All posts by Reputation Communications Staff

About Reputation Communications Staff

Reputation Communications Staff

Reputation Communications' staff of writers, editors and researchers contribute to You(Online): The Magazine.

Crisis Management, , , , , ,

Though some hedge fund founders have cultivated rock star status in recent years, most follow a conservative approach regarding their public profiles.

The most highly respected hedge funds often are run by the most low-profile founders. John Paulson, perhaps the most low-key, made a rare public appearance recently when his family’s foundation announced a $100 million donation to Central Park.

A common hedge fund issue

A common reputational issue that many funds encounter is the investor lawsuit.  Even the most well-respected funds face them. One such filing can rank high on a Google search of a company’s name for years, even if it is the only such instance in a long history of good standing.

In many situations the content becomes prominent on the Internet because there is so little online information about the company. (The less information that is online about a topic, the higher new information about it will rise and the longer it will stay high on searches.)

Hedge funds facing such issues have more freedom now to publish a broader range of marketing and other online information than they have in the past.  Consistently publishing new online content is a fundamental aspect of online reputation management. Rebranding can’t confer trust capital or restore a tarnished reputation, but it can re-establish and help rebuild a company’s image. It can also signal a new direction…and sometimes that is a good tactic.

 
 
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The Petraeus crisis became one because of common digital mistakes made by the parties involved.

Knowing how to ensure your emails remain private – and are not stored on servers or your smart phone forever – is an important part of Internet security. Concealing your computer’s IP address is also important.

Technology journalist Nicole Perlroth shared these and other tips this week in her Times article, Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the C.I.A. Chief Couldn’t. Here are three key takeaways:

How to Conceal Your Computer’s IP Address

Concealing your IP address is the single most important aspect of taking ownership over your online privacy.  Tor is a free, downloadable tool that conceals the IP address of computers. It prevents online providers from:

– knowing who you are, where you browse on the Internet and seeing inside your encrypted traffic as it is relayed to your banking site or to e commerce stores.

– watching your traffic, injecting their own advertisements into your traffic stream, and recording your personal details.

IT assistance is necessary to download and configure TOR.  It also has a set of guidelines that must be used to ensure it always works, so there is a bit of a learning curve.  If you want to research other companies that provide IP protection, Anonymizer is a program we like.

Encrypt your smart phone messages & delete them from storage

Wickr is an app that deletes all meta data from your pictures, video and audio files, like your device info, your location, and any personal information captured during the creation of those files.

Wickr provides:

– military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages

– sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long

– secure file shredding features

Protect your Gmail account from being searchable

“Choose the “off the record” feature on Google Talk, Google’s instant messaging client, which ensures that nothing typed is saved or searchable in either person’s Gmail account,” advises Perlroth.

 
 
Branding,

Personal branding is high on the list of “must-have” skills job seekers need to succeed in 2013, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Ruth Mantell.

“Human-resources executives scour blogs, Twitter and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn when researching candidates, and it’s important that they like what they find,” she reports.

“”That’s your brand, that’s how you represent yourself,” says Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, a Hauppauge, N.Y., provider of workplace-training services. “If you post something that comes back to haunt you, people will see that.”

“Workers also should make sure their personal brand is attractive and reflects well on employers. “More and more employers are looking for employees to tweet on their behalf, to blog on their behalf, to build an audience and write compelling, snappy posts,” says Meredith Haberfeld, an executive and career coach in New York.”

It underscores what online reputation management is all about: creating appropriate online content for the audiences that matter.

 
 
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Social media is a transformational communications tool. It enables anyone to broadcast a message to the global community free, easily and instantly. That makes it an empowering agent of change.

If you are interested in a topic and have a social media monitoring system in place, you can follow nearly everything that is said about a topic in real time – and participate in the conversation. (I say “nearly” because no monitoring system is infallible.)

The influence of social media on public opinion cannot be overemphasized. It is also changing the power balance in the Hollywood industry, as this article about the rush among celebrities to hire social media managers suggests. (The more followers a star has, the more fans, hence more negotiating power.)

Social media an important human rights tool

As the Arab Spring uprising showed, social media may be one of the most important human rights tools of our time. Yesterday, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) confirmed that when it announced that the Ford Foundation has enabled GC to launch JustPublics@365.  The initiative will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality — economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education — through digital media. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.

Coincidentally, Amnesty International executive director, Suzanne Nossel, has called on President Obama to use his second term to advance human rights and dignity, starting with restoring the United States’ own credibility on human rights issues.

 
 
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Online technology fueled the Obama campaign win, reports Steve Lohr. Customized open source software and cloud computing enabled volunteers to work at their own pace and in their own neighborhoods — without needing to travel to a campaign office. It enabled voters to be identified by precisely assessed data mining. Those are just two reasons why the Obama technology team deserve accolades.

“Often the profiles of volunteer callers and the lists they received were matched,” writes Lohr. “So the callers were people with similar life experiences to those being called, and thus more likely to be persuasive.”

Open source software is free and available to anyone online. Because cloud computing stores data on the internet rather than on any one computer, it makes files available to anyone, anywhere, on any platform they use: smart phones, IPADS and home computers.

The tools and techniques utilized by the Obama technology engineers are promising because they can be adapted in campaigns everywhere: not only in politics but to raise attention for human rights and other issues that affect global civilization. Our hats are off to them.

 
 
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Fake reviews on Yelp and similar sites are an integral part of Internet culture. (Yelp is an online guide to local businesses worldwide. Its listings are based on consumer reviews. Anyone can write them, using their real name or a false one. Over 30 million reviews have been posted since its founding in 2004.)

Yelp is an invaluable research tool for consumers. It is also an important marketing resource for businesses that rely on positive word of mouth to attract customers.

Anyone can post a fake positive review, just as anyone – including the competitor across the street – can post a bad one.  But Yelp allows businesses to create their own profiles with photographs and respond to reviews publicly or privately. That helps level the playing field. It also enables businesses to acknowledge their faults and build relationships with customers who give them bad reviews, should they want to. (A customer who cares enough to take the time to write a bad review may be one who cares enough to give you a second chance. Their critiques can help you make your business a better one.)

Today technology reporter David Streitfeld writes about Yelp’s new strategy for reducing inaccurate listings. Yelp’s action is a signal that the Internet is entering a new development phase: one where the drawbacks of fake reviews are addressed by the platforms that host them.

The more one utilizes the Internet for researching businesses, organizations and people, the more it becomes clear what a game-changer it is in terms of consumer empowerment. Reading Yelp reviews, it is clear that 30% (or, in some cases, all) of the overly effusive ones might be fake and that 30% of the bad reviews (or, in some cases, all) might be due to a bad day on the part of the reviewer. (Or that the reviewer is a competitor.)  The rest provide a middle ground from which readers can draw their own conclusions.  It isn’t perfect, but it is a rich mosaic of opinions which provide us with the best resource for helping make well-informed decisions: each other.  That’s why Yelp’s step forward is a positive one.

 
 
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Jon Rimmerman writes a wry, witty, entertaining daily email extolling the pleasures of wines – recommending some, panning others. “The Pied Piper of Wine” built Garagiste — a $30 million a year wine sales business – after a series of such emails sent to his inner circle attracted fans through word of mouth. (The subscriber list now exceeds 130,000.) After reading about wines he recommends they can order bottles directly from him.

His story illustrates what can result from pairing passion, authenticity (his personality and writing style) and the Internet culture.

Once upon a time, entrepreneurs would spend a year or more planning such a business. They would line up investors. Mortgage the house. Work two jobs while building it. Not anymore. As writer Daniel Duane explained in yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine:

“Garagiste, which gets its name from a French winemaking movement, has not advertised since its creation in 1996. Rimmerman built a Web site only two years ago. Before that, you had to hear about his list through a friend, copy the e-mail address, then send in a polite request to join — analogous, in some ways, to the nightclub without a name, creating desire precisely by its disinterest in attracting you. Even today, the Garagiste Web site — through which you can now sign up for the e-mail list — has no e-commerce function nor even a blog post of Rimmerman’s daily offers. You get the memo or you don’t, and Rimmerman rarely offers the same wine twice.”

Anyone wanting to glean insight into how the online culture is helping to build the independent entrepreneur culture should read Duane’s excellent article. What differentiates Rimmerman’s business from many others is that his newsletter is genuinely written in his voice. Readers trust it – and like it. They know he will not praise wines he is paid to sell, including those with fillers and unappealing chemicals. It is all about authenticity. Authenticity is a key driver in establishing a trustworthy reputation – whether you are an entrepreneur, a politician or a CEO.