- 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 March 2010
BA Strike sets off chaos among the vacationers
March 30, 2010 | 
Author The second spell of BA strike that is drawing to a close saw the grounding of over 227 flights, which in other words would mean that one in three flights from Heathrow were grounded. The British Airways cabin crew started a three-day strike on Saturday after the talks to settle the over pay and conditions collapsed, leaving thousands of travellers in dire streets. The two consecutive crippling strikes, which extended over weekends caused travel woes for thousands of passengers ahead of the popular Easter holiday weekend. The estimated loss due to the seven day strike of the UK carrier British Airways’ cabin crew union Unite is put at about GBP100 million.
Meanwhile, the Unite union is threatening a third phase of industrial action should an agreement not be reached, soon after Easter, around 14 April. A solution to the all out war brewing between the BA management and the union regarding cost cutting measures and working conditions of over 13,500 cabin crew is no where in sight. While the workers demanded better perks,BA is sticking to its stand that even as the company registered a loss of nearly £300million in the first half, the cabin crew had faced no pay cuts and remained “the best rewarded in the UK airline industry”.
As the claims and counterclaims continue unabated, the passengers are meted out with a raw deals, blotched holiday plans and undue hardships for no fault of theirs. What is astonishing was that even when the nation is grinding to a halt by a spate of airlines and rail strikes, the government machinery does not seem to be in a hurry to resolve the issues and minimise the hardships of its citizens.
The Prime Minister Gordon Brown stuck to his opinion that “The disruption to services is completely unacceptable, it places passengers who have already booked flights in a very difficult position.”
From a reputation management point of view, the national airliner of the UK has fared really badly in handling the labour strike as it runs a risk of losing a major chunk of its customer base. As other airlines are enhancing capacity to cope with extra demand, the risk of a major revenue loss for BA is on the cards!
- BA strike returns – Ballot today!
- BA Cabin Crew Goes Glug Glug Glug
- What lies behind the British Airways Strike
- British Airways – Legal action to save reputation!
Posted in Company Reputation | 
Tags: BA management, BA Strike, easter holiday, loss, pay hike, Unite | 
1 Comment »
Reputation Management, PR and SEO goes hand-in-hand
Reputation Management is about what you do, say, and what others say about you. So do we have a tinge of PR into this. What is public relation (PR) all about? We have already debated in the past about PR being one tool that is mostly about marketing and communication, but we haven’t talked about how PR culminates with reputation management. What is the role of SEO that completes the cycle?
Public relations is one factor that takes care of your reputation, with the intention to influence customers and support their belief about your product goodwill. It is a continuous process to maintain an amicable understanding between public and an organization. PR supports the efforts of reputation management, and there are various techniques to do that; press release, blogs, copy writing are some of the essentials that is used as a public relation strategy. Dealing with crisis management both online and offline is another form. All this signifies that constant communication is the core and vital that helps to put an effective image of your brand.
Next comes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the most powerful tool in the armour. SEO agents know how to target keywords that is causing damage to your reputation and in the bid will kill them to minimize the damage. The only difference is unlike every time SEO here will not only concentrate on doing online stuff thereby missing the real issue of reputation management, and overlook the cause of potential damage to the brand or business.
Finally, the complete package of RM, PR plus SEO is here to stay and deliver the requisite in keeping the reputation of your organization the way you want, after all your business deserves it.
Online Reputation Management – A mix of SEO and PR
This post is about demystifying ORM in the simplest way possible…
- Is online reputation management (ORM) kinda like SEO? Yes it is, the one cannot exist without the other in the online world.
- Is reputation management like public relations? Yes it is, ORM is a lot about projecting the right image to the world.
In fact, we here at Reputation Management For.com believe that ORM is a mix of all this and yet it is more.
Functions of ORM:
Reputation Management is all about protecting, defending and removing the best and the worst respectively, about you from the public eye.
Picking up on things on alerts, monitoring the airwaves for all that is being said about a person who can be a celebrity, a professional or a politician or a corporate entity or a brand as the case may be is an important function of ORM.
Crawling the internet for everything being said about you helps to push forward the positive content and maybe even create an online buzz about something new. This is an important part of ORM.
Having a presence on different blog networks and social networking platforms, and maintaining them regularly is another function.
ORM is a routine, on-going process that should be part of your advertising or marketing, if it isn’t already.
When crisis strikes: ORM, however, gets into overdrive when there is a crisis and this is when the PR side of it comes out in full force. The online entity is under attack and it needs to be done systematically like in any other media.
- Real-time searches need to be monitored and looked into and Facebook posts and tweets all add up to the quick re-bound in reputation.
- Blog posts and news and more so in the case of press releases all play an important part in minimizing a crisis.
ORM, in short, does all that you would do in the real world – show up at the right places, make statements, give interviews, go on chat shows, keep you in the spotlight and put you in the news as and when required.
The only difference is that, this is the virtual world and the blog posts, press releases, tweets and Facebook posts all do what you would have done physically in the real world.
With the power cyberspace has on this world having ORM in place to watch your back only makes good sense. ORM is here to stay, and may be called SERM or PR with a cyber twist, but its the one thing to have in place if your business is all about your good reputation!
Facebook Twitter Youtube can be deactivated without warning
Recently my Facebook account was diactivated without warning I couldn’t understand why. I went to logon to my facebook account and was given an error message that my password and username were incorrect. I then spotted a link saying that my account had been deactivated because I had breeched the terms and conditions. I had absoluteley no idea what they were talking about. I thought 3 years of posting, photos, pages, groups had all gone down the drain. There was a small link that you can follow to possibly get your account reactivated. Fortunately somebody mentioned that I had posted them a really weired message in facebook which meant one thing, my account had been hacked.
Facebook at no point emailed me to say they were closing my account or the reason for it, only that I had breached the terms and conditions. So I emailed them explaining that my account was hacked and I had nothing to do with it. 3 weeks later I got an email to say they have acknowleged my first email, I then got a reply a few days later requesting some security questions. Another week passed and eventually I got my account back online.
See what happened to this guy who has lost 900 videos on utube. It doesn’t dawn on you how easily you can loose a lifetime of content and work over night using the clouds and 3rd party sites like Facebook and Twitter. It’s like when your pc gets a virus and wipes everything and what is the first response from people? You did back up didn’t you. Since the episode with Facebook I have been looking aound and found many simlar stories, which makes you think if I am getting a service for free then what protection do I have.
It will be interesting to see how many people loose years worth of work using these types of services including Flickr, picasa and so. So my advice if you are storing all your family photos on a free service, or even paid one and not in a good old fashion photo albulm then you may loose everything over night.
How Public Relations is connected to Reputation management?
With the proliferation of online scandals and the marked shifts in the online consumer behaviour, the Public Relations practitioners are trying hard to fine tune their Public relation practices accordingly. The PR industry all over the world is making a serious effort to educate itself about the application of new PR channels.
A random study on Fortune 500 companies suggests that reputation management is increasingly becoming the philosophy behind corporate public relations. PR is evolving slowly yet steadily into a more strategic and holistic discipline of reputation management, an interdisciplinary subject that relates to the image of a corporation and its public relation scores. However, unlike traditional PR practices, the reputation management approach is not all about promises and customer services but it strategically guides a brand in such a way that it delivers on the promise. To put in a different way, it would be like while brands make promises, RM ensures that these promises are met.
In the past, things were much simpler as the PR professionals could call their contacts within the media to keep a negative story from getting published. However these days, as any one can post negative reviews about a company or a person through the participatory web networks, companies need to be more open and transparent in their PR policies to make sure that they remain connected with their target audience always. A sound public relation practice would help the companies to get a foothold on what’s being said and discussed about their brands. Remember, conversations are happening with or without you and the best method to make sure that your brand does well is to get involved and not to get away!
Brands need to be continuously monitored and if you notice any bad reviews, it must be addressed quickly. Come up with a white paper on what went wrong and where or spell out the damage control exercise that the company is planning to take. This would help to build up the trust among the customers and to clear the air and suspicion, if any. This is not just a smart reputation management move but also helps to plug the snowballing effect caused by the controversies. Corporate PR and communications should be allocated enough resources in proportion to the value of the brand equity. The bigger the brand, the greater will be the risk if you fail to pay heed to what the social sites and the blogosphere is buzzing with. Reputation management is nothing but getting your public relations in place. Silence may be golden in the real world but not in the virtual world, where everything goes by constant updates and sharing!
IPL 2010 – Tweeting, live video streaming & money
The Indian Premier League (IPL) 2010 has begun yet again with its Bollywood star power and deep pockets of business tycoons and is looking like a well-oiled business enterprise adept at social networking.
All teams, Kolkata KnightRiders (KKR), Deccan Chargers (DC) Rajasthan Royals (RR), Delhi Daredevils (DD), Kings XI Punjab, Chennai Superkings (CSK), Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Mumbai Indians (MI),l are active on Twitter.
For the first time IPL has tied up with Google and has live video streaming via the IPL YouTube channel so that the great Indian diaspora can enjoy the games from far-flung places around the globe. In terms of channel views, the first day of IPL 2010 saw the number going up 84 per cent to 880,615 by the second half of the day from 478,057 in the first half. By Sunday, it had crossed 3.1 millions.
For now the quality of the videos being streamed remains to be analysed but there is no denying that as business ventures go, the IPL 2010 takes its online presence seriously.
Tweeting owners: Team owners like Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shettty; captains like Shane Warne and players like Robin Uttappa and Yuvraj Singh are all busy tweeting away. IPL Chairman Lalit Modi is active on twitter as well along with PR people of each team tweeting about their respective teams. This is celebrity reputation management as well; all things IPL have celebrity status these days in India.
Mobile TV technology companies, gaming portals and online ticket booking sites are all raking in the moolah.
Being active on Twitter is crucial for team owners and more so in the case of Shahrukh Khan (SRK) whose team faced a reputation management crisis like no other – a blogger, who called himself the “fakeiplblogger” on blogspot, regularly trashed the team and its owner with surprising inside info on the workings of the team and its off-scene activity in South Africa last year. The team morale nosedived and KKR were languishing at the bottom.
This time around the buzz is great for KKR, SRK himself is tweeting his way into people’s hearts and making sure nothing works against his team. A great example of how controversy helped create a buzz is his last movie MNIK (My name is KHAN), thanks to social networking sites and the tag “MNIK” trended worldwide on Twitter and helped the star regain some of his lost popularity.
IPL 2010 stands testimony to how important reputation management through social media is for businesses and sport like cricket these days.
Posted in Celebrity Reputation, Company Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, Social Network Sites | Tags: Bollywood, Cricket, IPL 2010, IPL 3, Lalit Modi, Live Video streaming, Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Shane Warne, Shilpa Shetty, twitter, youtube | No Comments »
Lindsay Lohan E-trade saga
Lindsay Lohan is yet again in news. The 23-year-old actress has filed a lawsuit against E-Trade for $100 million over a Super Bowl ad featuring a “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay. The controversial TV ad features a baby boy apologizing to his girlfriend for not calling her because he was busy trading stocks on E-Trade. Lohan alleged E-trade for breaching of civil rights and use of her name, ‘Lindsay’ and characterization without payment or permission.
This is nothing new for the glam doll who has the habit of being in news for all the wrong reasons; starting from spending a day in jail, her relationship with Samantha Ronson, being shooed away by enraged people in the Paris Fashion Week, Lindsay has it all in her to invite controversy.
If we look back, Tracy Palmer, the Director of Consumer Advertising Sprint, made no fuss when her name was used for the girls character in the sprint ad. So doubts are afloat if this whole controversy by Lindsay is a publicity stunt. The allegations levied by her lawyer also seems inappropriate to stand up in the court.
“Many celebrities are known by one name, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit,” Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said in a statement to the New York Post . “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”
The whole drama has done a world of good for E-trade, with thousands of people searching for the controversial commercial online. Wonder why LiLo seems so offended, or is it a mere frustration of hers. She is in real need of a quality PR and some strategic celebrity reputation management to be in place to regain her lost image as a celebrity rather than as a troubled star.
We, at Reputation Management For.com, feel that Lindsay has to retain the confidence of the public and should work towards getting back her stardom. Who will want to sponsor a celebrity who may turn round and sue them later, had she not mentioned anything for the best part the ad would have gone unnoticed, now even we are writing about it now!
Jimmy Carr, Jonathan Ross and John Terry what do they all have in common?
We are a very pro-active and believe in taking a preventative measure rather than waiting until negative results start appearing about a company or individual. We wanted to start reporting on companies and celebrities and ranking them on how good their online PR and reputation management is. We started with 3 completely different celebs and will be adding to it weekly.
- Jimmy Carr got into hot water about a joke he performed.
- Jonathan Ross got into trouble about a phone call prank.
- John Terry had an affair with a team mates partner
What is apparent is the lack of online presence celebs and companies have. This is asking for trouble and with search engines becoming faster at reporting news, photos and videos if you don’t take action to protect your reputation online then you are allowing other people to write anything they want about you. Anyone with a phone is now a journalist, they can blog you, post you, video you and with in minutes have them online.
We can help protect and defend your reputation online, we highly recommend you do this before negative things may appear about you. It is way more difficult to push negative results down once they are there, by reducing the chances of results appearing on the first page will help soften or eliminate negative stories all together on the first page of Google.
If you need help or want to protect your reputation online then give us a call:
Call: UK +44(0)845 862 1893
Call: USA +1 646 723 3965
or fill out our online enquiry form
Posted in Celebrity Reputation, Reputation Online, Reviews & Quality | Tags: cel, Celeb Agents, jimmy carr, John Terry, jonathan ross, Online PR | No Comments »
Apple in patent row with HTC
Apple iPhone, which was originally launched in 2007 is still grappling with many issues – legal and otherwise. If it were the connectivity issues and deficient functions and features in its earlier days; now it is the patents and copy right issues that are plaguing the Apple smart phone.
Apple is grappling with copy right issues with HTC and has taken legal action against the Taiwan based phone maker HTC, alleging that it has infringed as many as 20 patents owned by Apple that are used in the iPhone.
HTC is famous for its many sleek handsets including Nexus One, the first handset to be branded by Google apart from many other handsets that employ Google’s Android operating system. With Google defending its mobile handset partner of HTC, it is going to be a tussle between the giants. Though Google is not a party to the law suit, it has decided to throw its weight behind HTC, its partner in developing the Android technology. Google chief Eric Schmidt had resigned last year from the Apple board of directors alleging conflict of interest in the wake of increasing competition between Google and Apple in Android Vs iPhone competition to wrestle the market share.
At least some industry watchers are rather skeptical of the timing of the law suit of Apple, which surprisingly coincided with the launch of the Android phones and many feel that it could be a delaying tactic of Apple to slow down the Android market before Google edges them out in the race. By targetting HTC, which manufactures a range of Android and Windows Mobile devices, Apple may be trying to put the entire industry on notice and to ensure its monopoly in this technology. With speculations gathering momentum, the need of the hour for Apple is to clear the apprehensions of atleast some consumers who have started thinking that Apple has gone overboard by clipping others in the fray in marketing its product.
We at Reputation Management For.com feel that a sound PR policy will not just protect the domain and the technology of Apple but also can clear the air before the customers start wondering who has stolen whose technology? The need of the hour for Apple is to safeguard the trust and the goodwill reposed in this world famous brand by the millions of apple fans all over the world.
Posted in Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, Product Reviews | Tags: Android phone, Apple iPhone, Google, HTC, Nexus One, Patent row | No Comments »
Toyota faces refund claims
After a massive global recall, the Japanese car giant ‘Toyota’ is yet again feeling the heat with the car owners demanding for full refund of their cars. Adding to the already grief ridden recall saga, Toyota invited loads of criticisms followed by legal battles ever since the revelations of their car’s tendency to accelerate out of control. The technical glitch seems too hot to handle for Toyota, and now the customers are out of control.
Thankfully, the recent recall by both Honda and Toyota has let the consumer’s to lose their confidence for Japanese vehicles. Has this change in consumer preference exposed the grey area for Toyota or other Japanese car makers? Blessing in disguise, the American car makers, ‘GM Motors’ and ‘Ford’ are finally ready to capitalize on their once undisputed Japanese competitors.
Lately the Attorneys Toyota Actions Consortium (ATAC) added rackerteering claims on Toyota for its number of lawsuits. Tim Howard,who is coordinating the ATAC even said that :
Undoubtedly all these development has tormented the reputation of Toyota globally. The growing list of enraged customers proves how PR was never considered at the first place followed by the absence of a strategic reputation management. Setting an examples how things can slip off your hands, if not dealt the way it has to be. Toyota has lost its reputation and number one position for being the most favorable customer loyal car maker in US. But its only matter of time before we know how grave the scar is for Toyota and other Japanese car companies.
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