The Reddy family have chosen to celebrate the wedding of their daughter with a £5million wedding near Bangalore at exactly the same time as the rest of India is trying to scrape together a few rupees. They clearly have the readies! Coming from a man who was previously and is still under investigation for all manner of misdemenours – Cloth Ears, or what?

As you might expect, Indians are not impressed!

Nation

In the short-term the measure has drawn attention to India’s corruption problems and the importance of undisclosed cash payments in all spheres of the economy: 86% of transactions are in cash and much of the paperwork is inaccurate. If successful, the longer term outlook will be beneficial if it leads to a more transparent economy. The challenge will be changing the culture of backhanders and inaccurate invoicing. The question will be if this is just a clearing of the balance and the citizenry will start hoarding the new notes as fast as the old!

Money Reputation

Businesses and citizens rely on the stability of the currency to plan for the future. Modi has show himself to be bold, but the question is whether this will worry people about what else he can do in the future. What other tricks does he have up his sleeve and what impact might that have on investment decisions.

Money is a figure of trust – it means nothing if you cannot trust it – simply a piece of paper to light a fire. Indians have discovered that bundles of paper that were designed to tied them over in the future are now worth nothing. What will be the longer-term impact on citizens? Indians already have an obsession with gold and other portable stores of wealth – will that increase in future?

The must be a moral in that story somewhere!

Whole Story here

Comment from Company

We take our obligations to our users very seriously. It always has been, and remains, our intention to inform our users, clearly and accurately, as to what data we collect from them and how it is used. We never intend to collect or share data which can be used to identify our users, and we have developed extensive data cleansing techniques to ensure our users remain anonymous.

After a review of some of the information recently reported and a thorough investigation of facts and circumstances, we now believe that our data cleaning techniques may not have been sufficient to fully anonymize the browsing data WoT users shared with us. While we deployed great effort to remove any data that could be used to identify individual users, it appears that in some cases such identification remained possible, albeit for what may be a very small number of WoT users. Of course, if the data allows the identification of even a small number of WoT users, we consider that unacceptable, and we will be taking immediate measures to address this matter urgently as part of a full security assessment and review.

We hope to earn back the trust of the community by implementing a set of measures which will ensure that those who prefer not to share their data can easily choose to keep their data private while still participating in the WOT community.

Regarding the relaunch of WoT – we received a notice from the Mozilla store that they were removing our add-on from the store pending answers to certain questions. We decided to remove WoT from the other platforms at our own initiative so that we could have the time to study the feedback we have been receiving and to make appropriate changes.

We are now preparing to relaunch an updated version of WoT which will include the appropriate measures to regain the trust of our users.

Good luck with relaunching your product under the same name. You might want something like “Web of Mistrust”

Unfortunately, in today’s world, you only get one bite of the apple.

Branding and reputation are subtle and nuanced and the deterioration of a brand starts many years before it is really evident on the street. Over the past two years, it feels as though Apple have kept missing the bulls eye with their launches. The iPhones have been underwhelmingly received, the apple watch seems moribund – almost a joke in some circles and now the laptops seem forgettable.

Update:

see the cries of horror from the key constituency – designers, creatives and “makers” whose schutzpah drives the underlying meaning of the Apple brand!

New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac

Neither candidate is anything other than completely unlikeable and their popularity ratings are the lowest in  History. To say that both reputations has been completely destroyed during the election is an understatement. A more interesting question is what impact does this election have on American democracy and it’s authority around the World.

There are so many negative things to say about this election cycle that it’s hard to know where to start. With a population of over 200 million people comma you would think that the Americans could come up with a more exciting pair of candidates. Then there is the behaviour of both the media and the electric as a whole who has absolutely failed to bring balance to the proceedings. Then there is the almost complete absence of facts and the way the election has been blanketed in a lurid covering of innuendo.

It’s no surprise that the rest of the world is laughing and countries used to being lectured by the United States are now pondering on the question of whether American democracy is a workable system anymore.

This is an outstanding example of reputation disaster in action. It starts at the top and then works it way down until the only person who comes unscathed is Michelle Obama, it would seem.

You pay to get ‘paid tweets’ – top billing, and yet there’s no end to the negative comments and trolls. And as for the actual revenue gained from these promoted tweets or Facebook Ads its anybody’s guess; in fact, its as mysterious as how Joseph Gorden-Lewitt’s character “just knows” Bruce Wayne is Batman in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. Twitter has marginally overtaken Facebook as the marketing channel to be in, in the wake of Facebook going public and the haziness as to how much the ads work for companies. It does not help that Facebook, as recently revealed, has more than 80 million fake users!!

For companies with invstment in social media marketing, this is a time for introspection; however, marketing woes aside let’s not forget the fact that being active on social media continues to be advantageous. The reputation management angle and the power that social media has in connecting with the consumers is remarkable! The search engine benefits of owning such a space is tremendous and it simply works well. In fact, social media can be very effective in handling a PR crisis, as this article would illustrate, if handled cleverly.

So, there you go… social media marketing may not be a good idea for companies now, however keep up with the tweets and Facebook posts and own the space, and use it to your corporate advantage and reputation management benefits.

Clearly a case of  reputation damage and though the court has ruled that the offending words be removed Google has towed the ‘not subject to Japanese law’ line. However, the present case is about compensation and yet again Google defence points out that such cases are rare and the algorithm decides things on what is already available online.

A man from Italy won a case against Google for similar reasons and so did a Frenchman who had to deal with words like ‘rapist’ being suggested with his name. Google does screen for pornography, profanity etc, so can easily oblige if  a court sees it as having caused reputation damage to a plaintiff.

However, with Google claiming to have more and more requests from governments to remove content all this could well eat into the brand losing its sheen of being impartial based on its algorithm, which gets tweaked every so often to weed out spam and information of low value among other things. So will Google pay up??

To find out more about what they off visit http://www.appcogroupservices.co.uk/

If a hotel is trashed in reviews by a couple of users on TripAdvisor, then it is more than enough to bring its reputation down.

It won’t be easy to remove or block all negative comments about hotels, but one can always push them down by bringing good content up thereby making it rank on the first-pages of Google.

Top tips for Hotel Reputation Management:

• Monitor social-networking sites, and other online media to check what people talk in general about your business
• Respond to user comments, suggestions, feedback, complaints, and reviews, without fail
• Regular communication and more of interaction with web-users on a daily basis helps, and can help one tap new business opportunities from nowhere
• Actively communicate and interact with people/online users on some of these popular sites: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
• Submit relevant theme-based audio-video, and textual files more, to keep the users engaged
• Creating/joining different online communities and groups, for chat and discussion forums always help, to know minds of people
• Update your website daily/often with new stories about the business, post blogs, news articles about events and conferences etc. to keep the users well-informed about the company
• Holiday deals, discounts and offers, contests and giveaways can help in keeping the online users grooved to the business
• Incorporate reputation management in the ERP system to automate the business activities, and to streamline the process
• One can even seek experts and consultants for business reputation management strategies

Finally, outsourcing online reputation management to Reputation Management Companies can be a better choice for the service industry as a whole!