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!

Social Media has been an excellent vehicle for businesses to promote their brands and products for years, and with a theoretical audience of over one billion users it’s a trend that’s set to continue for the foreseeable future. From that, it’s of little wonder that slowly people are starting to realise the potential for charities to make their mark on this global audience for the betterment of their respective causes. But what happens though when lines get crossed and businesses and charities start working together, and it becomes difficult to see exactly who’s getting the better deal?

Let me start out by saying that I am in no way against charities, or generally disagree with what charities are trying to do simply on matter of principle. I’m a big fan of some charities and I believe supporting a cause comes down to an individual’s ability to connect or relate to an issue, rather than being fundamentally for or against charities in general. Social Media has been instrumental in raising awareness for good causes who would otherwise not have the resources or the voice to speak out and be heard by so many people at once. In extreme circumstances Social Media has even proven invaluable to relief efforts in the face of natural disasters and has paved the way for charitable donations on a scale we’ve never seen before.

It’s nothing new for companies or businesses to be associated with specific charities. Some of the best results charities have seen have been due to working together with big brand names and there’s an argument for a charity that “any publicity is good publicity”. How far though is that argument being pushed by businesses today, and where does the line get drawn between that which is in the best interests of the charity, and the best wishes of the firm ‘promoting’ the charity?

I came across an interesting Tweet yesterday (or, more specifically, a ‘Re-Tweet’) from a celebrity whom I shall not name, which read:

DPGplc DPG plc [rt] by [name_removed]
@[name_removed] We’ll donate £5 to SANDS (Still & Neo-Natal Death Society) for every celebrity RT of this post. #CIPD11

My first impression of that Tweet was that it seemed a little lacklustre and insincere. I’m naturally a cynic and am sceptical about… well, most things really, so that reaction wasn’t exactly uncommon. But then I took a closer look and started looking at it objectively. The concept was simple enough; the company “DPG plc” (Development Processes Group) were sending Tweets to every celebrity/high profile user they could find, claiming that every time one of them Retweeted their post, they would donate £5 to charity. For the purposes of this article I shall ignore the fact that this was blatantly spam and say that on the surface, this seemed simple enough. A business is for all intents and purposes pledging money to a charitable cause.

Three things bugged me about the post right away. To begin with, it was making no effort to explain anything about the charity and, more importantly, it gave no obvious way of obtaining more information. If you want to try and raise awareness of an issue, you want people to care so ‘context’ is pretty important (despite the 140 character limit being fairly inhibitive at times). Furthermore, once you’ve got somebody’s interest/attention you want them to be able to easily access further information. Twitter has a built-in feature that automatically shortens links, so the (approx) 20 remaining characters from these posts were more than enough to contain a link to SANDS, the charity in question. Further investigating also showed that there was also no mention of the charity anywhere on DPG’s Twitter account or their own website (which doesn’t get a link).

The second thing that annoyed me was the fact that the post specified that DPG were only willing to make any contributions upon celebrity endorsement. I can see the logic behind this argument from a marketing perspective – celebrities are deemed more influential than Joe Twitter and thus upon a Tweet by a celebrity the message is theoretically reaching a larger audience. However, given that the post specifically stated that they are only going make a donation upon a ‘celebrity retweet’ implies a desire to specifically be associated with fame, rather than being concerned with raising awareness. If they wanted to do the best job they could, they’d want everyone to be Retweeting and learning about the charity and volunteering help. One way of interpreting this would be to conclude that DPG are more interested in making people aware of their gesture than they are in helping SANDS.

Onto my final and biggest gripe: the ‘hashtag’. That bit at the end of the Tweet which reads “#CIPD11″. For those who aren’t particularly familiar with Twitter, a hashtag is a way of linking Tweets to create discussions between users who aren’t necessarily following each other. A ‘topic indicator’, if you like. You can click on a hashtag and see every recent post which has it included, and wanting to know what #CIPD11 is and how it related to the charity; I clicked it. Turns out that the hashtag is actually nothing to do with SANDS or any other charity, it’s The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s Annual Conference and Exhibition. In other words, a big networking event to discuss ‘Human Resources’. And no, before you ask, there is no connection between CIPD11 and the Still & Neo-Natal Death Society. None on the website dedicated to this conference, nor on any other websites discussing this conference. Nor does CIPD11 appear anywhere on the website of the charity, either.

I also want to make it clear that this is not a DPG scam, as one of the trustees from the charity was keen to defend these Tweets when I questioned DPG’s methods:

TravisCerys Peter Brady
@kenhalfpenny @dpgplc I am a trustee of said charity it is a marketing concept that @DPGplc are prepared to pay £5K to us for these RTs

Peter Brady, founder of the Jude Brady Foundation raises a good point when it comes to discussing the ‘ethics’ dilemma as mentioned in the title of this article, and we’ll get to that in a bit. I’d like to note at this stage that nobody that I spoke to from SANDS or DPG knew anything about the arrangement, but then it’s not entirely uncommon for financial matters not to be common knowledge amongst all members of a company so they couldn’t really be scrutinized for that. But, it was a little disappointing that nobody was available to talk to, whether it be SANDS, DPG or even Peter Brady himself to clarify the details of the agreement.

The details strike me as particularly peculiar as well. For instance, how are they monitoring exactly how many celebrities are retweeting their posts? What are they using as the basis to define a ‘celebrity’? People in the industry will know of ‘Listening Tools’ which are used to monitor various aspects of user conduct on Social Media, and to turn around and say “We’re using listening tools” and hope that there’ll be enough people without the knowledge of how this works to save having to justify it any further. Because, to be clear, they wouldn’t have to monitor how many times a single post is retweeted, as their is no “one Tweet” to count. DPG have issued numerous different Tweets, each targeting a different ‘celebrity’. In order for their “£5 per celebrity retweet” to come true, they’d actually have to differentiate between a retweet from a celebrity, and a retweet from somebody who doesn’t enjoy quite the same social status (by whatever standards DPG are using as definition). Could it be that  £5,000 (total) is a figure that DPG has already agreed to donate and the celebrity retweets are all about publicity? Is the £5,000 Peter mentioned in his response just an “upper limit”, and if only 10 celebrities retweet their comments, does this mean the charity will only get £50? Who knows. The only 3 people who have heard of this deal apparently are all unavailable, the entire day. “Okay”. Like I said, I’m a sceptic.

TravisCerys Peter Brady
@kenhalfpenny @dpgplc and just for the record think of how much the profile of our charity is being raised too it's nothing but good for us

So regardless of how genuine DPG might be in their offer, or how they’re going about conducting themselves, Peter Brady does have a point. If, through whatever means, a charity is receiving just a little bit more attention on the back of somebody else’s marketing, is that a bad thing? Is there a a definitive rule which states that companies should be allowed to conduct themselves in whatever manner they choose so long as a) they’re not hurting anyone and b) charities benefit from it in the long run. But then, how does one measure exactly just how much benefit to a charity there can be by simply name dropping them as part of what is, in all reality, a marketing campaign designed to raise awareness of DPG plc and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s conference event.

How tolerant are you willing to be of marketing practices which are clearly using not just the concept of charity, but specific charities, in order to promote their own reputation? Do ridiculously misleading marketing campaigns actually help a company’s reputation, and is DPG likely to gain anything from this? Where should the line be drawn – if at all – between a company and charity forming a mutually beneficial partnership, if the company is gaining more from the relationship. If a company is gaining proportionately more from the relationship – is it even still charity? Ultimately it’s not for me to say one way or another.

When Peter Brady isn’t raising money for a worthy cause (and yes, SANDS is a worthy cause) he works for a company called Mutual Media whose industry is set in marketing, design and print. One of Mutual Media’s clients? DPG plc. I’m not suggesting foul play, far from it. I think what’s happened here is Peter Brady has approached one or more of his clients to ask them if they’d be willing to support a charity for which he is a trustee. I think DPG plc has seized an opportunity to promote themselves, their brand and their trade on the back of this. A lot of companies have found ways to make ‘x’ amount of their financial margin tax-deductible by writing off figures as charitable donations. I think DPG plc HAS the money spare to give to charity, but rather than just do what’s right and GIVE THEM THE MONEY OUTRIGHT, they’ve chosen to make a scene and say “look at us, look at what we’re doing, aren’t we simply the coolest?”. I don’t think any credit should be given to a gesture that’s clearly not been made with the charity’s best interests in mind, and advertising an HR conference under the pretence of charity awareness is utterly morally bankrupt.

The most concerning thing though, I think, of all of this is; if companies are allowed to abuse charities for the sake of self promotion, will this lead to people becoming indifferent to genuine charitable efforts and campaigns? If people are left with the impression that Social Media is being abused by businesses looking to exploit charities, will that in fact lower the number of people willing to contribute to a good cause?

You tell me.

Respond here, or reply to us on Twitter (I’m not pretending to be doing this for charity) at @reputationmgmnt to continue the discussion.

Thanks for reading.

Canada’s technology champion, Research In Motion Ltd is scrambling to remedy back its reputation, as an extensive series of lingering service blackouts around the world left millions of BlackBerry owners in the dark without access to emails or instant messages. The international confidence in RIM plummeted.

Last week, blackouts that began Monday in Europe, Africa and the Middle East spread to North America, knocking BlackBerry users in the United States and Canada off-line. Service disruptions were also reported in South America, Hong Kong and Japan. The annoyed BlackBerry users around the world took to Twitter and Facebook to vent out their anger. This is an example oh how the reputation of one company can be spoiled within minutes with one mistake.

RIM is now working “night and day” to correct the problem, which was caused by a core switch failure within its own infrastructure. Making matters worse for the company, this week, RIM’s chief rival Apple Inc. is making the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5, available to iPhone users. The new software includes iMessage, an instant messaging technology that is exclusive to Apple devices and that duplicates many of the same features offered by RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger platform, a key differentiator for the company.

As the disruption hit North America, shares of the BlackBerry maker dropped more than 4% at one point in Toronto Stock Exchange trading.

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.

Sportswear giants Speedo have taken a break from smuggling budgies and started down the path of smuggling bloggers to court as it’s revealed they’re unhappy with one Australian blogger who’s “using their brand name in vain”.
Speedo are suing Dave Evans, 24, for his website (found here and please note some may find the content offensive/funny) which is said to jeopardise their “substantial and valuable reputation” and “goodwill associated with the name and trademark SPEEDO”. Since its creation in 1914 in Bondi, Australia, Speedo has become a household name and one of the biggest sportswear companies in the world. Their swimwear is so well designed, there have been claims that they’ve offered an ‘unfair advantage’ to Olympic competitors wearing their designs over those of rival brands. And while this wasn’t enough to dent their reputation (mostly because the claims were outlandishly absurd anyway), you have to wonder whether this latest move was particularly well-advised.

Handling negative content online is a dangerous minefield of potential catastrophes in itself, as addressing detrimental media incorrectly almost always exacerbates the situation. Speedo have gone from having a website which features their product in a rather questionable light, to having potentially thousands of websites talking about the original negative content as the story is picked up by newspapers, television, radio, online news sites and other blog based websites as well. So not only have their actions brought an audience to this website which far surpasses anything it would have achieved independently, but they’ve also created a David vs. Goliath perception of corporations picking on the little guy. A position Evans has solidified by insisting he can’t afford to fight the lawsuit. He also says that even though he owns a suit, not a tie and he could not possibly attend Federal Court in Australia improperly dressed.

The internet is what it is, and there’ll always be somebody saying something positive and there’ll also be people airing their opinions that go the other way. How you handle the negative content is a far bigger issue than having the negative content around to begin with.

Speedo are trying to control their brands in the same way that some alcohol companies recoiled from an association with rappers who extolled their products in videos and songs. Remember how upset BMW were when they discovered that aging Beemers were often called “Black Man’s Wheels”! Brand owners are having to learn that in the hyper social world you cannot control how your customers connect with your brand or use your brand. Imagine if Campbells Soup or Brillo had taken Warhol to court for his use of their brands in his art. In the end Cristal celebrated its relationship with black music and built a new and very profitable angle on their business. You cannot help feeling that Speedo’s attitude has more than a little homophobia about it. Would they have done the same if the pictures were of nubile young women?

Were Speedo within their rights to challenge the blogger about the nature of his website (and their trademark/brand)? That’ll be for the courts to decide. If Speedo were within their rights – and if they had a case for legal action – does that necessarily mean it was a good idea?

Generally we advise against court action against bloggers, and the circumstances have to be pretty extreme before you should even consider it. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with a lot of publicity and attention that doesn’t necessarily agree with your position and, like with Speedo, the content you’re wanting removed will be granted a far larger audience than it’d otherwise be getting.

Check out our top 10 list of things NOT to do in reputation management here.

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.

This happens when you don’t handle crisis the way it should be. Murdoch’s News Corp is facing the heat over its phone hacking scandal, which is doing significant damage to its reputation. Interestingly the news broke out just in time when Murdoch was going to take over the British Sky Broadcasting. Later giving in to the pressure from the UK Govt, he dropped his plan.

The company though claims to have handled this phone scandal neatly has already lost $18 billion to reputation damages. James Murdoch in a statement further approved an out-of-court settlements and rejected the claim that incidence has dented the image of News Corp and that they have detached themselves from this issue and it’s business as usual.

Contrary to James Murdoch’s statement, it was noted that Murdoch-owned Times and Sun’s Sunday circulations was at all time low. A clear case that readers have opted to move away from them to their competitors. This latest salvo will also damage Murdoch’s businesses in other parts of the world, right now in the UK Murdoch media empire is on weak knees. Surprisingly this situation was in store for them looking at the way they were running the newspaper business.

Put your house in order, and that’s where News Corp failed. Instead, they were quick to blame their competitors to have colored them black. Arrogance, ignorance call it whatever, News Corp is paying for its miscalculation, and it’s going to be tough for them to recover their brand value.

More trouble in waiting for the media giant. The US lawmakers have recommended a formal probe into the whole phone-hacking scandal, and if proved, it will be a clear case of “criminal” misdeeds.

Do you have an active social media life? If the answer is a ‘Yes’ you need to be reading this post.

Post the ‘Weinergate’ incident, when an accidental tweet with an obscene photo that should have been made via direct message to an on-line girlfriend went public on Rep. Weiner’s timeline forcing his resignation, it is time to list out ways to avoid such social media disasters.

Armed with Android smartphones and numerous social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter is by itself a challenging situation. So you have your personal Twitter and Facebook account, and your companies’/clients’ both on a computer and sometimes even on your smartphone. Juggling these daily is daunting to say the least.

The other aspect is your own social life and how you conduct yourself in social circles, what pictures you post on Twitter and Facebook and so on. Ask around and you’re sure to know quite a number of people who have suffered the ‘Freudian slip’ or in this case the ‘Freudian click’ sending the wrong message to an ex-flame/spouse. You end up dealing with not just the horror of such a predicament but also the sinking feeling that it could have been easily avoided.

Here’s how you can avoid accidental social media disasters:

1. Always have multiple browsers for handling personal and professional social media accounts. This is by far is the simplest way to sort things out in your head before you post both professional and personal status messages. So, having IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox for different purposes is adding order to the chaos.

2. Applications like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Seesmic and others all provide quick social media posts from multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. So, using a particular application for professional use and another for personal is the way to go.

3. Direct messages on Twitter or Facebook messages may seem private, but never forget that nothing on the internet is really private.

4. Be funny but remember the virtual world is full of real people and this includes your friends, family, professional acquaintances, co-workers and other plain nosey people. And there are a few things that should not be shared on Facebook and Twitter.

5. If you are a politician or celebrity, the personal and the professional blur – the social media world may have a lot of bots but there are real people out there, so behave as you would in the real world.

6. After writing out a post or attaching a photo make sure to read it again and checking that its leaving from the right account before hitting ‘send’.

7. Posting from smartphones both in a professional and personal capacity is not good idea. Period. Unless you have two smartphones, which again is just a disaster waiting to happen.

So well accidents happen online all the time and some people pay a heavy price as online reputation is there for all to see and every action you take in the virtual world leaves a trail for someone to dig it all up again. Hiring online reputation management consultants is another way to deal with this.

We’ll explain a little why physicians should be worried about online reputation management (ORM).

As the online world is wide and handy, bad reputation takes shape here. Online Reputation Management is the monitoring process that addresses or alleviates the SERPs (search engine result pages) or entries in the online media and social networking domains.

Just like anybody Physicians are as visible as anyone on the Internet and they can be at the receiving end too. Physicians, though they are never considered super-humans, are role models so the expectation and responsibilities is obvious. But looking at the speed information travels on the Internet (through blogs and social networking media), the reputation of a physician can be grounded in no time.

We, at ReputationManagementFor.com did an advanced search on Google on selected Physicians and took screen shots of the first page results. Some of the Physicians were shocked – the negatives that showed on the first page were purely false. In several cases the errors were momentous. Some doctors expressed their helplessness; they are worried when any misinformation appears on sites like Yelp, HealthGrades etc.

A senior doctor once reflected on how it took several months for him to persuade a patient to retract the scathing review posted about him on a review website. The problem starts when doctors or Hospitals do not have enough knowledge about such reviews and by the time they realize, the post might have received thousands hits. Now that’s what we say is a reputation management problem!

We know more patients are doing research about physicians online. Some doctor keep a tab on what is been said about them.  Another example is about a doctor who overlooked this factor because he was employed, but it was a collective reputation so he along-with the Hospital took the beating.

Ignoring online reputation is like endorsing somebody’s view that you are a burglar. It is your professional reputation that’s at stake. You’ve worked hard to get and you owe it to defend and manage your ORM.

It is too early to tell whether this has been a bad week for social networks or for super injunctions in the British courts. Super injuctions are a legal rulingtht forbids media reporting of court case. It can even cover the very existence of the court case. They were usually used to protect vulnerable individuals whose life could be placed in jeopardy if they were named. More recently they have been exploited to protect celebrities from media coverage on the basis they would invade their privacy.
Here is the problem: celebrities have a lot to protect in terms of endorsements which have substantial financial value. Should courts protect them from the fallout from their peccadilloes? Is a man who is cheating on his wife also a “family man” in the case of the widely reported footballer? Was the banker who had an affair with a colleague and had a super injunction so powerful that it could noteven be reported so deserving of court protection that even the regulators of his bank (the largest bankruptcy in UK history) were not aware of his behaviour.

The review of the system looks like it will remedy some of the issues by ensuring that all injunctions are fully explained and that they are for defined periods. This will almost certainly resolve the Twitter issues. The anonymous twitter user, like many others, was frustrated by the exploitation of the law by celebrities.
There is a wider question of whether celebrities should have a “private life” in the sense that you and I understand it. They are highly paid as celebrities and it is unconscionable that the court should protect their livelihood at the expense of freedom of speech.