- Appco Group Services
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- Reputation Management Tip for 2012: Brands need to tap into social media search!
- Facebook Timeline and Reputation Management
- Apple Siri gender bias or glitch?
Posts Tagged ‘Bad Press’
Employee Reputation critical for organizations
January 6, 2010 | 
Author Just how good it is when an Organization says that ‘Employees are their assets’, well let’s keep this debate aside for now. But here we are going to highlight how employees’ reputation creates a huge impact on those who look at you from the other side and just how critical it is for the reputation of your company..
Your employees’ carries the attitude and brand of your company. Have you ever noticed when visiting any office and waiting at the front office. I think this is the best place to analyze how true the employees carry the brand. You can feel the elements of the company culture and values coming through in the way people speak to each other and how they greet you. After all, employees are the caretakers of a company’s brand.
Employees and corporate reputation goes hand in hand. Though company reputation is vital, but employees are also the key factor that link to manage it. This generates positive performance and ultimately cements a place for you in this competitive era. So how to keep a positive reputation of your organization is about recognizing the significant role employees’ play in the overall positioning of corporate reputation.
However, to encourage employees to ‘live the brand’ are not much practiced. It is further suggested that to highlight your brand through your employees there has to be solid strategies in place. So when employees are trained to do their part perfectly the battle is half won. Let the employees know what actions are effective in return that successfully portray your strong brand.
In my opinion a brief training exercise and the know-how of the company and its regulation will go a long way in shaping employee reputation. Apprise them of the various vulnerability that could sabotage their reputation; for example ‘A tech savvy employee when comes across some website that has negative thing about the organization, what he should be doing? Persuade them to take advantage of the situation and come up with better solution to counter that after all it’s reputation at stake.
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, HR Reputation, Reputation Management, Reputation News, SEO | 
Tags: Bad Press, brand reputation, CEO Reputation, company reputation, employee reputation management, negative content, Reputation Management, reputation management news, SEO | 
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Tiger Woods Reputation- an accident!
When searching for ‘Tiger Woods’ on Google it didn’t bring up his official website, but something rather spicy to be precise.
Woods reputation has taken a beating no doubt, and now his announcement about indefinite leave from golf will further make matter worse. Companies and products that Woods endorse are caught sitting ducks. A rough estimates shows an already loss to incur is around $12 billion.
The positive reputation he has worked years to attain now shows above his official website. Being a celebrity your reputation is always at the crossroads and anything can hit you. Strangely in Mr. Woods’s case it was a (mysterious) accident.
It may be noted that before the accident Tiger Woods enjoyed 85% positive sentiments on social media. Interestingly a week post-accident it did not plunged to a very low either as a sudden impact. This was the ideal time to capitalize and minimize the damage, if only Mr. Woods had believed in Reputation Management.
With no proper damage control plan in place it was all expected. Surprisingly the reaction from the Woods clubhouse has been too slow and hazy. Tiger should realize that ‘No press is tantamount to Bad press‘ and he took his own time to clear the air. Meanwhile internet and the social media websites were flooded with more negative comments thus creating its own crisis. Negative comments later jumped to 40% from 15%, while the positive sentiment was at an all time low of 14%.
This whole affair will cost the golfer $100 million a year in endorsement income. Too late for the Tiger to be out of the woods if only he knew- “It takes hundreds of good golf shots to gain confidence, but only one bad one to lose it” - Jack Nicklaus .
Posted in Bad Press, Celebrity Reputation, Company Reputation, Negative Forums, Online PR, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, SEO, Social Network Sites | Tags: Bad Press, Golf, Tiger online reputation, Tiger wood accident, Tiger Woods, Tiger woods reputation, Tiger woods story | 6 Comments »
Nestlé’s Reputation: They are not managing, but damaging it
Nestle – as if the controversy was not enough for their Honey Shreddies, here comes another blow from FDA over their Juicy Juice drink BOOST. The company claims it is a complete Nutritional Drink. FDA says – ‘Nestle is promoting the drink as a medical food and that it treats “failure to thrive” and helps children in chronic illness.
Well about Nestle “Their actions are so loud, one cannot hear what they say“. Nestle seems to oversee the fact that consumers aren’t fools, this age when the world is just a click away it will not take much time for your reputation to go for a ride in matter of minutes. In the recent case we have seen how Twitter and Facebook were flooded with articles and calls to boycott them.
While we know that Nestle is always in controversy, what surprises me is they have no action in place to counter it and are always wondering what hit them.
Strangely they say one thing and go on doing something else. Nestle responses are always generic – send them an e-mail only to get a reply ‘the mail is forwarded to the Switzerland, Headquarters. Their handling of a situation is poorly managed – they bask on PR, which is just an aspect of the approach and not a substitute of Reputation management.
Buying time will only make matter worse; the consumer has the power of Internet. Nestle should let it be known that they are transparent. You cannot hide things from consumer; the skeletons will be out and the rest internet will ensure that you don’t stay in single piece.
Better late than never Nestles should do some brainstorming. Internet and plenty of social media out there it’s a classic example of “word to mouth” for your reputation.
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Damage Limitation, Negative Forums, Online PR, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, Social Network Sites | Tags: Bad Press, FDA, food and drink industry, nestle controversy, Nestle Honey Shreddies, nestle online reputation, nestle reputation management, Reputation Management, reputation management news | 2 Comments »
Boy George banned – bad rep ain’t that easy to clean
Boy oh boy! Boy George will have to return the 200,000 pounds he got as fee to enter Celebrity Big Brother. A court has ruled against the disgraced star’s participation in the show. Boy George was sentenced for 15 months for imprisoning a Norwegian in shackles and assaulting him and is still under probation.
Though the singer managed to get an early release, his attempt at getting back into celebrity life was quashed with this court order. Talk about being in the doldrums of reputation… Boy George sure needs to be back in the spotlight, however, to actually be in a TV show where people watch you like a lab rat, could have backfired and we will never know how it would have panned. I guess the courts did not want to condone the ‘celebrity’ tag being given to someone who is still on probation and wearing a tag.
Boy George needs serious celebrity reputation management and that’s a nobrainer; he needs to be making an example of his life against cocaine addiction and erratic behavior. Connect to real people on Twitter and Facebook and slowly build his reputation back. Reality shows may not be such a great idea and MC Hammer, Heidi Fleiss and the rest who are in CBB should wonder why they have been selected for the show.
For Boy George the ban may have been the right thing to have happened, but time to work on some great online reputation re-building is the way ahead for him to keep his celebrity tag.
Reputation management – Is your good business getting a bad name
When you get a spam mail do not delete it and take sometime to read it (do not reply or react). If you notice the content of the mails are mostly promotional about all kinds of business. The majority of spam mails is to do with breast enlargement or about male enhancement. Do not be surprised to know that these mail as they claim comes from bigger companies than you own.
Now that’s a bait!
Some people ignorant of the fact what spam mail are suppose to be tend to reply them. What tempts them to respond is something interesting, well! It’s the big names like MSN, Amazon or Paypal attached to this email.
Now that’s what we call bait – you being skeptical shoot an email to that owner only to know it was spam. Unfortunately the damage is already done, you have authenticated and confirmed your email address, and now the spammer has all sources at his disposal to flood your Inbox.
What is the point.
Well give it a thought! If the spammer thinks that using reputed companies like MSN, Amazon or Paypal is perfectly fine, what makes you think that your business is safe. As we all know burglars are always on the lookout for huge cache, and they en route their plans using smaller companies because they know with smaller companies it is always a win-win situation. If this situation is not handled properly, imagine the kind of damage your business will inherit, you may even close your shop.
How to shield
Now urgency has pounced on you, there is nothing as important, but to shield your reputation before more people gives it a bad name. This not only results in loosing business even your identity too.
Smart move, you want somebody to take responsibility and guard your business and personal reputation.
Reputation managers will then try to capitalize on the already done damage until such time your reputation is secure. This is probably the best option and least you worry about the reputation of your business.
Send out a strong message and let no one think about using your company’s goodwill to fill their own coffers in future.
Posted in Bad Press, Company Reputation, Journalists and Reporters, Reputation Management, Reputation News, Reputation Online, SEO | Tags: Bad Press, business reputation, company reputation, negative reviews, reputation management blogs, reputation management news, Spam mail reputation | No Comments »
Bad press, damage limitation, PR, crisis management, brand protection
Bad press, damage limitation, PR, crisis management, brand protection, call it what you like, the minute you put online in front of any of these phrases changes the requirements of a company who can help. So who do you need to help mange your reputation on the net?
When you find you have negative content appearing in the search engines where do you go? Sure negative comments can be a positive thing if you have had a serious issue and have shown to have dealt with it after listening to your customers. More often than not however it can be an ex employer, competition or customer who has taken a particular disliking for the company and very difficult to show you have dealt with the complaint.
Reputation Management is about showing your company in the correct light and create understanding. It is unlike advertising, whose main goal and focus is to generate sales and awareness. Like PR, reputation management should be a planned exercise, with the goal of making the public, customers and suppliers see that the company understands the needs and wants of all parties involved. You can’t do this if there is only negative content showing on the first page of the search engines.
How you go about producing this positive content must be done honestly and in a manageable structure, otherwise you could take the wrong path. See this example from the NY Times
Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.
One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”
So it’s important that you get the right advice, having an online reputation management strategy can save you a lot of time, effort and money. Leaving it till its a big issue can sometimes hurt you and damage your reputation beyond repair.
You may forget but the Internet does not
The problem with the Internet is quite often stories in newspaper and PR in the traditional sense is forgotten about days, weeks or months after it was published. The Internet is an altogether a different beast, it remains there, it stalks you, it follows you and like a snowball can form into a full scale avalanche. Now this can be good if the news or story is positive, however this can be a nightmare if its negative.
What feeds this avalanche quite simply is the same as how a rumour will start in an office or at school. “did you hear what such and such got up to at the weekend, John told me he last night, apparently Steve told him” and so on. Where the Internet plays a much bigger roll in this, is someone can pick up on an article, blog of comment in a forum and write a blog about it and link back to the actual source. If the story is interesting enough then it doesn’t take long for many people to follow suit and start linking back to the source and the 2nd and 3rd placed posts on other blogs who are also talking about it.
Google’s main factor for deciding how high to rank a page in the search results is how many links it has pointing to it, they are a bit like votes, the more links, the more likely Google will see the post as a relevant article and start to rank it highly. If you leave the article at the top of the search results then it attracts even more links and stays up their creating momentum and becoming more difficult to budge when you do decide to address it.
So burying your head in the sand and hope negative or bad press online is going to disappear is the worst PR you could do. That is why reputation management is critical to start straight away, there is nothing better than hearing a client saying “see no negative things are being said our business”, it just means we are doing our job right!
If you are a CEO the last thing you want is your kids reading personal negative things about you (that may or may not be true), quite often we have to not only protect a company name, but also the main drivers behind a corporation. If these types of comments get on to some of the mainstream forums, then people can be quite brutal and vulgar about what they are saying about you.
Protect your company using reputation management (PR Online) to stop things getting to the top is much easier than trying to bury it later on. Check out our prices for standard packages – Reputation Management Prices
Russia business reputation
Would you do business with the Russians? Well you’ve got to be truly brave or obstinate of the bovine kind to actually consider it. Business fraud in Russia is rampant and has had a 12 % increase from that of 2007.
Russia has had huge trouble dealing with its bad reputation even though the country is now the largest producer of natural gas overtaking even the might of Saudi Arabia. But then that’s the end of the story as far as business diversification goes, being infamous for hackers, the mafia and what not, Russia is in the trenches as far as business reputation goes.
Transparency International has put Russia at 146 out of the 182 countries surveyed – at par with Sierra Leone! Places like Dubai are facing business dishonesty and debt, the slide in reputation has only begun in these places while Russia has a mammoth task ahead!
Meanwhile the world will remain wary of doing business with the Russians and that is how it stays.
Ryanair – brand and reputation enigma
Ryanair is one of the most popular airlines in the world. It certainly flies more people than any other airline in the world. It is also one of the world’s most unpopular airlines judging by surveys of passengers. What’s going on?
Ryanair was not the pioneer of budget airlines, but it has been the most aggressive purveyor of the technique and perhaps the most famous example of the type, outstripping rivals like Easyjet. It has build its budget philosophy around low cost rather than cheap and in being upfront about what you are paying for. They pioneered the technique of charging taxes separately to highlight what the cost of taxes is and in the form of Michael O’Leary they have a voluble and cheeky CEO on whom few critics have landed a punch.
In the past few years the Ryanair story seems to have darkened as their business model is increasingly driven by extras that enable them to continue to advertise cheap flights and yet still charge passengers a lot more via online check-in charges, payment processing charges. It would seem as though the costs of providing the services have been squeezed out and now they are seeking to have their cake and eat it. Advertise low fares but charge the customer a lot more.
Their customer service philosophy is different and highly O’Learyesque – don’t delight or even please customers: just get them there cheaply and on time. It is airline travel as commodity service rather than high value service.
The problem for the Ryanair reputation is this: they are losing their reputation for being low price. They may continue to proclaim, “we are lost cost”, but increasingly for customers the experience of being double charged for one payment, having to pay for checking-in calls that into question. A straw poll of my friends revealed that none were happy with Ryanair.
- all felt that some charges were deliberately exploitative of customers.
- Ryanair staff were rude and that the system was designed to confuse and punish customer mistakes.
- None would fly Ryanair by choice, only because they were the only airline flying to a particular destination.
They do not mind paying for food or baggage. They don’t mind queuing for seats and they don’t mind having to check-in online.
Ryanair portray themselves as an engine to drive down costs, but the accounts reveal that profitability is really about advertising low fares and then charging as much again on top. As more and more customers recognise and discuss this, one senses that the Ryanair brand will be associated with being a cheat.
The Ryanair strategy on reputation management is strike first and offer a withering character assessment of the critic. Increasingly it does not wash with customers. Ryanair will need to look more carefully at how it charges as rival operators exploit the Ryanair reputation gap. For Easyjet, this represents a huge opportunity if they can continue to drive out costs but deliver an honest service and establish themselves as customer champions.
Posted in Company Reputation, Examples | Tags: Bad Press, doctors reputation management, Negative Customer, Ryanair | 6 Comments »
Get rid off negative comments
Most businesses want their websites to show up on the first page of search engines. How good is it if your website appears on the first page of Google or Yahoo? You search for your company/product name and to your surprise you find one or more listings on top. You have been waiting for this, but then the sudden change in weather on search engines is astonishing. Have a closer look, do you see anything unusual? Well it could be those negative comments about your products doing the rounds and inviting so many visitors and obviously putting your website on top. If it is so, you are in big trouble.
One negative comment is enough to frighten away many likely customers. How genuine these reviews or complaints are is not the question, but it is about the impact. Your company’s reputation is at stake besides loss of revenue in millions.
Reputation management has become a crucial tool, but then very few companies go for this service to counter negative propaganda waged against their firms. Airlines, banks, hotels are the most vulnerable and are always at the receiving end, by disgruntled customers or envying competitors. By being ignorant of reputation management these firms end up sorting issues through litigation, which is twice as expensive and time consuming as compared to hiring reputation managers.
In such situations, our suggestion is to ‘nip it in the bud’- suppress the negative comments and bring up the positive ones. It is all about customizing a strategy to corner negative comments and design a campaign to keep positive reviews of your company above others.
Safeguarding your business from on-line damages and ensuring its smooth run is tantamount to running a business itself. New and small companies need to understand how vulnerable they are and how important reputation management services are for their business.