&J has done just that.

We recommend this follow-up action: Keep up the positive content on the brand and ensure company reputation does not take a beating. Put out news everywhere that recalls are being made and that the problem is being fixed. Even follow up with news of freshly tested new batches of meds in the days to follow.

This is damage limitation at its best and crisis management that actually works!

When searching for ‘Tiger Woods’ on Google it didn’t bring up his official website, but something rather spicy to be precise.

Woods reputation has taken a beating no doubt, and now his announcement about indefinite leave from golf will further make matter worse. Companies and products that Woods endorse are caught sitting ducks. A rough estimates shows an already loss to incur is around $12 billion.

The positive reputation he has worked years to attain now shows above his official website.  Being a celebrity your reputation is always at the crossroads and anything can hit you.  Strangely in Mr. Woods’s case it was a (mysterious) accident.

It may be noted that before the accident Tiger Woods enjoyed 85% positive sentiments on social media. Interestingly a week post-accident it did not plunged to a very low either as a sudden impact.  This was the ideal time to capitalize and minimize the damage, if only Mr. Woods had believed in Reputation Management.

With no proper damage control plan in place it was all expected. Surprisingly the reaction from the Woods clubhouse has been too slow and hazy. Tiger should realize that ‘No press is tantamount to Bad press‘ and he took his own time to clear the air. Meanwhile internet and the social media websites were flooded with more negative comments thus creating its own crisis. Negative comments later jumped to 40% from 15%, while the positive sentiment was at an all time low of 14%.

This whole affair will cost the golfer $100 million a year in endorsement income. Too late for the Tiger to be out of the woods if only he knew- “It takes hundreds of good golf shots to gain confidence, but only one bad one to lose it” -  Jack Nicklaus .

Shashi Tharoor tweeted again and explained why he was quiet while the visa controversy was going on everywhere on TV and the WWW. His boss Minister of External Affairs, S M Krishna went on to say that such matters should not be discussed on a public forum like Twitter. Tharoor however tweeted so this morning…

Was travelling outof range& missed brouhaha.Now that EAM Krishnaji,whom I respect,has spoken,I hv nothing 2add.Will discuss visa issue w him.

But thanks for all the kind words over the last 24hrs. Appreciate the support!

Support he had from everywhere but the politicians of both the ruling Congress party and the opposition. Debates went on on all major news channels on Tharoor’s tweets. People were amused and felt he has every right to tweet what he feels like while his party were left explaining. The difference of opinion between the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) and the Home Ministry was discussed at length.

For the rest of the country it was a great day – a minister telling them things like it is. There’s hope for politicians in India after all, we may yet have a new breed of leaders who dare to be different.

Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs is no stranger to social networking and is the highest followed person in India on Twitter. Tharoor in fact popularised Twitter in India to a great extent with his now controversial Tweets and was even named “Twitteroor” for his political gaffes as far as his political party’s stances were concerned.

The minister is intellectual, tech-savvy and popular with the masses and has 537,478 followers on Twitter when this post was written. The problem with Tharoor is that his Tweets are a source of both admiration and political uproar at the same time. Even as he endears himself to the youngsters, the geriatric members of his often sycophantic Congress party look at him as an up-start of sorts.

That Tharoor was in the initial stages a close rival to the UN Secretary-General post of Ban Ki Moon and that he has numerous books to his name all accord him a celebrity status. What I like about him the most is his constant attempts at making his countrymen laugh at themselves. Here he is back in the news for tweeting against his own government’s tightening of tourist visas to India. This is what he tweeted -

Dilemma of our age: tough visa restrictions in hope of btr (better) security or openness & (and) liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.

When asked about the economy class of Air India he famously tweeted -

“absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”

The slang was lost on most people in India and when he added the holy cows all hell broke loose.

That he has huge plans for his country and is not afraid to speak his mind and even against his own government makes him stand apart. But then these days how the mighty fall ( Tiger Woods) and before you know it, courting controversy can finally catch up. The minister sure needs some expert reputation management for continuing his work well and to be in the good books of the old war horses in the Congress party.

Being a busy man he needs the services of an army of experts to help him with online reputation management and being a celebrity and a politician the need only magnifies manifold.

Nestle – as if the controversy was not enough for their Honey Shreddies, here comes another blow from FDA over their Juicy Juice drink BOOST.  The company claims it is a complete Nutritional Drink.  FDA says – ‘Nestle is promoting the drink as a medical food and that it treats “failure to thrive” and helps children in chronic illness.

Well about Nestle “Their actions are so loud, one cannot hear what they say“. Nestle seems to oversee the fact that consumers aren’t fools, this age when the world is just a click away it will not take much time for your reputation to go for a ride in matter of minutes. In the recent case we have seen how Twitter and Facebook were flooded with articles and calls to boycott them.

While we know that Nestle is always in controversy, what surprises me is they have no action in place to counter it and are always wondering what hit them.

Strangely they say one thing and go on doing something else. Nestle responses are always generic – send them an e-mail only to get a reply ‘the mail is forwarded to the Switzerland, Headquarters. Their handling of a situation is poorly managed – they bask on PR, which is just an aspect of the approach and not a substitute of Reputation management.

Buying time will only make matter worse; the consumer has the power of Internet. Nestle should let it be known that they are transparent. You cannot hide things from consumer; the skeletons will be out and the rest internet will ensure that you don’t stay in single piece.

Better late than never Nestles should do some brainstorming. Internet and plenty of social media out there it’s a classic example of “word to mouth” for your reputation.

Boy oh boy! Boy George will have to return the 200,000 pounds he got as fee to enter Celebrity Big Brother. A court has ruled against the disgraced star’s participation in the show. Boy George was sentenced for 15 months for imprisoning a Norwegian in shackles and assaulting him and is still under probation.

Though the singer managed to get an early release, his attempt at getting back into celebrity life was quashed with this court order. Talk about being in the doldrums of reputation… Boy George sure needs to be back in the spotlight, however, to actually be in a TV show where people watch you like a lab rat, could have backfired and we will never know how it would have panned. I guess the courts did not want to condone the ‘celebrity’ tag being given to someone who is still on probation and wearing a tag.

Boy George needs serious celebrity reputation management and that’s a nobrainer; he needs to be making an example of his life against cocaine addiction and erratic behavior. Connect to real people on Twitter and Facebook and slowly build his reputation back. Reality shows may not be such a great idea and MC Hammer, Heidi Fleiss and the rest who are in CBB should wonder why they have been selected for the show.

For Boy George the ban may have been the right thing to have happened, but time to work on some great online reputation re-building is the way ahead for him to keep his celebrity tag.

When you get a spam mail do not delete it and take sometime to read it (do not reply or react). If you notice the content of the mails are mostly promotional about all kinds of business. The majority of spam mails is to do with breast enlargement or about male enhancement. Do not be surprised to know that these mail as they claim comes from bigger companies than you own.

Now that’s a bait!
Some people ignorant of the fact what spam mail are suppose to be tend to reply them. What tempts them to respond is something interesting, well! It’s the big names like MSN, Amazon or Paypal attached to this email.

Now that’s what we call bait – you being skeptical shoot an email to that owner only to know it was spam. Unfortunately the damage is already done, you have authenticated and confirmed your email address, and now the spammer has all sources at his disposal to flood your Inbox.

What is the point.
Well give it a thought! If the spammer thinks that using reputed companies like MSN, Amazon or Paypal is perfectly fine, what makes you think that your business is safe. As we all know burglars are always on the lookout for huge cache, and they en route their plans using smaller companies because they know with smaller companies it is always a win-win situation. If this situation is not handled properly, imagine the kind of damage your business will inherit, you may even close your shop.

How to shield
Now urgency has pounced on you, there is nothing as important, but to shield your reputation before more people gives it a bad name. This not only results in loosing business even your identity too.

Smart move, you want somebody to take responsibility and guard your business and personal reputation.

Reputation managers will then try to capitalize on the already done damage until such time your reputation is secure. This is probably the best option and least you worry about the reputation of your business.

Send out a strong message and let no one think about using your company’s goodwill to fill their own coffers in future.

2010 is going to be an interesting year for SEO, Reputation Management and Online PR, there could not of been a better example of how the communication world is changing, with this years Christmas number 1. TV vs Facebook;  X Factor vs  Rage Against The Machine.  2010 will see a real shift towards groups of people on social sites really making a difference and having access to many tools to shout out even louder.  Tools like Facebook, Twitter to name a few are only part of it, with the introduction of Google’s sidewiki which allows people, customers, competition to write remarks about a website without any control.  There is no opt out of sidewiki, customers will love it, businesses who have a bad track record of customer service will hate it.

Many companies will need to allow for Reputation Management to be in their marketing budget for 2010, but this is not a negative, far from it.  In the last 5 years there has been a massive shift from traditional advertising to online advertising because, if done correctly the returns on investment can be far greater than traditional advertising.  Plus if you focus some of your efforts on organic SEO and RM you will see them as an investment rather than just a cost.  Compare that to a TV advert, once you’ve spent you budget the advert is gone, unless someone has recorded off the TV, but even then most people just fast forward through the adverts.

How Reputation Management Works

So you’ve decided you want to focus your efforts on improving your position online and spent a wee fortune on SEO, what happens next?

The customer finds your site and now knows your company name, it is at this point that Reputation Management and Online PR play their roll, because if the customer has not bookmarked your website they will put your company name in instead.  It only then takes one negative comment on a forum to start effecting your sales and the reason for this, if that negative comment appears on the first page of the search results and starts to attract more negative comments it doesn’t take long for it to rise up the search results and ultimately be sitting directly below your own site.   Having a negative result directly below your own company website can attract up to 70% of your potential customers to click on it first rather than click on your site.  Pushing the negative forum down the SERP’s is where RM and SEO come into play.

If personalised search results are here to stay, then click through rates could be one of the determining factors for which site will show for your company name.  Maybe PPC campaigns will help with CTR and make certain sites perform better, but the jury is still out on this.

If 2010 for your business is about converting more of the right customers then reputation management has to be up there in the marketing budget.  There is no point spending 1000’s on advertising only to loose all those potential sales because of negative things being said about your business.  So here is our top tips for 2010.

The BBC reports that a survey conducted by British Heart Foundation found that most mothers were hoodwinked by the nutrition table on products they bought for their children. The online survey done on 1454 parents between ages 16 to 64 and kids aged 15 or below brought out these interesting facts listed below.

Nestle’s Honey Shreddies, which claim to be wholegrain and to “keep your heart healthy and maintain a healthy body”, contain more sugar [13.6g] than a ring doughnut [9.2g] in an average serving.

Kellogg’s Coco Pops cereal and milk bars are labelled as “a source of calcium, iron and six vitamins” and 63% of mothers in the survey thought they were healthy.

“Contains no artificial flavouring or sweeteners or preservatives” was taken as healthy by most parents along with the tag “wholegrain”, while this is not true. It’s all in the wording, this is designed to be misleading within the EU Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation.

We cannot single out Nestle or Kelloggs alone for this, it’s become the norm and when they make these nutrition labels they only say the good part of it all. While the hiding quantity of sugar and fats are usually in the fine print. We need to be informed and be told things in plain terms.

Food and drink industry is monitored all the time but something like this especially when it comes to healthy snacks for kids can be quite a blow to the big names in the industry. Not quite the Christmas gift they were expecting, right?

What can food companies do for brand protection from this bad press? Get information out there about the benefits and even come clean about the not-so-great facts, for a start. Nothing like a few twitter posts and blogs in these times of google real-time search integration, to tackle this crsis.  Nestle and Kelloggs, what say?

What’s else can motivate you to stay at home this Christmas?  With the fall of Flyglobespan, BA managing to stop a strike, Eurostar trains not working and the roads, well quite frankly a nightmare.  Why bother having all this stress and just enjoy what I hope is a White Christmas back in the UK.

It was crazy how Eurostar dealt with the crises of people being stuck on the train for 7 hours.  The first thing that sprung into my mind is what would happened if that was a fire?  Would you be stuck on the train in the middle of the tunnel for 7 hours with smoke building up.  I hope not.

What I don’t understand is why so many companies get it wrong when it comes to keeping its customers up to date. I hear time and time again that people are left standing in stations, airpots, etc and don’t have a clue what’s going on.  This can be just about the most damaging thing for a companies reputation, management should have responded to their customers immediately, even just to say, sorry we’re on it just not sure what the problem is.  If a negative situation happens, sometimes this can turn a potential nightmare into a dream situation if its dealt with correctly.

This is just another blow to tourism in general, with the recession, new flight taxes, companies failing and strikes imminent, you can understand why staycations have become so popular.  Unfortunately for Eurostar 1000’s of people are going to remember how they ruined their Christmas.  What should Eurostar do now to fix their reputation and win back customers?