Reputation Management Online

A great example of a company who has managed to keep itself clean of a massive backlash on line is Getty Images.  They have at least 5 pages showing up on the first page of Google for Getty Images, the other results are all positive apart from Wiki which is a balanced view (possibly).

So a few years back Getty Images started :

This is taken straight from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images

Copyright enforcement

Getty Images uses a firm called PicScout to scan the web for unauthorized and unlicensed usages of its protected images. Websites that are found to be in violation are sent financial settlements that retroactively licensed the image. However, the settlements also demand damages, which are said to have been incurred against the copyright holder. Thousands of these letters have been sent out, yet according to the Wall Street Journal in October 2005, Getty had not taken any of these potential cases to court.Reference 1 and 2 However, Getty published a notice to its contributors describing how a court decision in New York makes it more difficult to obtain damages for infringement. Reference 3 The article does not state whether Getty Images was a party involved in the court case.

Recently, Getty Images lost a lawsuit in Germany^[14]. Getty claimed unauthorized usage, but the defendant could prove authorized usage as he had bought a retroactive license directly from the photographer.

There has been many sites and forums talking about how Getty handled this and complaints of their hard handed approach,

Here are a few more websites discussing Getty Images:

• extortionletterinfo.com/
• internetmadness.blogspot…getty-images-are-trying-to-getty-me.html
• forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1014&message=27828081

So Getty Images theoretically should have got hammerted both off and online, but because they have a very strong brand, very succesful website (s) they were able to keep any negative results from appearing on the first page of Google.

The lesson that Getty shows here, if you are prepared and allow for Reputation Management in your on line marketing budget then you can easily stop, reduce and help prevent negative results costing you more in the long run, even the Wiki discussion page is lacking any real chat about it.  It could have been a lot worse when you think about how the people Getty were going after quite often were “Internet people”, I’m not saying what they did was right or wrong.  What Getty did show is that if you have a Strong Brand, well designed website you can hide most negative things, remarks, blogs and comments.