Google’s most popular feature with searches is ‘suggestions’. The suggestions sometimes appear much before you have finished typing. Many wonder how Google knows what you are exactly looking for.

After a court in Italy held search engines responsible for suggesting offensive terms, Google had elucidated that “search suggestion service suggests words potentially connected to the words that users type on the Google search field”.

So that might be the reason when my friend typed ‘Arindam Chaudhuri’ on Google and it suggested the word ‘Fraud’ associated to the name. The user was surprised by the suggestion because Arindam Chaudhuri is the Director of IIPM (The Indian Institute of Planning and Management), a private B-School in India. He posted the screen-shot on Twitter (http://twitpic.com/5f6t8h) on June 22, 2011 for all to see.

Next I decided to do a quick search about IIPM, unfortunately the word ‘Fraud’ showed up next to the name.

Following this, somebody who claims may be representing ‘IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri’  committed a fatal error, she shot a mail from her personal email ID to the user asking him to remove that picture, else face legal action. The mail further claims that they have settled the issue with Google, but Google gracefully refused to comply unless this picture is taken off.

I am skeptical if IIPM did this since they claim to be one of the premier B-Schools in India, with the so-called best think-tank heading them. Secondly any third-party who sends a mail on their behalf threatening legal action is only going to put the institution in bad light. It only endorses what Google is suggesting.

How can you hold the user responsible for what Search Engines suggest? The Management Guru should know that taking legal action on every negative comment is not the solution, since there are plenty of bad mouthing that happens on the Internet. And with the kind of suggestions that comes up during searches, it’s obvious that users will click on the forbidden combination and you further lose credibility. What you ought to do is to figure out why it is so, and then sort it out amicably. Your reputation is at stake and your prime concern should be to deal with negative contents about you on the Internet if you are really that great an institution; after all everybody deserve to keep their goodwill intact. Let sense prevail!

If in the past, we’d turn to our family or friends circles for recommendations, advice, opinions or answers, it then turned towards “www.com” ever since it appeared on the virtual scene. Today, we are once again back to asking friends and family circles with the help of this World Wide Web. The 3 W’s have given birth to several new generation virtualities, especially the ‘social media’. Now, ‘social media’ is the best source of recommendations for nearly everything including the reputation of your brand.

Social media has emerged itself into a vast number of siblings such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Linkedin, Google Plus and so on and on the list goes. Social media and search are converging because search engines are incorporating social signals. Google, Bing and Yahoo have incorporated Facebook likes and Twitter’s tweets into their organic search results. Now, searchers see results in different formats based on activity within their social networks.

Social networks are now expanding their own search functionality. Facebook now lets you search your News Feed for status updates, pictures and videos shared by your connections or brands that you “like.” Twitter bought Summize and is continually improving its search capabilities.

It is seen that consumers are skipping search engines and asking their social networks friends and family for recommendations. This may be most alarming for marketers who are relying on search engine marketing. These social media can make or break one’s reputation. That’s the reason why most of the brands and businesses are after these social searches. Ensure that your brand is well-positioned in a world of social search and that is the big tip for 2012 from Reputation Management For.com for brand protection.

I got a friend request from a total stranger on Facebook last week. The only thing we had in common was mutual friends. As always I declined that request. But then why would anybody send friend request to people they don’t know, strange but that’s what Social networking is all about. To my surprise I saw my colleague accepting this request from the same person. I then wondered if I had gone overboard by declining a request from somebody with potential caliber? I enquired with my friend and he had not clue; he accepted the request only because there were few friends in mutual circle.

I later learned that Facebook is sending friend requests automatically without users’ consent. I thought Facebook is a great place to be in touch with friends and it contributes to web searches. But if it is going to ask me to add people I never want to, I might then have second thoughts. This latest glitch has already earned the wrath of users from across the world.

Facebook on the other hand has stated that this latest development has nothing to do with their official feature. They suggest that some rogue Facebook applications could be responsible for this, The Herald Sun reports.

Isn’t it that Facebook is one such online brand that everyone trusts and the reason why users enter their personal details.  It’s so vague to believe that anyone can develop a Facebook application and Facebook never bothers to check the authenticity. Maybe the level of trust Facebook enjoys, that users end up giving access to their account to such third party applications.

ReputationManagementFor.com – Every brand to survive needs that driving force called trust and you cannot qualify by overlooking any factor that leads to trust deficit. Today the pressure is on the companies to maintain that faith with every association they make- business or social; it should be imperative for any organization. So, what’s taking Facebook so long to set things right before such Applications eat up their reputation?

Reebok’s reputation as an earnest athletic brand that could make people jump and run faster was all intact until the company introduced its toning shoe ‘EasyTone and RunTone’. The product claimed to burn that extra fat and get you that Jessica Alba kind booty. Well this was enough to tempt people to buy and fine tune their shape.

But it seems like the Federal Trade Commission did not agree with Reebok and charged the company for misleading advertising. It further slapped a fine of $25 million as settlement to resolve charges regarding their toning shoes. Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, Mr. David Vladek, said in a news conference that the company’s claims —

that they strengthen and tone muscles better than other shoes” — were not backed up by sufficient evidence.

Though Reebok has agreed to pay that $25 million settlement “to resolve charges’, this incident has taken the toning shoe market on to a false start, and possibly on to a phase-out. Now an important question remains…what should Reebok be doing? I think the company should be worried about how it deals with this keeping in mind the reputation and loyalty the brand has among its customers.

Faith in companies is trembling as of now, and this will not help. Reebok hasn’t rebutted the claim, so if they are still confident, then they need to reassure customers that the brand will bring in more products in this line or move-on to other lines while assuring that EasyTone and RunTone has undergone all the quality measures just like any of their other products.

Wikipedia began with the noble intention of providing all with free information on anything under the sun. So yes, the content should be impersonal or neutral and in an openly editable model. So unlike an encyclopedia, which is written by experts, the Wikipedia content is largely written by volunteers who do so without pay.

The big advantage: By virtue of being a favoured site by Google, the SEO or ORM implications of having a Wiki page for your small business are huge. Wikipedia pages usually rank on the first pages of Google and other search engines.

Should you have a Wikipedia page for your small business? There are a few risks to keep in mind -Wiki pages can be edited by anyone and there are numerous people who keep a tab on new pages. If you look at the way people with an axe to grind keep at forums to deliberately malign a brand or name, one should tread carefully as this is also the case with a Wikipedia page. So there is no rule-for-all from a small company reputation management aspect and we would advice a case-by-case decision for creating a Wiki page.

What if you already have a Wiki page? If you already have a Wiki page for your small business and do not have negative content issues with it, it would be best if you don’t make too many changes.

What do you do if you have too many negatives being added on your Wikipedia page? If you do have a Wiki page that is being regularly updated with negative content, there are still a couple of things to be done. First of all make the tone very neutral; and add a host of new info on your page to water down the negatives or push it down further.

So there it is, depending on how well your business is doing in a certain area and taking into account the added publicity a Wiki page will bring in and with the help of reputation managers to watch your back you may have a Wikipedia page for your business with the positives far outweighing the risks.

Do all hotels need to give a thought about reputation management; is this a critical new function in the travel industry? The answer is ‘Yes’. In the era of volatile social networking,  how a potential customers’ buying decision is influenced by traveler’s reviews is an important factor to be considered. Well precisely; it’s about monitoring, examining and responding to reviews and opinions of your hotel and taking part in social media to mold the perceptions of your brand.

Hotel industry has realized the importance of online reputation management, but is not sure how to handle the complexities of online reviews and comments.  Hotels have been prompt to adopt social media, but I believe a lot of hoteliers are mixing up priorities.

ReputationManagementFor.com- suggests that Hotels need to have minimum Reputation Management and Social media understanding.  Why? This is because it is regarded as a marketing tool that almost touches every aspect of a hotel, from operations to revenue management.

Talking about social media, Facebook and Twitter can be competent channels to involve travelers to get them to speak, but the buying decisions are made on review sites. Hoteliers should know the difference that people go to Facebook to socialize and that TripAdvisor is not for shopping but it’s a review website. And the minimal hotels should do is to monitor and respond to online reviews.

It is also crucial to note that reputation management is not about attempting to eliminate negative content. It’s a fictitious statement. It’s about genuineness and transparency since your business deserves the best.

TripAdvisor was the first to introduce review sites for travelers, and today it has 50+ million opinions and reviews on its website. Taking into account the bulk of visitors TripAdvisor has and the amount of reviews posted directly, it is crucial hotels to monitor and react to such reviews and opinions.

We feel TripAdvisor is the most decisive factor of a hotel’s online reputation management program. If a hotel is inactive in social media circuit, it ought to be taking heed and responding to TripAdvisor reviews and use the feedback to improve their customers’ experience. As mentioned above customers have more than dozen options to air their views. Reputation Management becomes more complex with Social Media, because travelers post their views on social sites, review websites or other forums, and monitoring alone can be intense, before you decide what step is to be taken

Social media can be a massive waste of time if we don’t have a clear idea how to deal with it, and still if you clutch on to the orthodox marketing activities it will reflect on your revenue. The way travelers’ decision making and communication mode has transformed dramatically we need to have massive resources to arrest further damage. With the need to adjust to this situation, hotels must keep a tab on the latest happening and publish useful, pertinent content on review sites and social websites.

We live by five star ratings to just about anything you can buy or do in the online world these days. To plan a holiday or buy a best-seller we go by ratings and reviews online on TripAdvisor or Amazon. Real people telling you their joyous experiences helping you decide it all. Or NOT! This New York Times article lifts the lid on fake rave reviews. Here is an excerpt…

“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”

As Reputation Managers we are constantly approached by people, firms and other service industry people about negative reviews. Negative reviews are scary for anyone and usually or mostly always done with malicious intent in our experience. If you look at it really how many times have you written about a hotel experience you did not particularly like or restaurant not having met your expectation? Its usually the good experiences one blogs or writes about with a couple of constructive criticism thrown in.

However, 5-Star reviews that we see everywhere from Amazon to TripAdvisor and review sites are being fed by the growing need to provide rave reviews to attract more customers. It is not as easy as spotting spam and people tested could not identify the fakes. The NYT article talks about Cornell researchers trying to make an algorithm to sieve out the fake rave reviews from popular websites.

There are sites that now offer positive reviews and ratings on books to music to hotels and restaurants. The more credibility and value that can be converted into hard cash will soon find an industry to alleviate the demand for them.  It will be interesting to see what the hotel industry or online shopping sites do to tackle it when this problem gets rampant and loses credibility.

Good agile move by Tui who have offered police officers caught up in the UK riots the opportunity to rebook their holidays…

Nick Longman (a TUI director) was quick off the mark with an offer to police officers who had their leave cancelled with the special offer which also forestalled any bad press or police officers lose holidays.

“We know how important holidays are and that nobody needs a holiday more than members of the police force right now. We want to ensure that all members of the Police will still be able to take their well earned break with us, at a time convenient to them. Our retail staff, some of whom have been affected by the riots, will be only too happy to help police officers re-book their holidays, so we advise all officers affected to pop into their local Thomson or First Choice shop.”

Reputations are build on agile and sympathetic responses to immediate events. This was no crisis for TUI but it leaves a nice taste in the mouth.  The offer is similar to riot impacted Sony who offered a mugged Malaysian student a replacement for the PSP he lost in the incident.

Our finding shows that most doctors worry about negative reviews posted about them on review websites. Physicians’ know that it’s just the mouthing off unhappy patients. Review website often doesn’t take the responsibility to ascertain the negative reviews are baseless and fictional. For example In one case we found a “review” that was demeaning beyond belief, the so-called patient was an ex- girlfriend of that physician and she had a personal agenda in doing so. But not everybody will realize the quality of such information and the significant impact it has on the physician.

Doctors’ knows that all patients do not agree with their opinion. And the disgruntled ones go online and post their opinion, despite the doctor being absolutely right based on the medical condition of the patient.

We have another sticky situation here, happy patients do not bother to go online and post their experience, but on other hand disgruntled patients’ response accumulates. Either way the doctor has to bear the brunt and live with the general belief that a section of patients believe he is not a good doctor.

Reputation Management For.com understands that patients posting their reviews about doctors on review websites are more inclined to amplify. Online reviews about doctors are informative that helps find low-quality physicians, but not as effective in picking out quality physicians from average ones. We are not sure how many physicians’ know to deal with such a situation and that they need a legitimate system in place for their patients, to defend quality of information that beams out from your not so good wishers.

‘Yet another talent lost early’  as tributes to Amy Winehouse pour in, there are quite a few shameless self-promotions going on out to market her sudden death. This post is not to serve as an eulogy to Amy but to point out to companies how not to market on their official twitter accounts during the death of a celebrity.

‘Should Traffic Ever Trump Taste?‘  gives two examples of  such behaviour and we pick the Microsoft UK PR twitter handle post – and yes they were crass enough to post this…

Clearly their later apology and tribute did nothing to cover up the real intention of the tweet.

This is a great example of how not to be a PR handle on Twitter and clearly puts Microsoft UK  in a bad light, despite the opportunity of increased sales of Amy’s music. Definitely a big ‘thumbs down’ from us here at Reputation Management For.com.