If you think that the online information about your product is as secure as you thought, I will be sorry to say you are wrong. You never know unless you are tracking your online reputation if any disgruntled customer or competitor is griping about you on Facebook and twitter. A close introspection and we found that Facebook status and twitter updates appear in Google’s search results faster. Why Google? Because that’s where 90% of internet users go to fetch information about you. So make sure what you want them to know about you because your understanding about your brand and product is not what you say, but what Google suggest it is.

Twitter and Facebook have cut a deal with Google regarding updates over six months ago. Other search engines who do not want to be left out of the race are pursuing and seem to have reached similar agreements with social media sites. So it means that if a client or customer happens to search on your Twitter or Facebook username they will see everything and anything that has been tweeted recently or posted on your FB status.

Negatives if any will be visible to any and all of your potential clients. Trust us, if you fail to deal with this you are never going to make a second good impression.

Why do you need to manage your online reputation? It’s anybody’s guess, what will happen if a client or customer researches about your product or service and finds 25 negative tweets and status citing some strange issues on the first two pages of Google.  But what if those 25 negative rants are replaced with positive ones and made to rank above the negative contents?

Ask us is that possible? And ask yourself does your company need it.

Well our answer is, yes it is possible, if you are serious about your online reputation. Remember when you have 25 negative reviews to surmount; you have a serious reputation management problem. Frankly most companies don’t have that much unless their products or service is that bad really. But with reputation management you get a fighting chance to protect what is yours and give your best shot.

Yesterday we did a piece on the Top Ten Reputation Management Tips, detailing 10 things you really should be doing to preserve your own/brand name on t’internet. And, while we freely admit that the list wasn’t exhaustive, there are also some things which – equally as importantly – you should NOT be doing. Whilst amicable that you should wish to fix any issues that may arise, within you is the potential to make things a whole lot worse, too.

The following are examples of the top 10 things not to do to manage your own reputation. When they say the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, they’re talking about this list:

1/ Don’t Engage In Bad Business Practices

Yeah, like, duh. You shouldn’t even need to be reminded of this (and most of you don’t), but the quickest way of landing yourself in hot bother is by making bad ethical business choices. But it’s not just your archetype evil business tycoon that’s prone to doing this, it’s pretty much anyone that runs a business. The economy is utter trash at the moment and making cuts is necessary for a lot of people, but you need to be careful what you’re making cuts to. If you’re cutting corners on normal business procedures, customer service, customer aftercare (for example) – it will reflect reflect badly on you and it will get out. The safest bet you can make is that nothing you do is guaranteed to stay private, or behind closed doors, and that for every irate customer or business partner it’s a potential bad story appearing on the internet. Just think “Should this get out, how would this reflect on me/the company?” and you’ll make far fewer bad judgement calls.

2/ Don’t Rush To Admit You Are Wrong

Seems a bit of a u-turn on that last one, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. We’re not suggesting that you intentionally hide mistakes, mishaps or unfortunate coincidences, but rushing an apology doesn’t always help either. If something happens and you’re perceived to be at fault, showing a bit of humility and holding your hands up might go a way towards clearing your conscience. But that’s about all the benefit it’ll have, as admitting liability publicly is the only thing anyone’s going to hear. Sure, you might have a solution – you may have already sorted the situation out – but the minute you say “Yeah, our bad”, the only thing you’ll hear about is that you/your company has admitted complacency. And regardless of what the problem was, or how great you were at rectifying the situation, the headlines will all read “[Company Name] Admits Fault”. IF something happens, don’t feel like you have to be brutally honest and hope people will respect you for it. Sort the problem, and issue holding statements (i.e. “We are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it. We will be issuing a full statement in due course.”) until you can confidently say that the issue is behind you. At which point, acknowledge the existence of the issue, explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what provisions are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3/ Don’t Ignore Misdirected Negative Content

“He aint talkin’ about me” logic doesn’t work. Not when it comes to businesses, and not when it comes to preserving your reputation. It’s all well and good safeguarding against your brand/company name receiving negative attention and taking measures, but is that enough? Well, say you ran a company called Big Mike’s Tyres and had a solid reputation. Congratulations. Unfortunately, a few streets away some guy is running a company called Big Mike’s Tiles and, well… his reputation isn’t as good. In fact, he’s pretty much a cowboy; he rips people off and does a terrible job installing new tiles. So naturally, a lot of people take to the internet to complain about him. But, because of keyword similarities, his bad press is appearing on searches for your company. And, if anyone sees a story saying “Big Mike Ripped Me Off!”, you think that each of them are going to take the time to distinguish between different companies? It’s also not completely beyond the realms of possibility that somebody’s going to see the article about Big Mike ripping people off, assume it’s talking about you, and write their own piece criticizing your company. I hate the use of clichés, but don’t let yourself be put in the position of ‘guilty by association’.

4/ Don’t Threaten Legal Action

Speaking of clichés, I also strongly dislike the “exception to every rule” concept. There are undoubtedly going to be exceptions to this one, but you should at least know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the prevention of negative content arising, but there are certainly rules about how you should conduct yourself when it does. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is threatening legal action against authors/publications out of anger. What they’re saying might well be defamation, it might be inaccurate, it might be a whole lot of things that make you look bad, but you can’t get angry about it. Or, at least not outwardly so. You might even have legal grounds  to have it removed, but have you consulted legal counsel? If there are legal implications, leave it to the solicitors to sort. That’s what they’re paid to do. Once you threaten legal action, you make it a far bigger story. Bigger stories attract more attention, and not just from readers. Once a topic becomes popularized, everyone will want a piece, and so instead of one piece of negative content, you’ve got ten people writing about the original story with the extra bit about your ill-advised response. It used to be a concern that when a story got out, people would hear about it. Now though, you need to be far more concerned with who writes about it. Don’t give them the ammunition they need to make their story any better.

5/ Don’t Try To ‘Pay-Off’ Bloggers

Generally speaking, Bloggers write about whatever they want. A lot of amateur writers also feel that in order to maintain a ‘cutting edge’ to their work, they can only do so by being overly and often cynically critical of others. So yeah, you might at one stage find yourself at the receiving end of a good tongue-lashing, compliments of RandomBlogger569. His article is highly critical, unfairly bias and at points is blatant fabrication. How dare he?! Right, what can you do? Well, as established above – threatening legal action is out. What about trying to pay him off? This guy writes blogs as a hobby, and using his words to try and get attention and is rambling on hoping to cause a scene. How much bigger do you think the ‘scene’ is going to be once he’s written a follow-up post about the guy he wrote about trying to bribe him to remove his content? The best advice is not to respond (rather than fan the flames) and take the usual RM steps to ensure it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

6/ Don’t Argue On Review Sites

There are review sites all over the internet covering practically every subject under the sun (and some above it too). This is the by-product of Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content generation. This is mainly because people have found they can make a lot of money off of hosting a platform for people to share their experiences/opinions. It requires very little effort, as people will now actively seek out a website they can share their thoughts on; and the more people who share their thoughts, the more people will look to the site as a point of reference. And, with that kind of traffic, comes advertising revenue. So these sites are out to make money and they don’t care who is made to look bad in the process. As such, there might come a time when people take to one (or many) of these sites to write about you. Which, you know, if you’re perfect in every possible way, is most likely to be positive content (though still not guaranteed). Sometimes though, people just want to rant. Let them rant – they’re doing what they think they need to do to feel better. If you start replying in an attempt to refute what’s being said, you’ll look petty. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, there can be no good from arguing with somebody on the internet. Under any circumstances. It will look unprofessional, it’ll grant greater credence to what’s being said and you’ll make a bigger thing out of it than it needs to be.

7/ Don’t Post On 3rd Party Forums

A successful politician will, when questioned, often ignore the premise of a question altogether and respond with an answer that sounds like it’s answering, but is actually deflecting on to different matters entirely. They do this not just to be awkward, but because they know that if they answer the question directly, they’re acknowledging that the question has a degree of validity. If negative content starts appearing for searches on your name/company/products in the form of forums, the worst thing you can do is respond to it. For one, it’ll just prolong the story. If you’re taking the proper Reputation Management measures, the story will disappear soon enough, but not if you answer/get caught up in active discussions. For every time you issue a response, you’ll get (at least) one response which counters everything you’ve just said. Your choices then are to continue arguing (with everyone) which is going to make you look just as unprofessional as getting into debates on review sites, or stop posting. At which point, they’ll have won the argument, you’ll have lost and you’ll look worse for it. It’s like thinking “water puts out fires, water is a liquid; paraffin is liquid, I’ll use paraffin to put out this fire”. Yeah, good luck with that.

8/ Don’t Fret Over Neutral Content

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything everyone said about each other was nice, supportive and gratifying? Well, besides from being boring, it just wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense. Nothing and nobody is perfect, and so if you wangle S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) to reflect nothing but positive content, it might look artificial and suspicious. Sure, get rid of negative content, but what about all the pieces that are ultimately indifferent? Some people are so paranoid about looking good that they’ll try and manipulate everything that doesn’t imply butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth away from the top rankings in the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are those that are of the mindset that if something isn’t singing their praises, it’s making them look bad. This is crazy. Not only does neutral content (or ‘Swiss Content’) make related searches pertaining to your name/company look more natural, but if it’s ranking high it’s helping to push the negative content down too. Leave it alone.

9/ Don’t Post Compromising Pictures

We said yesterday that it’s good to share pictures. And, while we don’t like blowing our own trumpets, we were right. Sharing pictures will at time help put a face to a name, make people feel a closer, a more human connection to your business. That’s great, you’re human too after all. You lead a life outside of work, just like your customers. You socialize, you have parties, you… Oh, wait! Don’t you still have those pictures from the Thanksgiving  party you had after-hours at the office last year? That was such a good party! Remember when Rodney from Accounts had a few too many to drink and tripped over the carpet and landed face first into Deborah? How you all laughed! Wouldn’t people think you were great people if you showed them you were just like them? No. Rightfully or not, when people give their custom to a company, they hold them to higher, professional moral standards. It’s due to a need for trust, and they need to trust that you’re being professional at all times and they can rely on you to deliver the goods/service they expect. If you show them any pictures which cast doubt over that trust, or cast any aspersions over the professional integrity of your business, they’ll likely not give you their custom/take their money elsewhere. And this is the internet, there’s nothing people like more than a potential scandal.

10/ Don’t Contribute To Wikipedia

Last on this list, but often the top of Google searches. A lot of people assume that if they can make a Wikipedia page, or add to a Wikipedia page, that’ll be a high-ranking page for related searches. This almost always backfires. First of all, it’s difficult to create a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a company or business that’ll pass the requirements to feature in the online encyclopedia. Most pages get removed pretty quickly anyway, making any effort to write a piece a waste of time. But then, we’re forgetting the main point of Wikipedia. It’s the ultimate UGC website. It’s comprised almost entirely of user-generated content as, the ‘beauty’ of it is that literally anyone can edit it. An email and password later, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could edit what you’ve written. You could have said the nicest, brightest thing about your company and an 11-year-old could edit the article, and add the story (or cited references to the story) you’ve been trying to cover up in the first place. And all of a sudden, there it is – at the top of Google results page. And we can guarantee you – as hard as it is to bury random bloggers or news columnists, getting rid of Wikipedia entries is infinitely more difficult.

Again, this list is probably not the be-all and end-all of everything-you-could-possibly-do-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, but it’s a good start. The trick is just to keep in mind “in what way is this likely to backfire?” and a bit of common sense should keep you on the straight and narrow. Sure, doing any of the above would certainly be considered a mistake but not an unrecoverable one. If you have any issues and aren’t sure how to proceed, get in touch with us – as ever, details are on the home page.

Ok, here should be a comprehensive guide to managing your own online reputation and the things you SHOULD be doing to preserve your own/brand name. If you’re here, you’ve already shown an interest in making sure you’re doing what you can to keep your head above the proverbial current of the internet. Or you’ve found yourself in an unpleasant situation and are facing unwarranted negative press/publicity and are seeking ways to rectify your situation.

The following list assumes that you are aware of what the internet is, how to work a search engine and that you have your own webpage. You know, the basics. Here’s our Top 10 Reputation Management Tips:

1/ Structure Your Website Around Keywords

Fairly obvious for some, but you’d be surprised how many companies fail to structure their websites for SEO  (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. You need to imagine what people would be searching for when they’re looking for your specific business (and other words relevant to your business type and/or location) and tailor your site to focus on these words. SEO is a big market and it can take months to pick up a healthy proportion of the tricks of the trade, but the least you can do is name your pages aptly – i.e. no ‘Page 1′, ‘Page 2′ or ‘Page 3′ or ‘Untitled Page’ extensions. Having a url that reads http://www.yourcompanyname.com/productname.html for example will ensure that at the very least your page will rank highly in search engines for specific searches pertaining to your company/the products you sell.

2/ Employ Proper Writers

There is very little that’s more off-putting to a reader than poorly written content on websites. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, or how interesting the subject material is meant to be – if it isn’t written properly people will not only not want to read it, but will think less of you for it. There are different ways of bringing somebody onboard to maintain a high level of quality. You can bring on dedicated Content Writers who are typically full-time staff (on temporary or permanent contracts) whose job it is to specifically generate new content from scratch to put on your website(s). Content Editors are similar, but their job is focused more on revising existing material. Then you have Copywriters whose job is to write (/generate content) about a topic/product in a way that ‘advertises’ the material at hand. You don’t have to take on a writer full-time though if the project is small enough, as a lot of writers will do freelance jobs too. It’s usually advisable to have somebody on the company payroll to handle any potentially sensitive subjects though!

3/ Handle The Social Networking/Media Scene

Unfortunately social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have now been around so long that you can no longer pass them off as ‘New Technologies’ (or a form of ‘witchcraft’). Facebook especially, whilst not the original social networking medium on the internet, now has over 500 million users worldwide. In fact, that’s how many users they had before they made a film about the website. That’s right, the website is so popular they made a film about it. So you can bet your hind legs people use it. And more importantly, they expect you to use it too. We’ve covered on this website previously the importance of managing your presence on social networks, so I’ll make this as brief as possible. Even if you don’t feel you have time to commit to running a social networking site alongside any other official business websites you have, you still need to have a profile people can find. If you don’t have control over a social networking page pertaining to your company/brand name, who does? There’s nothing stopping anyone else setting up a page with your name on it and making a mockery of your business, so don’t give them the opportunity. It’ll take less than 15 minutes to set up a page even for the most technologically shy out there.

4/ Ensure You Are Sharing (Pre-Approved) Photos/Images

This one often gets overlooked even by the biggest companies/establishments. In the era of Web 2.0 and UGC (User Generated Content), everyone is a web publicist. And everyone wants pictures. Of everything. Even if it’s just for research, people will use search engines to look not just for websites, but images and pictures related to their keyword-based searches. So if somebody wants to search for, say, Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes, and your company sells them; when they search for images of Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes it should be YOUR Oatmeal-Powered Motorbikes they see. Image searches will display pictures relating to the search, and provide details of the image and provide automatic links back to your website. Also, you might want to have profile pages for key members of staff who might be the subject of User Searches – it helps with SEO and having official pictures of staff makes it less likely for searches returning results irrelevant or compromising pictures.

5) Addressing The World of the Blogs

People like to feel noticed. They like to feel appreciated, like they’re being kept in the loop and respected enough to be addressed directly. A blog can be a great way of presenting yourself to your market in the most professional manner possible. This can be done in the form of a personal blog from a company director, or a less personal company blog detailing business related updates (amongst other forms of blogs). Not only are you creating another website relating to your business that can rank in search engines results (potentially increasing traffic to your site too), but you can use them to relegate potential negative/rival content too. If you’ve got a good grasp on the internet goings-on, you might want to speak to existing ‘bloggers’ about doing pieces on your business. We’ll cover this later on in the week in more detail, so stay tuned for that – it’s not to be approached casually as it could backfire!

6/ Documenting Interviews / Podcasts

Another way of getting more positive content out there is by releasing interviews and podcasts from prominent members of your business. Interviews don’t have to be live question and answer sessions, but simply addressing a list of the most Frequently Asked Questions in a new and refreshing way. With the likes of iTunes and YouTube readily available to host videos, you can again give people content over multiple platforms to cover your bases. Don’t throw together a basic picture-based slideshow made from Windows Live Movie Maker or something pants like that, as making feeble efforts at videos makes you look ‘out-of-touch’ with the internet and will do more harm than good. But video diaries are great, and people can ‘subscribe’ to new content coming out of YouTube (and various other) accounts, and the more you do the more attention you will attract. Just, don’t go saying anything you’ll end up regretting – get your content reviewed by people who aren’t just going to blow sunshine up your *** prior to releasing anything.

7/ Set Up Your Own Review Sites

One of the things the era of user generated content sites have spawned is the concept of review sites. These are pretty self-explanatory; people go to these sites to either say lots of nice things about you, or it gives them a chance to moan and display their dissatisfaction with their experiences with you. Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect and you can’t please everyone (without going out of business), so there are going to be people who feel aggrieved with your business and service. If you’re having issues (or wish to prevent potential issues from arising) you might want to consider setting up your own, branded reviews site. If done right, it will rank in search engine results higher than the defamatory content and is another opportunity to show the internet all the best parts of your business. It’s best not to ‘fake’ positive reviews (or post false content anywhere online in general), but asking customers to send you feedback and being a bit selective over the submissions that make the final cut is OK.

8/ Press Releases

This is a very good way of getting high-ranking positive content out into the world of t’internet. While you have your own website(s), and now Social Networking Profiles, YouTube/iTunes channels and Official Blogs, you’re going a long way towards dominating the first page of search results pertaining to those ‘keywords’ we discussed earlier. With ‘Press Releases’, you can put official pre-approved content on 3rd-party websites too (ones that don’t belong to you!). This is a good alternative to Blogging if you don’t have the time to do both, as it offers a one-time official statement/story about your company and – here’s the important part – you get to write it (or at least have copy approval). It usually costs for this service for a good press release site, but is ultimately worth it. You also don’t want a bad/poorly performing site to host your content (counter-intuitive, right?) as it doesn’t help you in the likes of Google rankings. But yeah, go nuts. Throw in some pictures, some “official company quotes”, write it in third person – you get a lot of freedom to play around with formatting but one of the key aspects is that it has to be interesting enough to read, so make sure it’s something worth writing about. Words for the sake of words wont add any value to anything.

9/ Own Your Brand Name

Again, this might sound like stating the obvious, but there’s actually a bit more to it than you might think. One thing you really need to do is make sure that you control basic derivatives of your primary domain name. For instance, if I were to have www.kenisgreat.com (which I don’t, but, well – maybe one day), I’d also be sure to have www.kenisgreat.co.uk too. If somebody else were to register the .co.uk derivative, I’d have absolutely no control over the content. Which wouldn’t be as bad if it were being run by somebody else also called Ken, and we were competing for popularity, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was being run by somebody called… Dave… and Dave specifically wanted to make a website dedicated to the absurd implication that Ken isn’t great? This is perhaps one of the most important things you should have control over, as people will regularly bypass search engines if they’re familiar with your brand name. Users can type in web addresses speculatively, expecting to find information pertaining to your brand. And if they don’t find you, they might then go to a search engine to look for you. Or, if they find something they don’t like, they might not seek your business at all. You don’t have to have different websites for different domain names (which can actually be counter-productive for SEO purposes), and in fact the more URLs (and references to the different URLs) you have pointing to the same webpage will improve its performance and site traffic. Visit a domain registration website for the different domain extensions available. You don’t need them ALL, but a healthy selection of the most common is advisable. Also worth considering are derivatives of the brand/company name itself. So www.brandname.com might become www.thebrandname.com or www.brandnameuk.com – it’s up to you. You could even register www.brandnamesucks.com – just incase some other joker decides they want to.

10/ Watching Out For Negative Content

Perhaps the most important part of Reputation Management is being able to respond quickly and decisively to negative content as it arises. And it will, there’s no getting away from it – this is the internet; freedom of speech and such. Not knowing if somebody is trash-talking you is the biggest mistake you can make though, as defamatory stories (true or otherwise) about you only need so much attention before the seeds of doubt are planted and start to take root. Obviously, you can’t spend all day watching the entire internet for people posting compromising material. That’s crazy. No person can be reasonably expected to do that. Which is why there’s software out there that’s been designed to do it for you. You can create ‘Google Alerts’ which basically performs continuous searches for specified search terms and returns new results. You can choose how often to get updated, or what time of content you get updated with, and choose where these results are sent to. This would include having them sent to an email address that’s connected to a smartphone device, so you can keep up to date, on the move, all around the clock. If you were so inclined, that is. You might also want to look into setting up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds – similar system, but less Googlefied (a real word, honest). This basically takes feeds from all over the internet; monitoring the likes of blog posts, news entries, audio and video and relaying the information in a uniform format.

There’s a lot you can do to manage your own online reputation, and the above list is by no means exhaustive. Also, the above advice only covers the things you can/should do, and there’s a lot you should specifically stay clear of too. We’ll shortly be doing a follow-up post to this covering the Top Ten Don’ts of Reputation Management which you should also probably take note of. Meanwhile, if there’s anything you need help with or would like to discuss this topic further, check out the reputationmanagementfor.com homepage. We’ve been doing this a while and we’ve gotten pretty good at it!

Often the centre of controversy, Celtic manager Neil Lennon has had an absolutely torrid season up in the SPL by way of publicity. And unfortunately, very little of it recently has had anything to do with football. When it comes to the two football giants in Glasgow – (the Old Firm), little of the rivalry between them is sporting and the at-times mutual sectarian exchanges from the fans has landed them both in hot water publicly. However, whereas Rangers have been handed appropriate discipline, Neil Lennon has had a reputation mostly imposed upon him that’s led to consequences far worse, and infinitely more inexcusable.

“Football is a sport and should therefore be enjoyed accordingly”. It’s a simple sentiment, but one a lot of people don’t seem to appreciate as much as they really should. Anyone taking up the reigns on either side of the Old Firm mantle is putting their personal reputation on the line due to the insane idiocracy that makes up the moronic fans that vehemently hate what the Old Firm (or ‘the other side of the Old Firm’) represents. And, with Neil Lennon as the perceived figurehead of Celtic Football Club, he’s been exposed this season to some horrendous acts that you would see literally nowhere else in the ‘beautiful’ game.

Due to the nature of his job, Neil Lennon finds himself frequently talking to the Scottish press before, during and after games, and any other time there’s something topically prevalent to discuss. While it’s traditional to try and manage a club’s image via the newspapers, the Scottish press seem to have abandoned any and all sense of journalistic integrity in favour of creating their own stories. Case and point being this week as Lennon was intentionally misquoted during a press conference with Heart of Midlothian manager Jim Jefferies. Upon hearing the slanted version of what Neil had said, Jefferies responded negatively and that mentality filtered down into the players and fans. One of the Hearts fans felt so strongly about what the press had (mis)reported Neil as saying, that during the teams encounter last night at Tynecastle he broke out of the stands, made a 30-yard run up the touchline and physically attacked the Celtic manager.

There are no circumstances under which this kind of conduct would be deemed acceptable, and the Scottish national newspapers have been quick to condemn what happened. Neil doesn’t seem to be able to catch a break and it takes the strongest kind of character to prevail against the torrents of abuse he’s getting. He needs to be seen to be acting as responsibly as possible and despite his best efforts to do this in the press, they’re not cutting him any slack. He’s had to resort to the use of social networking site Twitter to get his message out to fans, which he did so this morning with the following ‘tweet’:

Don’t let what happened to me tonight take the shine off a wonderful team performance… I don’t walk alone.

Making reference to the popular Celtic club anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which the fans sang at the tops of their voices over the final whistle last night, Neil shows that he appreciates all the support he’s getting from fans whilst maintaining that his focus is still on the football. Which, to be honest, is where everyones focus should be.

There’s no ‘quick fix’ to Neil’s situation and I hope he sticks at it so that the scum who partake in this hatred-fueled crusade against the man from North Ireland wont have ‘won’. Until then, we’ll continue to see a decline in the effectiveness and integrity of the written press as they struggle to keep up with popularity of readily-available and unregulated, bordering-on-prose journalism online.

There is a saying that even bad publicity is good publicity, but that may work for Hollywood and that is not the case here. Reputation Management For.com conducted a study and learned that corporate crisis might very much result in online negative publicity, lowering the repute of the company. It was further found that most companies still tend to follow public relations and don’t see the value in ORM (online reputation management) until they get bonked in the head with devastating bad publicity. It’s in such situations that the effect of public relations becomes invaluable.

The study was an experimental test to see how corporate companies behave to regain their battered image. Public relations online is different than ORM, whilst both accomplish a similar purpose. But the fact remains that both include different factors. Public relations attempts to curb the message you represent to your audience. It’s a kind of technique about what you want to make others think of you and your business, more associated to quality control catastrophes.

ORM (Online reputation management) on the other hand is a set of methodologies that helps remove online negative publicity while monitoring any mention of your company. Regularly monitoring comments mentioned in your name will allow you to react and control the subject matter.

An unexpected finding in our study showed that most companies responded the least to bad publicity; surprisingly we found that an inappropriate reaction by a “bad” company resulted in an increase in respect for the firm, whereas the same reaction by a “good” company led to lose respect.

Negative publicity, if it stays for long, will be hard to shake off. By applying a fully integrated Reputation Management program for a strong positive internet presence, any brand or business firm can bring up awareness levels and necessarily raise sales.

Reputation Management For.com is an integrated RM company based in the UK. For more information, please visit our website for online reputation management

How popular is British Airways when it comes to bad customer service.  Well!! They always seem to sneak in whenever bad service is talked about.

Recently easyJet was been dragged into a wrangle with their ground handling agents Servisair. The passenger handling company alleged how easyJet force their check-in staff  to act more like policemen than customer service staff to meet the low-cost airline’s strict baggage rules.

But easyJet had this to say…

It was unfair for Servisair to blame the airline’s policies for bad customer service. “It is incorrect that easyJet puts excess pressure on the Servisair employees. It is also incorrect that the role of the agent has changed,” a spokesman said. “easyJet does expect a high level of customer service to be conducted by its employees and anyone representing easyJet.

Most airlines still execute 50% of their own ground handling, but an emerging drift towards contracting ground service indicates that airlines are on to cost-cutting measures. The outcome doesn’t count, as long as they don’t compromising on safety, efficiency and market rate.

Since their objective is to get rid of the inconsistency by concentrating on making quick money. easyJet should know that quality customer service takes a beating here.

3rd party contract much results into the development of definite grudge amidst the folks who are dealing with customers directly. Though this drawback is fatal, it often leads into undesired situations and bad reputation.

Interestingly, British Airways gets its share of reputation bashing in the comments to this Telegraph article as passengers relate their horrendous experiences with the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom. This hijacks the story off easyJet-Servisair tussle. British Airways already uses a third party to undertake ground handling at the majority of airports around the world. Their woes never seem to end as the unions are still out to get their demands; and you can never be sure when your flight will depart.

Airlines fail to understand that customers only care about the flight which they pay in advance.

British Airways and easyJet will need to recognize that flying and ground handling is a service they provide, and no purpose is served when customers complain. Service providers across all sectors need to realize that the online hawk-eye watches for that one slip in customer service to put your goodwill into a tailspin.  If you are not able to deliver customer service the way it should be done – customers will find better alternatives. And that’s what’s the story really is in this case be it easyJet, Servisair or BA.

A new law- SB-1411 now makes Online Impersonation illegal in California. Truly a first of its kind for the online world, and then this law is a good first step to combat online impersonation done in anonymity, an option that previously, victims never had.

Reputation Management For.com is glad that this law comes in the way for online protection for business in the state of California, where SB-1411 got effective since 17, January 2011.

The Senate Bill 1411 reads ‘Impersonation is criminal and civil penalties to the act of impersonating a person online.  Specifically, to knowingly and without consent credibly impersonate another person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud another person.

Well this sounds amazing for identity robbery.  If somebody is caught doing so will invite a fine up to $1000 and a jail stay for a year. Besides he will invite other troubles like the impersonated person suing the impersonator. But strangely the law has no provision for such people who disguise to be someone on the internet just for fun and humor. For now spoofs, parodies and other impersonations may get away especially when done with no real harm intended.

California State Senator Joe Simitian, who supports the bill, stated that …

The victims of …harassment and defamation as a result of false impersonation perpetrated through the Internet are typically left without adequate legal protection to stop this abuse.

Is it true? California already has a law in hand to deal with impersonation in section 529 and 530 of the California Penal Code.  Interestingly it was in the year 1872 when this law was written when internet, Facebook, Twitter was not even a dream.  So does that means that current California law is feeble at protecting someone who would be impersonated on the Internet?

Apparently the senate wants the free speech suggestion to hit the court’s corridor first, but then who will be the first to try this and make a case.

Reputation Management For.com feels if a person wants to trouble  somebody in order to settle a grudge he will always find ways to do it (outside California). Also we can only imagine the number of lawsuits that will be filed for impersonation. As of now we suggest impersonators to be afraid at least in the state of California.

No single company has had its reputation shredded quite like Bank of America over the past few years except for maybe BP, or ‘British Petroleum’ as President Obama likes to call them. Every day another story comes out over their processes around foreclosures and mortgages. Now Nevada and Arizona have filed suit against Bank of America saying it has been deceiving homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure.The worst thing to come out of the suits is the evidence from employees that is damning in the extreme and really casts Bank of America as both the villain and deliberately heartless. Foreclosure is an emotive political issue across the states. The political power of the issue arises from it being such as widespread phenomenon: everybody knows somebody who has been foreclosed and few people take to it happily. We have learned a great deal about the Sub-prime mortgage brokers and their methods and how Countrywide which was bought by BofA in 2008 got sucked into the mess through newspaper commentary and books. Although many feel that Congress and especially the President have let the companies get away with it, the local politicians and Attorney Generals are taking a much more robust view of company misdemenours.

For Bank of America, 2008, 2009, 2010 have been anni horribili. 2011 looks likely to be worse as the company reputation continues to be shredded by film, newspapers and court cases. The big question is whether they can survive with this sort of reputation fall out over the long term. They seem to have suffered the most from the reporting though Chase s chasing hard.

What is especially significant is that much of the damage has been done by their retained suppliers: property managers, mortgage servicers and foreclosure companies. What is clear is that BofA is the one that gets the bum rap!

We recently did a post talking about new rules that had been put in place to help protect individuals from falling foul of rogue modelling agencies (seen here). After receiving enquiries from companies concerned about getting caught up in the modelling scam affair, we’re issuing this follow-up aimed at explaining the problem faced by legitimate modelling agencies.

Managing your reputation is a key part of achieving the levels of success you need to, in order to keep your company running as smoothly and as profitably as you’d like. Before the internet went wholly mainstream, your name lived and died by word of mouth, and it was easy to identify the bad eggs. A good bit of PR work was enough to keep you above board and your reputation intact. Now, however, with slander just a few clicks of a mouse button away (and a few keystrokes too perhaps) – it’s too easy and far too common to find the word ‘scam’ appear next to your company name.

Modelling scams are nothing new, and whilst simplistic in nature they’re still catching a lot of would-be models out. And with the frequency by which new scams are appearing, it leaves a very skeptic audience when approaching the industry. There are too many reports about people trying to get their foot in the door and having their toes burnt in the process for there to be any ‘natural trust’. And it’s not just the rogue agencies that are liable to slander either – modelling is an extremely competitive market and a lot of the time some people just don’t have what it takes. Hearing that is never pleasant, so it’s only to be expected that some take it less gracefully than others.

As such, negative comments/feedback are, by nature, commonplace in the world of t’internet. Google picks up on almost every poor or defamatory post made online with the abundance of personal blogs and article sites available for general browsing. And, with new ‘Google Suggest’ leading the unsuspecting web surfer in predetermined directions, you can’t always guarantee that people will see what you want them to see.

Take Storm for example. Storm is a top modelling agency in the UK, ran by Sarah Doukas (the one who discovered Kate Moss at age 14), and as far as modelling agencies go – you don’t get any more reputable. However, Google Suggest doesn’t only have good things to say about them:

Suggested Google Scams are popping up all over the internet, across a broad spectrum of industries, but with the new laws levied against the industry it’s thrown the darkest aspects of the modelling industry squarely into the limelight. With the new Google Suggest system, Google will try to guess what you’re searching for based on what you’re typing, from the very first letter. So as soon as ‘Storm Model’ was typed in (as above) then Google ‘suggested’ the word “scam”.

The reason for this is that, as Google claims, the ‘suggested terms’ are generated based on the organic flow of user-entered search queries. So basically – if enough people are searching for the same thing, Google is likely to register this and suggest it to other users for future searches. So in this case, due to recent press a lot of modelling agencies are finding the word ‘Scam’ come up on a Google search next to their name.

PR companies aren’t what they used to be. You can’t call a newspaper and get a story / article canned the way you used to. The internet is a platform for the disgruntled masses who are determined to voice their concerns and share them with anyone willing to listen. And what you can’t stop, you have to try and control – which is where Online Reputation Management comes in. ORM companies are specifically set up to monitor negative content as it arises as optimize information flow to the end user.

At the end of the day it’s still about making sure that anyone looking for information on you isn’t mislead or that aspersions aren’t cast by the power of suggestion. The goal is to keep companies making money in spite of any misdirected bad press or coverage, whilst simultaneously projecting a consistent positive image. Diverting your attention to controlling your online reputation costs time, and can put you directly in the line of fire. Besides, you’ll know yourself that your time is best spent managing your own business. And who’ll be doing your job whilst you’re doing ours?

If there’s one show that’s guaranteed to generate headlines, it’s Simon Cowell’s The X-Factor, screening on ITV in the UK. And while we’re all used to the stories of grief that the shows contestants claim as their motivation, this year has seen a couple of disturbing stories that are attracting all the wrong kinds of attention (forgetting momentarily that all publicity is good publicity).

It started a couple of weeks ago when Gamu Nhengu’s performance was adorned by audio-enhancement techniques. This created quite the ruckus amongst viewers who were upset that they were not getting an unbiased exposure to the contestants. But, as well as the folks at home not being all too pleased, Gamu’s troubles didn’t end there. A long with hundreds of thousands of disgruntled fans of the show, Ms Nhengu’s performance was also being watched the UK Border Agency.

It turns out that Gamu’s mother Nokutula was in the UK on a working visa which had actually expired without the possibility of extension. Yes, that would make Gamu, her mother and her two younger brothers illegally residing in the UK.

I’m sorry, but if you’re not entitled to live in Britain, and you’re staying in the country illegally… why in God’s name would you make an appearance on national television? If only Simon’s troubles ended there…

Other former X-Factor hopeful Chloe Mafia has already had to put up with articles popping up all over the news and media about her ‘professional life’ (the oldest, thereof), and now self-proclaimed misfit has openly admitted to taking drugs (cocaine). She also failed to make it past the ‘boot camp’ stage of the show, after arriving unprepared for her audition. Again.

No loss, she was rubbish anyway.

But, all the while contestants like Gamu Nhengu and Chloe Mafia are making headlines for all the wrong reasons though, the X-Factor is going from strength to strength. It seems nothing can touch this music behemoth’s reputation, but the same can’t be said for the contestants. These girls (assuming both are still in the country this time next week) are going to suffer from their auditions more than they stand to gain.

Everywhere they turn they’re going to be facing bad press. It’s not just the papers, which tend to go away and be forgotten about, but more and more frequently employers are ‘Googling’ potential employees and so every negative story about a person or company is available at the touch of a button. And now, with new Google Instant, users don’t even have to be searching for a negative story for one to come up via Google Suggest. Online Reputations are at an all-time vulnerable, and unfortunately for these X-Factor entrants – there’s very little they can do about theirs.