Yesterday we did a piece on the Top Ten Reputation Management Tips, detailing 10 things you really should be doing to preserve your own/brand name on t’internet. And, while we freely admit that the list wasn’t exhaustive, there are also some things which – equally as importantly – you should NOT be doing. Whilst amicable that you should wish to fix any issues that may arise, within you is the potential to make things a whole lot worse, too.

The following are examples of the top 10 things not to do to manage your own reputation. When they say the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, they’re talking about this list:

1/ Don’t Engage In Bad Business Practices

Yeah, like, duh. You shouldn’t even need to be reminded of this (and most of you don’t), but the quickest way of landing yourself in hot bother is by making bad ethical business choices. But it’s not just your archetype evil business tycoon that’s prone to doing this, it’s pretty much anyone that runs a business. The economy is utter trash at the moment and making cuts is necessary for a lot of people, but you need to be careful what you’re making cuts to. If you’re cutting corners on normal business procedures, customer service, customer aftercare (for example) – it will reflect reflect badly on you and it will get out. The safest bet you can make is that nothing you do is guaranteed to stay private, or behind closed doors, and that for every irate customer or business partner it’s a potential bad story appearing on the internet. Just think “Should this get out, how would this reflect on me/the company?” and you’ll make far fewer bad judgement calls.

2/ Don’t Rush To Admit You Are Wrong

Seems a bit of a u-turn on that last one, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. We’re not suggesting that you intentionally hide mistakes, mishaps or unfortunate coincidences, but rushing an apology doesn’t always help either. If something happens and you’re perceived to be at fault, showing a bit of humility and holding your hands up might go a way towards clearing your conscience. But that’s about all the benefit it’ll have, as admitting liability publicly is the only thing anyone’s going to hear. Sure, you might have a solution – you may have already sorted the situation out – but the minute you say “Yeah, our bad”, the only thing you’ll hear about is that you/your company has admitted complacency. And regardless of what the problem was, or how great you were at rectifying the situation, the headlines will all read “[Company Name] Admits Fault”. IF something happens, don’t feel like you have to be brutally honest and hope people will respect you for it. Sort the problem, and issue holding statements (i.e. “We are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it. We will be issuing a full statement in due course.”) until you can confidently say that the issue is behind you. At which point, acknowledge the existence of the issue, explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what provisions are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3/ Don’t Ignore Misdirected Negative Content

“He aint talkin’ about me” logic doesn’t work. Not when it comes to businesses, and not when it comes to preserving your reputation. It’s all well and good safeguarding against your brand/company name receiving negative attention and taking measures, but is that enough? Well, say you ran a company called Big Mike’s Tyres and had a solid reputation. Congratulations. Unfortunately, a few streets away some guy is running a company called Big Mike’s Tiles and, well… his reputation isn’t as good. In fact, he’s pretty much a cowboy; he rips people off and does a terrible job installing new tiles. So naturally, a lot of people take to the internet to complain about him. But, because of keyword similarities, his bad press is appearing on searches for your company. And, if anyone sees a story saying “Big Mike Ripped Me Off!”, you think that each of them are going to take the time to distinguish between different companies? It’s also not completely beyond the realms of possibility that somebody’s going to see the article about Big Mike ripping people off, assume it’s talking about you, and write their own piece criticizing your company. I hate the use of clichés, but don’t let yourself be put in the position of ‘guilty by association’.

4/ Don’t Threaten Legal Action

Speaking of clichés, I also strongly dislike the “exception to every rule” concept. There are undoubtedly going to be exceptions to this one, but you should at least know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the prevention of negative content arising, but there are certainly rules about how you should conduct yourself when it does. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is threatening legal action against authors/publications out of anger. What they’re saying might well be defamation, it might be inaccurate, it might be a whole lot of things that make you look bad, but you can’t get angry about it. Or, at least not outwardly so. You might even have legal grounds  to have it removed, but have you consulted legal counsel? If there are legal implications, leave it to the solicitors to sort. That’s what they’re paid to do. Once you threaten legal action, you make it a far bigger story. Bigger stories attract more attention, and not just from readers. Once a topic becomes popularized, everyone will want a piece, and so instead of one piece of negative content, you’ve got ten people writing about the original story with the extra bit about your ill-advised response. It used to be a concern that when a story got out, people would hear about it. Now though, you need to be far more concerned with who writes about it. Don’t give them the ammunition they need to make their story any better.

5/ Don’t Try To ‘Pay-Off’ Bloggers

Generally speaking, Bloggers write about whatever they want. A lot of amateur writers also feel that in order to maintain a ‘cutting edge’ to their work, they can only do so by being overly and often cynically critical of others. So yeah, you might at one stage find yourself at the receiving end of a good tongue-lashing, compliments of RandomBlogger569. His article is highly critical, unfairly bias and at points is blatant fabrication. How dare he?! Right, what can you do? Well, as established above – threatening legal action is out. What about trying to pay him off? This guy writes blogs as a hobby, and using his words to try and get attention and is rambling on hoping to cause a scene. How much bigger do you think the ‘scene’ is going to be once he’s written a follow-up post about the guy he wrote about trying to bribe him to remove his content? The best advice is not to respond (rather than fan the flames) and take the usual RM steps to ensure it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

6/ Don’t Argue On Review Sites

There are review sites all over the internet covering practically every subject under the sun (and some above it too). This is the by-product of Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content generation. This is mainly because people have found they can make a lot of money off of hosting a platform for people to share their experiences/opinions. It requires very little effort, as people will now actively seek out a website they can share their thoughts on; and the more people who share their thoughts, the more people will look to the site as a point of reference. And, with that kind of traffic, comes advertising revenue. So these sites are out to make money and they don’t care who is made to look bad in the process. As such, there might come a time when people take to one (or many) of these sites to write about you. Which, you know, if you’re perfect in every possible way, is most likely to be positive content (though still not guaranteed). Sometimes though, people just want to rant. Let them rant – they’re doing what they think they need to do to feel better. If you start replying in an attempt to refute what’s being said, you’ll look petty. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, there can be no good from arguing with somebody on the internet. Under any circumstances. It will look unprofessional, it’ll grant greater credence to what’s being said and you’ll make a bigger thing out of it than it needs to be.

7/ Don’t Post On 3rd Party Forums

A successful politician will, when questioned, often ignore the premise of a question altogether and respond with an answer that sounds like it’s answering, but is actually deflecting on to different matters entirely. They do this not just to be awkward, but because they know that if they answer the question directly, they’re acknowledging that the question has a degree of validity. If negative content starts appearing for searches on your name/company/products in the form of forums, the worst thing you can do is respond to it. For one, it’ll just prolong the story. If you’re taking the proper Reputation Management measures, the story will disappear soon enough, but not if you answer/get caught up in active discussions. For every time you issue a response, you’ll get (at least) one response which counters everything you’ve just said. Your choices then are to continue arguing (with everyone) which is going to make you look just as unprofessional as getting into debates on review sites, or stop posting. At which point, they’ll have won the argument, you’ll have lost and you’ll look worse for it. It’s like thinking “water puts out fires, water is a liquid; paraffin is liquid, I’ll use paraffin to put out this fire”. Yeah, good luck with that.

8/ Don’t Fret Over Neutral Content

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything everyone said about each other was nice, supportive and gratifying? Well, besides from being boring, it just wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense. Nothing and nobody is perfect, and so if you wangle S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) to reflect nothing but positive content, it might look artificial and suspicious. Sure, get rid of negative content, but what about all the pieces that are ultimately indifferent? Some people are so paranoid about looking good that they’ll try and manipulate everything that doesn’t imply butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth away from the top rankings in the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are those that are of the mindset that if something isn’t singing their praises, it’s making them look bad. This is crazy. Not only does neutral content (or ‘Swiss Content’) make related searches pertaining to your name/company look more natural, but if it’s ranking high it’s helping to push the negative content down too. Leave it alone.

9/ Don’t Post Compromising Pictures

We said yesterday that it’s good to share pictures. And, while we don’t like blowing our own trumpets, we were right. Sharing pictures will at time help put a face to a name, make people feel a closer, a more human connection to your business. That’s great, you’re human too after all. You lead a life outside of work, just like your customers. You socialize, you have parties, you… Oh, wait! Don’t you still have those pictures from the Thanksgiving  party you had after-hours at the office last year? That was such a good party! Remember when Rodney from Accounts had a few too many to drink and tripped over the carpet and landed face first into Deborah? How you all laughed! Wouldn’t people think you were great people if you showed them you were just like them? No. Rightfully or not, when people give their custom to a company, they hold them to higher, professional moral standards. It’s due to a need for trust, and they need to trust that you’re being professional at all times and they can rely on you to deliver the goods/service they expect. If you show them any pictures which cast doubt over that trust, or cast any aspersions over the professional integrity of your business, they’ll likely not give you their custom/take their money elsewhere. And this is the internet, there’s nothing people like more than a potential scandal.

10/ Don’t Contribute To Wikipedia

Last on this list, but often the top of Google searches. A lot of people assume that if they can make a Wikipedia page, or add to a Wikipedia page, that’ll be a high-ranking page for related searches. This almost always backfires. First of all, it’s difficult to create a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a company or business that’ll pass the requirements to feature in the online encyclopedia. Most pages get removed pretty quickly anyway, making any effort to write a piece a waste of time. But then, we’re forgetting the main point of Wikipedia. It’s the ultimate UGC website. It’s comprised almost entirely of user-generated content as, the ‘beauty’ of it is that literally anyone can edit it. An email and password later, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could edit what you’ve written. You could have said the nicest, brightest thing about your company and an 11-year-old could edit the article, and add the story (or cited references to the story) you’ve been trying to cover up in the first place. And all of a sudden, there it is – at the top of Google results page. And we can guarantee you – as hard as it is to bury random bloggers or news columnists, getting rid of Wikipedia entries is infinitely more difficult.

Again, this list is probably not the be-all and end-all of everything-you-could-possibly-do-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, but it’s a good start. The trick is just to keep in mind “in what way is this likely to backfire?” and a bit of common sense should keep you on the straight and narrow. Sure, doing any of the above would certainly be considered a mistake but not an unrecoverable one. If you have any issues and aren’t sure how to proceed, get in touch with us – as ever, details are on the home page.

I have been following this Apple and HTC saga with great anguish. Back in March 2010, Apple Inc fired a lawsuit against HTC claiming that they infringed on its numerous patents. Now, last Monday HTC fired another salvo against Apple, complaining to the International Trade Commission to stop Apple from selling the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

HTC on the contrary has also accused Apple of stealing its patents about cellphone directory, power-management technology and hardware and software. As both the companies mudsling each other I get an idea that both have infringed on each others intellectual property.

From the business aspect, Apple’s attack on HTC was in some way to pull Google Inc, since HTC’s smart phone is based on the latter’s Android software, which gives them an edge over Apple’s iPhone. HTC’s counter action on other hand was on the expected lines.

Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s vice-president for North America, in a statement.

We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly, our customers that use HTC phones,

Now how strong HTC’s patent portfolio is something to be debated later, it’s not the phone specification that interest me but the way Apple loose their secret every time. They spend million dollars to come up with a product saying it’s unique, and then spend some more millions to keep the secret. Sadly the trade secret is all over the place. It’s like you want to keep the fire, but don’t want to feed the flame.

Reputation Management For.com feels that Apple or any company should protect their intellectual property or least get used to such situation. In the age of Internet and social media this is how it will be and won’t be getting any better.  But, every time raking up controversy generates negative influence, least you pump another hundred thousands to convince your consumers. We know where law suits end up, and finally you are back to mind your business, but this time post-mud slugging you may have to satisfy by losing a major chunk of your market share and Reputation.

Greenpeace, in its effort to “ensure the earth’s ability to nurture life in all its diversity” is now pinning on its efforts for some very important issues. By gunning for Nestle’s palm oil source and naming their popular product as Killer (Kitkat), Greenpeace has raised its voice for literally anything it feels is just non-earth-friendly.

Greenpeace is now aiming to highlight Apple’s ipad mobile devices which according to them rely on cloud computing and may contribute to global warming. It has also taken on other IT giants like Google, Facebook, MSN to be contributing their share towards critical climate-change. As of now it seems that Greenpeace has drawn a dotted line between the Apple’s ipad and global warming.

Greenpeace acknowledges the fact that if both the data centers and the telecommunication networks that are the two key components of the cloud continue to grow at current alarming rates, then by 2020 the electricity consumption would be half the current in the United States or more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. So with the growing cloud-computing needs in preparation for the iPad and with Apple purchasing a data center in South Carolina which is much larger than its existing facilities, Greenpeace feels that it needs to ask some important questions.

“Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.”

Greenpeace seems to be going for a double-dip by either picking the largest brands when they are getting an exposure in the market and thereby earning another green money or is it that as an original green company it is focusing on the world issues like global warming that raises environmental issues to public knowledge? From a reputation management point of view, we feel that Greenpeace need to come out clearly on social platform that it’s not after “Apple” or “iPad,” but want to debate something very important; Global Warming.

• Apple’s iPad or iSad?
• Apple iPad-How good is the experience
• Buying Kindle after a review
• Apple’s cart upset, again!
• Nestle lands in palm oil slick after the milk powder scandal!

In business and in life, reputation is everything. So it goes on the web as well. Your web site is considered one of the representations of your reputation of your business. You and your business together forms your web site. When disatisfied customers complain about your company in discussion forums, and chat rooms around the web, that is another representation of your reputation.

You are what people are saying about you. The blogs convey the public thoughts and moods to express good or bad points and emotions. To minimize damages due to inflammatory websites and weblogs launched by consumers, some use the same reactive tactics. Given the increasing popularity and development of search engines, these tactics have become more important than ever.

In the years ahead, reputation will become even more important on the web. To be successful, you will need to manage your reputation on and off your web site. Software services are emerging nowadays that measure and record reputation in quantitative and qualitative ways. Search Engine Reputation Management tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to proactively shield their reputations or brands from damaging contents.
These tactics have become more important than ever due to the increasing popularity and development of search engines. We can help your company develop a reputation management strategy by assessing high-level analysis of the business, industry, competition, and customers. That is the analysis of the key phrases, web site visitors,source of prospective customers and competitiveness of the search results for those phrases.

I wrote a post back in 2007 called PR – Be Careful which was my first real insight into how pr companies work.  A few years on and a bit more experience, has shown me how PR, SEO and Reputation Management should be a combined strategy.

I have seen the best and the worst of PR so here are some healthy tips going forward:

1. PR companies would normally take 2 different stances when it come to damage limitation either respond positively to the story or ignore it and hope it goes away.   Both can be a dangerous game on the Internet, if you react to a story or someone’s comments on a forum directly then quite often than not it will attract more negative comments.  If you ignore it, then again it can attract even more negative comments if it appears high in the search results.
2. Using a PR company to create press releases is a great way to get positive stories out there, make sure you use online channels as well.
3. SEO, make sure your own website and or blogs can be found, a customer should be able to find your site easily and quickly so ranking number one for your own site is critical.
4. Reputation  management is a combination of content, SEO and PR by filling the net with positive stories that rank highly for your company is how best to protect your reputation online.

SEO (search engine optimisation) , PR and Reputation Management services all play a significant roll to protect you name, company or brand.  We have built a working relationship with many of these types of companies over the years and have achieved great success with it.

We do provide a article and content service, but do find it very useful if clients can also provide content which we can use to fill the Internet with positive stories and feedback, customer reviews are also a great source for stories.

What does reputation actually mean?

The dictionary definition is

1. The general estimation in which a person is held by the public.
2. The state or situation of being held in high esteem.
3. A specific characteristic or trait ascribed to a person or thing: a reputation for courtesy.

noun

1. Public estimation of someone: character, name, report, repute. Informal rep. See respect/contempt/standing.
2. Wide recognition for one’s deeds: celebrity, fame, famousness, notoriety, popularity, renown, repute. See knowledge/ignorance.
3. A person’s high standing among others: dignity, good name, good report, honor, prestige, repute, respect, status. See respect/contempt/standing.

So how this effects you

Online reputation management or ORM is not a common phrase YET, like SEO was a term not used by average business owner 5 years ago.  As time progresses and people start to hear from customers “Did you know such and such said they are not happy with your service on a website X”, they will start looking for ORM services. How will potential customers know what to look for, the may start off with search terms like Search Engine Optimisation or Search Engine Marketing.  Although many SEO companies can help with ORM, it is altogether a bigger beast and requires a company with experience in the field.

Steps to online reputation management

The best steps to online reputation are definitely the pre-emptive measures, like any service if you call a plumber out at 10pm you will pay way more than if you can schedule a normal time.  Reputation management is much the same, unless you company name is a popular name like “Music Download ltd”  then for the most part a reputation management company should be able to get quick results quickly.

Some simple steps to help you get going:

1. Make sure you have a well optimised site
2. Sign up to Social Network Sites like facebook, twitter, etc
3. Register blogs and wordpress
4. Create some articles
5. Do some online press release

Of course all this takes time and resources so if you need a hand then get in touch and we can certainly do a lot of the work needed to help your reputation online.

The speedy and easy publication procedure that is now available to nearly every Internet user is, without doubt, a distinct and powerful double-edged sword. When used properly, self-promotion of your specialistic physician practice is both accomplishable and effectual. Yet, this “click of a mouse” publishing can also hinder your practice useless if leveraged maliciously by unhappy clients or wrong competitors. If the latter of these situations has happened to your name or your medical practice, or even if you fear that it may happen to you in the near-future, there are high-level steps that you can take as a physician to prevent and reverse such time of life tactics on the digital landscape. Physician Reputation Management can protect your specialized medical practice while at the same time raising positive brand awareness and market presence.

It is of utmost importance that you as a specialized physician allow a large typical sample of your patients dictate the objective feedback about your procedures and their experiences with your medical practice. By creating controlled and open forums of communication, specialized physicians can take a preventative approach to depot  bang-up feedback and reputation rather than waiting for a single unhappy anomalousness to spread false information about your medical services.