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’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.

Professional Recruitment Consultants worth their salt go through rigorous Candidate preparation throughout any placement process. This includes advising the Candidate on interview techniques, coaching on environment specifics, and how to handle ‘the counter-offer’. The counter-offer can see deals worth thousands of pounds fall through in an instant and ultimately there’s little that can be done after a Candidate’s mind is made up.

External factors in Recruitment will regularly work against you and seeds of doubt, once planted, can sprout into insurmountable objections. And while you have absolutely no control over the relationship between a Candidate and their current employers, everything the Client sees and hears about and from a Candidate has to be your responsibility. Which begs the question; have you Google’d your Candidate lately? Your Client? Have you Google’d yourselves? As it turns out, the internet can end up costing you money too. And we don’t just mean your line rental.

For example:

a/ Public Indescretion
A Financial Controller is, after a long and gruelling recruitment process, offered a job. Great. They then proceed to hand in their notice with their current employer, only to find out at the last minute their prospective new employer has rescinds their offer due to an indiscretion from a drunken night out posted on a public Facebook wall. Game over.

b/ Misinformation
Misinformation about the Client is posted on-line from disgruntled ex-employees or poor quality competitors with similar business model. This impacts on a ‘Volume Recruiter’ as negative content reduces recruitment retention by 40%. Often malicious fiction and hearsay becomes accepted as the truth in the eyes of potential applicants. Upon discovery of this misinformation, proposed placements fall through as Candidate interest/confidence is lost.

c/ Review Sites
Having ignored the power that review sites have on perception, the internet displays predominantly negative content/comments about a Recruiter/Recruitment Agency. As with most companies, they don’t promote the positive reviews and stories from the majority of their satisfied customers; instead a few unhappy customers dominate the review sites. They focus on the negatives, from sales technique to problems with products and after-sales, and as a result Candidates and Clients go to your competitors in pursuit of a more reputable agency.

“Okay so I have an issue there are negative comments on-line?”

Try these simple steps:

1. Where possible, talk to the person off-line or via private message and resolve the issue amicably.
2. If the person has a genuine issue, don’t engage in conversation. Adding activity to the page will pushes the forum up higher the search engine rankings. If input is absolutely required, a short “Our company takes all complaints seriously and we will try to help where we can, so please contact us at [contact@company.com]” statement is the most you should contribute.
3. Check the rules of the forum/review site that the person has posted to, many of the sites will remove posts that are threatening, defamatory or libellous.
4. If still unsuccessful, don’t ignore the problem. It is easier to push down negative comments if they are recent; if the page is left for more than a few months like a stain they become harder to remove. And when left alone, they can gain a life of their own if others start to add their own comments.

Protecting your reputation:

Recruitment is about delivering results and Candidate & Client trust is a critical part of a successful placement. Investing in on-line branding is becoming more critical as many professions including Doctors, Lawyers and top sports figures are now more frequently targeted for negative attention.

If you have a distinctive name you are more at risk of being singled out on-line which can be both positive and negative. You don’t have to turn into a social networking addict, just produce a few well written social networking pages so people can find you on-line and make more balanced judgements about you or your business. Link this with an SEO campaign and it will be enough to protect your brand and be ready to deal with any unforeseeable circumstances.

If your company is doing well in business, you can expect anything from scams to complaints being suggested by Google that will only do it harm. Today, Internet is a huge virtual market place and it is important for any business to maintain a positive feedback or image on the web in order to do well. It is certain that you’ll get some negative reviews or listings even in your Google suggestions when your company name is searched.

The number of companies coming under attack from unscrupulous competitors, ex employees and anyone with a grudge  are increasing.  These third parties have enough time on their hands to submit a false complaint or allegation against your company in the hope that it will be seen by potentially new and existing clients. This is done with the intention of creating enough doubt in the minds of your clients that they will continue to search for competing companies.

There is no difference between large or small companies in getting affected by such scam complaints and these companies often may not have any idea as to how they can protect themselves against this. These scams or complaints are often almost impossible to have removed or cleared from Google dropdown suggestions!

To defend against such attacks which are often the result of competitors wishing to disrupt their rivals’ success, companies need to establish effective online reputation management campaigns.

Here are some tips for you to deal with these forms of attack but given the nature of these problems in each case has to be investigated and handled best according to the gravity of problem.

• Great use can be made of new social media sites and blogs which show your company in a positive light
• Don’t approach the companies who host the negative comments and never offer a fee. These are often simply scams designed to extort money from you.
• Get the help of any popular reputation management company to deal with such serious issues.

Rebuilding your online reputation is a task which can take a few months if done correctly and remember its an ongoing process.  For further details on how to remove negative comments click here.

Online reputation management cannot be taken for granted. Online reputation management combines a series of strategies and methodologies that when effectively done, help promote a positive online presence for a company. Online Reputation Management (ORM) has two defined branches, Proactive and Reactive. Both branches ensure online actions are controlled and monitored for a positive online presence of a company.

Reactive Reputation Management:

Reactive action is necessary in a business context and it is taken as a positive step. Reactive reputation management is recommended for companies that have an existing complaint online and want to get rid of it. Reactive Reputation Management includes the following:

• Keeping an eye for online conversations about your brand.
• Maintaining feedback to client’s complaint or praise
• Tracking with latest online trends to make use for marketing and customer services.

Businesses that took time to do Proactive Reputation Campaign on their online brand are more protected from reputation erosion than those businesses that did not even take time to build a solid wall that will shield their Google results image from customer complaints.

Proactive Reputation Management:

Proactive reputation management is all about shielding your online brand and your Google image from all kinds of reputation attack. It is sure to secure you a positive online reputation. Proactive Reputation Management includes the following:

• Social media management – getting involved and monitoring
• Blogging on different networks
• Creation of mini-sites to keep the reputation high
• Search Engine Optimization combined with monitoring
• Article submission through numerous article submission help to flood the online world with things you want to say. The control is in your hands.

By combining both the Reactive and Proactive strategies with constant brand monitoring, companies need not worry about reputation attacks.

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?

Wouldn’t it be great if the judge were to commence proceedings with “You’re under my perjurisdiction now, Tommy”? Ok, so it’s unlikely to have happened, but Tommy Sheridan is in for his toughest test yet as he’s hauled back in to court… for lying in court.

He’s clearly not the first person to have faced a bit of bad press, and he’ll certainly not be the last, but in 2006 when Mr Sheridan was reported in the News of the World to be having extramarital flings – he decided that the best way of handling the situation was to cause a big scene and take the media giants to court. Of course, whether he did or didn’t lie is now down to a jury to decide over the next 10 weeks the case is expected to last.

In his defamation case in 2006, Tommy Sheridan won £200,000 in damages after claiming that The News of the World had fabricated stories that detailed an alleged visit to a swingers club in Manchester and engaged in extramarital affairs with two women. Other accusations levied against the former MSP included excessive alcohol and substance abuse; both claims denied on the basis he was a “teetotaller”. In a case he decided to represent himself (after sacking his legal team in June of that year), the jury returned a majority vote of 7-4 in Sheridan’s favour. It didn’t take long for News International (the other side of Sheridan vs.) to launch an appeal on claims that false testimonies had been given and the sheer volume of witnesses attesting to Sheridan’s admission of guilt.

The whole saga has been going on for four years now, and Sheridan has been making no effort to shy away from the limelight and has declared his innocence in interviews, taken on his own radio talk show and even made an appearance in Celebrity Big Brother. The latter of which was because apparently he “needed the money”. Yeah those lawyers don’t tend to pay for themselves, Tommy! But to be honest, most of this could have been avoided.

When you fall victim to negative press – whether it’s deserved or not – there are ways to go about handling the situation. And whether you’re guilty or not, drawing attention to negative press is not the way to go about it. Your reputation is always going to have aspersions cast against it when accusations are made, whether they’re false or not. There will always be doubt thereafter, irrespective of an innocent or guilty verdict. Tommy and wife Gail could have managed their reputation a lot better by keeping press interest to a minimum. Newspaper stories go away if left alone, and there are ways of dealing with stories online via online reputation management, but at this stage it’s a little late for Mr & Mrs Sheridan.

There aren’t many people who wouldn’t be flattered to hear that somebody thought they had the potential to be a model. In a society that tells you that unless you buy in to the cosmopolitan culture of perfect bodies and catalogue fashion, fraudsters have been left for years to prey on girls and women seeking affirmation on their appearance. Now though, ‘Pretty Protection’ rules have been put in place to crack down on rogue modelling agencies looking to capitalise on the vulnerable.

The modelling scam is fairly straightforward – through various mediums girls are being approached, courted, and being assured that they have what it takes to make it in the modelling industry. They’re asked to attend photo shoots or registration events where they’re pampered and treated like royalty. They’re led to believe that paid work will be forthcoming from an extensive list of clients, and just when the ‘mark’ is about to sign on the dotted line, the trap is sprung.

In order to sign up to these agencies, the girls (ok, so guys are just as susceptible to this too, but statistically speaking the main demographic of those affected are female) have to come up with a ‘signup fee’ or an ‘agency retainer’ on the expectation of making the money back on modelling work. By the time the session is over, victims might have handed over sums that reach the high hundreds. And unfortunately, save for an occasional email or letter informing them they’ve had no interest yet, this is often the last time most people hear anything.

The new rules are as follows:

As of 01/10/2010, it is now illegal for model agencies to charge any type of upfront fee before finding a client work.

Any company caught trying to do that could face an unlimited fine or be banned from operating for up to 10 years.

A 30-day cooling off period has been introduced for photographic work.

If you fall for that trick and pay for a portfolio of pictures you no longer want, you have a month to change your mind and ask for your money back.

Critics though have already said though that the new regulations aren’t sufficient to adequately protect against rogue modelling agencies, as there are still several loopholes still left gapingly wide open. There are however people you can speak to if you feel you are still being scammed, and they can be found here.

The problem now though is that people who genuinely want to make it in the modelling industry are left wondering who they can trust. With so many rogue agencies out there, it’s hard to identify who’s genuine and who isn’t. And now with awareness being raised as to the potential pitfalls of putting your trust in modelling scams, the legitimate agencies risk being tarred with the same brush. An unfortunate but classic case of ‘guilty by association’.

When you have a legitimate business of any ilk, you should look to protect your reputation and disassociate yourself from scammers in the same trade. At reputationmanagementfor.com, we’ve already spoken to spoken to modelling agencies over the last year who are concerned with being caught up in the negative light their ill-intentioned counterparts have been casting. If you have a business whose reputation is being questioned due to matters outside your control, then get in touch with us to find out how we can help you to protect your brand name and reputation. In fashion more than most industries – your name is your lifeblood.

email: info@reputationmanagementfor.com

Call: UK +44 (0) 845 862 1893

Call: USA +1 (212) 913 9035

Well here’s a turn-up for the books…

Lindsay Lohan, out on probation after being found guilty of substance abuse, has had an arrest warrant issued in her name after failing her latest drugs tests. She now faces strict punishment by Judge Elden Fox for breach of the terms of her probation after he showed leniency in allowing the star some freedom to go about her business, including a host of current screen work.

What’s being talked about most at the moment though is not the fact that she failed another drugs test (like, who couldn’t see that one coming?), but infact the activity on her Twitter page.

Ms Lohan Tweeted:

“Regrettably, I did in fact fail my most recent drug test and if I am asked, I am prepared to appear before judge Fox next week as a result.”

“Substance abuse is a disease, which unfortunately doesn’t go away over night. I am working hard to overcome it and am taking positive steps forward every day. I am testing every single day and doing what I must do to prevent any mishaps in the future.”

The nature of her recent posts has got people questioning whether it’s actually her that’s posting. Her friends have been making comments like “this doesn’t sound like Lindsay”. And indeed, this is a sentiment that seems to be echoed by many people commenting on these Tweets.

It all begs the question… in a time whereby her public image has been shot to high heavens, was it Lindsay making those posts? They were clearly designed to show humility and carry favour with the judge, so was it Ms Lohan that made that call? Did she get advice from a lawyer? Did this Hollywood celebrity make use of a Reputation Management company to try and handle damage control? Was it for the sake of her latest film Machete?

Whatever the hope was for these posts, they seem to have missed the mark. Lindsay now faces jail time and for her stumbles on her path to recovery she has lost the respect of a lot of those keen to see her repent and reach sobriety.

At least we didn’t lose Paris Hilton too…