Reputation Management Online

Gartner Group – the once fashionable purveyors of reports on online business – have recommended that corporates get their heads around the use of avatars within corporate enviroments. (Press release here)

They have 6 recommendations for businesses as they point out that the use of avatars is becoming both more widespread and inevitable.

1. Help users learn to control their avatars. For most people, controlling and using an avatar is not viewed as intuitive or easy, but like any skill, after a few sessions a user can master the basics. The platform being used can also be an important factor, but improvements in optimizing virtual environment memory have lessened this issue.

2. Recognize that users will have a personal affinity with their avatar.Users often take pride in their avatar and dress them up or down. For enterprises, this is where dress codes can come into play, if the avatar is being used for company business. Early efforts with avatar appearance have often been viewed as an inhibitor to adoption but this issue should fade as quicker and easier methods of configuring avatars become available.

3. Educate users on the risks and responsibilities of reputation management. Organizations can avoid problems with employees mixing their personal and professional avatar interaction and activities by suggesting that employees use one avatar for their work interactions and another avatar for personal activities.

4. Extend the code of conduct to include avatars in 3-D virtual environments. Just as with social networking sites and individual Web pages where employees participate as representatives of their employer, an avatar’s behavior and appearance are a reflection of the individual and the company they work for. Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments. However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes.

5. Explore the business case for avatars. Justifying avatar use in a business setting is becoming easier, in part because avatar use is gaining wider acceptance. Training and virtual meetings are the top use cases, and one of the main reasons for the increased use of avatars is cost.

6. Encourage usage and enterprise pilots. Looking ahead, one of the biggest uses of avatars appears to be for online meetings. Web meetings are emerging as an important new use case for virtual environments, and this may be a good point at which to start learning about the issues and opportunities surrounding users and avatars. Enterprises may find that they have a willing and ready population of users who are familiar with avatars and their usage. Pilot testing is still the best option for starting to understand the issues that enterprises will face with increased avatar adoption.

Point three is an interesting case for how businesses interact with online worlds. 10 years ago it was common for individuals within business to use their own emails before businesses properly invested or managed corporate email systems (and it is still highly common in India).  Are avatars a similar case or does this represenan example of businesses trying to shape the behaviour of their employees in what I thought was an old style.

Moreover do we associate an avatar which is a personal representation with a corporate brand? How far should corporate guidelines go before they become restrictive or constraining. Put differently, corporate guidelines are so often lowest common denominator and suddenly we start seeing citibank avatars looking all alike.

Avatars are behavioural and as such as part of the brand culture of a company. Getting employees behind a brand is the key variable in brand success and integrity. Avatars are not reputational as such. If they are weird or represent the male chairman naked and big tits – it will certainly cause a story and then reputation might suffer. But presently nobody mistakes an avatar for a person as such and what the avatar does might be offputting but it wont be seen as indicative.

More pertinently corporates have to tread carefully around how much they control employees in the online space. Corporatising avatars is more likely to cause reputation loss if it is not handled carefully.