Something that always comes up in our engagements is the widespread availability of our clients’ names on the Internet for anyone to purchase and use.
Someone may simply share your name, but they can also impersonate you and use your name to create false and possibly inappropriate material about you on blogs, websites, and social media accounts – much like fake news.
If you own the “.com” domain for your name, as well as iterations on the top digital platforms, you are in good shape. This is important even if you don’t plan on using these assets — for example, when you deliberately hope to be “invisible” online because you prefer a low profile.
If you are pursuing any initiatives that depend on having a favorable public perception and you are not actively managing your image online, be forewarned. You don’t have control over your image yet. You are also a prime target for identity theft, because unless you have taken proactive steps to protect your name online, anyone can use it… and pretend to be you.
Fortunately, most of us will not be the focus of mistaken identity, defamation campaigns, or fake news. But your name is the essential tool in a personal branding program, a thought-leadership campaign and the most basic protection of your reputation, as well as for enhancing it. For that reason alone, don’t let it be taken and used by anyone else.
Remember: Online reputation management enables you to shape the public’s perception of you and your organization by taking control of the story the Internet tells about you. It all begins with your name.
Reputation management for entities is particularly relevant these days as the whole world watches the Twitter saga unfolding.
With the social media giant in freefall and its new boss Elon Musk pushing his own inscrutable agenda, the question of how organizations can effectively manage reputations during times of change or crisis should be front of mind for the leadership of any organization paying attention.
Since Musk took the reins of the social media giant, Twitter has faced major challenges such as users and advertisers fleeing the platform and senior employees jumping ship. The mass layoffs the company has endured and the media circus accompanying every action has exacerbated the hit to Twitter’s brand.
The situation could become more volatile.
It is still not clear what Musk’s vision for success with Twitter is, and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of his ability to dig himself out of the deep hole he has dug himself, despite the success of Tesla and Space X.
Perhaps this is a case in which we can examine how an organization can learn how to manage its reputation in the public eye… and come out even stronger.
The current imbroglio that Twitter finds itself in is an extreme situation where the world’s richest man has acquired the world’s public square and the result is a stunning explosion of brand value. But observant companies can still learn valuable lessons from this fiasco about how to manage their reputation in the public eye, and even come through stronger when faced with significant challenges.
What it is, and why it matters
Reputation management is often defined as the practice of influencing stakeholder perceptions and public conversations about an organization and its brands. It includes monitoring perceptions and conversations, responding to reputation threats and proactively seizing opportunities to boost reputation.
Reputation management is more challenging for an organization with many moving parts, as opposed to individuals or small businesses which can monitor reputations online by tracking news, reviews, and social media.
A larger organization, especially a publicly traded company, must manage expectations of shareholders and multiple partners, so reputation management becomes complex. But there are steps organizations can take to put their best foot forward online, in the media, and to their customers.
What can organizations do to protect their reputations?
Companies can take several steps to manage their reputation on an organizational level. A positive reputation can take years to build and a few minutes to ruin. There is always the risk that one misinterpreted tweet or post can cause a maelstrom on social media, so it is best to consider the following actions, all of which can be done preemptively.
– Be as transparent as possible in communications and with your audience.
Of value today in an organization is the ability to be transparent and own a mistake. Brands are as fallible as people, and as creators and influencers continue to be the face of organizations, brands will continue to strive to be perceived as relatable. This is especially true for Gen Z, who grew up on screens and understand which brands are authentic.
-Be diverse, but really embrace diversity
A lot of lip service surrounds diversity these days, with limited real action often taken in organizations. The best way to change is to promote diversity in your organization (including diversity of thought). Work to build diverse teams and share with your community what you’re doing, particularly the wins of team members.
-Be good to your employees
As we’re seeing with Twitter, Musk’s behavior and communication style is driving many employees away. His direct and abrasive style is self-selecting for employees who value his style of management, but the optics (as covered in the media) are not great. In general, people do talk, so being good to your employees will help generate good will.
These are three important points for reputation management on an organization level, but attention must also be paid to your online presence. In Twitter’s case, this is less relevant as they are a social media company. But most companies have a robust digital footprint which needs to be monitored.
Steps for a better online presence:
-Prepare a digital strategy
As the saying goes, “failing to plan, means planning to fail,” so having some kind of plan is key. The online world is dynamic, but the good news is you can gauge feedback immediately and understand trends with easily accessible analytics.
-Make your website (and social media) the authority
There is often an educational component to the service or product you market. With so much noise online and everyone jockeying to be an “expert,” building a presence with authority and developing content such as testimonials, data, and media links will help you stand out. The more authority you have online and the more transparent your communication, the better your reputation will be.
-Have conversations with your customers
Your customers are your lifeblood and engaging with them (and the comments they post) can help spot challenges which may arise. Taking that extra step is also key in building brand loyalty with your community.
Whether we like it or not, all of us have an online presence. Our reputation on the internet — shaped by social media posts, public data, news reports, and consumer reviews — can either bolster our professional success or contribute to its decline. We can choose to monitor and maintain the image we are presenting to the world online or leave our reputations vulnerable to misinformation or malice.
One of the best ways to be proactive online is to get ahead of everyone else in telling your own story. That’s why it’s of the utmost importance for successful people and businesses to cultivate a robust presence online through developing an online reputation management (ORM) strategy. But where’s the best place to start?
Enter: Reputation Reboot
Reputation Communications’ insider’s eBook, Reputation Reboot: What Every Business Leader, Rising Star & VIP Needs to Know, is an insightful primer and guide on building your ORM strategy. It contains everything you need to know about the basic steps you can take to shield your online reputation from harm, while helping you understand how optimize search engine results and navigate the murky waters of internet content regulations. It includes sections on crisis management, Internet law, privacy and other issues of concern to many.
Reputation Reboot was not written with the intent to scare you into implementing ORM, but instead to make you aware of the enormous opportunity there is in taking ownership of your online presence. When you embrace the informational power of the internet, there are more options for narrative and privacy control than you might think.
Is your organization ready for a skeleton in the closet? That is a question every CEO needs to consider.
What happens when there’s a ticking time bomb in an organization just waiting to detonate? That often happens when a long-buried and controversial issue in an executive’s past resurfaces. Such a crisis can cost an organization significant equity and reputational damage.
This danger is real, as digitalization of once-outdated public records is making old information from the past more readily available in online searches.
Combine that with the microscopic attention being paid to business leaders and founders, politicians, celebrities, and what once would remain a legal notice published long ago in a local newspaper now appears on the first page of a person’s Google results if the newspaper’s archive is digitized. Or, when past romantic and professional contacts suddenly go public with critical, sometimes reputationally fatal disclosures that may be biased or subjective, but still make career-destroying headlines.
All of this can raise the likelihood of reputational damage for an individual or organization. If you have something like this in your background, best to prepare a strategy for addressing it should it resurface in the future.
The New York Times has published a disturbing article that shows how some online reputation damage happens: intentionally.
In A Vast Web of Vengeance, tech reporter Kashmir Hill details how one person spent years creating false, negative posts about more than a hundred people. They have suffered extreme reputation damage due to 1200 defamatory posts that are too unpleasant to print here. In her article, Hill describes “the power of a lone person to destroy countless reputations, aided by platforms like Google that rarely intervene.”
Yes: On the internet, anyone can be impersonated, harassed or the focus of “fake news.” It persists because of the Communications Decency Act Section 230, (CDA 230), a law that protects the platforms that publish such information — publishers like Google, Facebook, Twitter and millions of blogs, forums and websites — against liability for third-party content on their websites.
We have written extensively about the need to update that law. That includes our interviews with leaders active in the movement to change it, notably:
Right2Remove, which advocates for “Right to Remove” privacy policy legislation “that allows for the removal of content from Internet platforms that is designed to cause reputational harm to consumers in the United States.”
Here is to more investigative journalism focusing on this important topic, including changing the law that enables such harmful content to remain on the internet forever, or at all.
Many people seeking online reputation repair hope for an instant, fast tool. For all the bells and whistles that can be promoted in this industry, here is what you need to know.
Content is the most important tool in online reputation management (ORM). It has remained so during all of Google’s many algorithm changes. The quality of material placed online, whether it is text, video or anything else, affects how Google evaluates its importance, credibility and relevancy.
Google is constantly refining and updating its algorithm, the system it uses to establish the credibility and value of a site over others. One reason is because so many efforts are continually made to game the system: to trick Google and other search engines into erroneously believing that fake content, fake websites and meaningless links (a search engine optimization, or SEO, tool) are credible and thus worth a high ranking. A high ranking means a site is given more precedence over others. Many factors factor into it – some of which Google identifies and more it doesn’t.
Proactive Content, Strategically Placed, is a Key Strategy
Many damaged reputations result from not having erected a wall of proactive content that serves as a buffer to offset consumer-generated media (CGM). CGM includes the anonymous blog and forum comments that often form the most damaging threat to reputations. Proactive content counterbalance such sentiment, as well as negative online information that may be factual and from respected sources. When there is little content about an individual or organization online, on appropriate platforms and with the SEO that enriches it, anything that anyone posts online about that topic goes straight to the top of the list of results in a Google search—and can stay there.
Strategy Determines Best Type of Image for You or Your Organization
Effective content is information-rich text as well as videos, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information that can be placed online. Ineffective content has a junky or low-quality aspect. When you see meaningless text about an individual or organization plastered on numerous generic websites that lack a clear organizational unity or credible hosting site, you are seeing a generic ORM campaign that is mass-produced for hundreds or thousands of people and organizations. If you care about your or your organization’s image, it might not be an appropriate approach for you. What is important is intelligent, well-crafted text and other material that aptly reflects and adds value to your brand.
Ever wonder how online reputation repair really works? That is, when it is done right: when it is not outsourced to other countries, or implemented using the kind of tactics that lead to a Wall Street Journal exposé, or results in disappointment.
Look no further. Reputation Reboot: What Every Business Leader, Rising Star & VIP Needs to Know, is now available as a free, downloadable eBook.
If you are a high net worth individual, a high-profile VIP or on a fast-professional ascent and want to know how reputation repair is done for people like you, this succinct insider’s guide was written for you. It is based on our years of experience and written by Reputation Communications’ founder and CEO, Shannon Wilkinson.
Here are two reviews from readers of Reputation Reboot:
“Be forewarned: it is not a step-by-step “how-to” guide, but a big-picture look at how online reputation management works when you are in a position to attract significant online content online…not all of it necessarily credible, accurate or positive.”
“It gives CEOs and other high-profile individuals both a deep and granular understanding of why they need “to build a robust online presence: to safeguard the reputation of their name or company and bolster its defense against irrelevant or misleading information.”
Reputation Reboot can also be accessed on Amazon Kindle.
Do you want to have content removed from Google? If you live in the U.S., your options are far different than if you live in Europe. Being an informed consumer will help you avoid making costly mistakes. These are tips for becoming one.
Review the “Terms of Use” or “User Terms” of the website where the content appears. Many sites no longer approve the publishing of inappropriate and defamatory content. So if such content does not meet their requirements, you or your representatives can email a request for it to be removed. (Recently, we saw such content removed within minutes, though it can take longer.)
Become familiar with the U.S. Communications Decency Act, the primary U.S. law governing the Internet. It frees website owners for liability regarding what is posted on their sites. This law determines whether Google can or will honor your request to remove content.
Google’s Official Site for Removal Requests
Google provides consumers with this site to report content they believe warrants removal from the Internet: Removing Content From Google. On that site, Google states that whether or not content will be removed is “based on applicable laws.” By that, Google means the Communications Decency Act. If the content is protected by that law, Google will not remove the material.
The Lumen Database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. It is published by a collective of law schools, including Harvard. Lumen is an independent 3rd party research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. Its goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal–both legitimate and questionable–that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect. If you send a request to Google to remove content online, they may share it with Lumen to contribute to the body of publicly available information on the topic.
(To learn how many dubious online reputation management providers gamed Google’s content removal request system, check out The Wall Street Journal’s expose, Google Hides News, Tricked by Fake Claims. The reporters analyzed Lumen’s records to uncover thousands of fake requests and reported them to Google, which removed over 50,000 links as a result.)
Know Your Options in the Event of Defamatory Content
