Some social media experts are advising high school seniors to take control of their online personas with elaborate LinkedIn profiles. The point is to bring them to the attention of college admissions officers, reports The New York Times.
As Natasha Singer explains:
Public schools from San Francisco to New York City are teaching online conduct skills as part of a nationwide digital citizenship push to prepare students for colleges and careers. Teenagers who set up LinkedIn profiles in the hope of enhancing their college prospects represent the vanguard of this trend.”
The votes are not all in regarding the value of this step. But LinkedIn is a critical piece of the online reputation management process. It is one of the first digital profiles we expand when working with CEOs, executives and other business clients, in part because of its powerful SEO (search engine optimization) platform.
Last week, Dynamic Network Services Inc., a web-technology provider, suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted in some of the top sites on the internet being disrupted, including Twitter, Netflix, PayPal and Spotify. An investigation is ongoing. The Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column asked experts to assess Dyn’s crisis communications response.
Shannon Wilkinson, our CEO, was one. Her take:
Dyn has embraced the most important quality in responding to most every crisis: transparency. It very quickly informed the public about the attack, including with a blog post from its chief strategic officer that conveyed its desire to clearly explain both the attack and its ramifications.
“Dyn communicated through real-time alerts on Twitter and through its ‘status site,’ a platform dedicated to informing the public about site maintenance and ‘any incidents in progress.’ If you were among the many perplexed consumers who couldn’t access their favorite sites on Oct. 21, you could Google ‘Internet down?’ and find Dyn’s messages– as I did–on its status site. For many of us, it was our first introduction to Dyn. And it was a reassuring one.
“The blog post from Dyn’s chief strategy officer, Kyle York, played a vital role. Rather than apologize for the inconveniences the outage may have caused, York focused on educating the American public about the seriousness of the attack and its complex, unsettling causes. In the process he recast Dyn as the protagonist in our collective war against hackers, even as frontline troops protecting liberty. Dyn gets five stars for its exemplary crisis communications.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance section often reports on corporate crises. Its Crisis of the Week column is behind a paid firewall and comes out once weekly. If you are a communications professional and follow crisis management, it is well worth the cost to gain insight from the experts.
Many people don’t know how to ask Google to remove content from the Internet. The first step is to learn what your options are. You can do that by visiting Google’s Legal Help section. An excerpt:
If you’ve come across content on Google that may violate the law, let us know, and we’ll carefully review the material and consider blocking, removing or restricting access to it. Abusive content on Google’s services may also violate Google’s product policies, so before sending us a legal request, consider flagging the post, image, or video for one of our content teams to review.
Understanding Google’s policy toward inappropriate content on websites is the first step in determining whether you have a case. That is explained in Google’s Terms of Service:
Our Services display some content that is not Google’s. This content is the sole responsibility of the entity that makes it available. We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law.
Google often requires a court order before it will remove content. This is an excerpt from the Court Order section of Google’s FAQ:
If a court has ruled that web pages in Google’s search results or content on a Google service is unlawful, you can submit the order through our troubleshooter for our review. Please note that we only accept valid court orders signed by a judge. We may voluntarily remove the content from our services if provided with specific URLs and if the terms of the court order indicate the content violates the law.
If your issue pertains to defamation, What to Do When You Are the Victim of Online Defamation, by David O. Klein, Esq. and Christine Rafin, Esq. may be a helpful resource. Another is the Lumen database, a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Lumen is a research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. The organization’s goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal 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.
Daniel Grant, a business writer for re:sculpt — The International Sculpture Center’s blog — interviewed Shannon Wilkinson, our CEO, about the importance of social media in art marketing. As the art industry expands, social media is an important adjunct to mainstream marketing and PR. So we appreciate the opportunity that ISC has provided to contribute to the growing dialogue about this issue. An excerpt:
Social media culture is a community,” she said. “First and foremost, it is about connecting and sharing. It is not about endless self-promotion, although many people misuse it in that way.”
The first step is building a community of what she called “influencers,” referring to gallery owners, museum staff, grant-making and awards organizations, journalists, critics, collectors and sponsors, as well as other artists – “people who play active roles in making decisions, policies and statements that impact the art world, in particular, the art world that is most relevant to an artist.”
Building that community involves researching the audience that matters to the particular artist. For instance, a sculptor might conduct a hashtag search for “#sculpture,” which will offer a sense of what is currently on Twitter and Instagram in that space. Next, artists should conduct searches for the magazines, writers, institutions and organizations that are most active in supporting their particular type of art, following those that interest them and are relevant to their careers. After that, artists might start examining who those people and institutions follow, following the ones who interests them.”
You can read the full article at this link: Using Social Media to Market your Work. If you are an artist or art gallery and would like to learn more about how our services can help you reach your promotional goals, please contact us here.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has hired its first director of technology and society, Brittan Heller, to collaborate with tech companies to combat online harassment. It’s an important step for helping companies stop online abuse.
In this excellent New York Times interview by Anna North, Ms. Heller offers advice for others dealing with harassment online:
Part of the power that the harassers have is they like to make people feel isolated, and sometimes part of the ongoing harm of these kind of crimes is that you feel like there’s no meaningful way for you to fight back, there’s no way for you to adequately speak out against what’s happening to you.
I would not let the harassment take your voice away. You can talk to family, teachers and friends about what you’re experiencing and what you’ve seen. You can be a support for other people experiencing the same thing, and you can call out people who are trying to incite hate online. Also, educate yourself. Look at the terms of service or community guidelines for the type of platforms and social media that you’re using, and find out what kind of site that company wants to run. Most say that they don’t wish to host hateful content.”
ADL’s website publishes extensive resources at Combating Hate, including best practices for responding to cyber abuse. Additional information is available at Stop Cyberbullying, a Federal government website.
Are you are an attorney? Have you wondered why online legal directory Avvo has published a listing about your practice and then made you pay to have it removed? That is, when you didn’t request the service and didn’t know it was there until it showed up on the first page of your Google search results? Look no further.
A class action suit filed in Chicago protesting the practice has been dismissed in Federal court. (Spoiler: Avvo’s business model is protected by the First Amendment.)
This is an excerpt from the ABA’s coverage:
In February, the plaintiff’s attorney Thomas Zimmerman, told the ABA Journal that Avvo sells advertising to competing lawyers utilizing the “likeness” of an attorney, with or without a photograph, that is established on an Avvo profile page. The profile lists the attorney’s name and professional credentials without the attorney’s permission, and then competitors pay to put their own ads on the attorney’s Avvo page, Zimmerman said. “In order to stop that, Avvo requires that you pay them a fee.”
Like so many lawsuits filed against similar Internet platforms, an earlier case filed against Avvo in federal court in San Francisco in 2015 was also dropped.
If this topic interests (or confounds) you, you may find our Legal category index helpful.
Over 3 billion people worldwide now use the Internet. That number grows each day, making a compelling argument for strategically using the internet to showcase your reputation capital. Online reputation management (ORM) helps people achieve that.
At Reputation Communications, we are often asked questions about how ORM works. Recently Hungry Marketing, a New York City agency, invited our founder and CEO Shannon Wilkinson to provide advice for the entrepreneurs they serve. This is an excerpt from her article.
False advertising has led the public to believe that unwanted Google content can be “suppressed.” Consumers spend a lot of time seeking that result. They are confused or disappointed when they find it is not a viable option.
To change the order of content on search results, you must replace it. To replace one piece of content, you may need ten, twenty or more new content entries. That content must be high-quality. If it doesn’t add value to a brand, it can devalue it.
For that reason, consumers need to be wary of guarantees from providers who assure “suppression.” Typically, they create masses of low-quality content to populate internet “flogs” (fake blogs) and similar types of sites in the hope of lowering unwanted material. Google and other search engines don’t favor that type of material and can penalize such sites. But consumers don’t know that.
“Content” is text, video, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information placed online.
It is the biggest influence on a webpage’s rank. Your webpage’s rank determines where it shows up in Internet searches of your and your organization’s name.
Ranking also determines the prominence of third-party content about you, which is a large part of the reason it is important to understand where that content is coming from. Understanding those sources will play a key role in deciding how to manage that content—which is the heart of online reputation management.
Generally, the sites with the most daily visitors and views have the highest rankings, and the most prominent content. Top 10 websites include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as major media sites. But there are other factors that influence where a webpage shows up. Even obscure sources can show up in the first page of searches.
Strategically crafted headlines
People often see an article about them – or their brands — from a little-trafficked blog (or some other relatively obscure source) on the first page of a Google search. This can often be the result of the way the headline is written, making the article seem especially relevant to the search terms. The longer the article stays near the top of search results, the harder it is to dislodge.
Tags
If you notice pictures of you showing up prominently on Google, it is because someone has tagged them. A tag is a caption that is added to the metadata of a photograph or to an article, blog post or other piece of text that is published online.
Internet data scraping
Data scraping is how your home address, age, family members’ names and age and satellite pictures of your home end up online. Programs (called ’bots) continually scrape the web for data from publicly available sources like county courthouses, telephone directories and other sites. It is then collected by public databases that package, publish and sell that information. If you find a lot of references to your address online, that is how it got there.
Aggregated content
Aggregated content means content that is republished from another source. The Internet is full of sites that republish content, especially content that will attract a lot of viewers, which includes celebrity- and VIP-related content. When you see versions of your photographs or other content about you on multiple minor sites (including sites that look junky or low-quality), they have aggregated that content.
Anonymous commentary
It is difficult to have anonymous comments about you removed from an online forum or other platform—but it can be done, especially if the material is clearly defamatory. Increasingly, websites are revising their comment and user policies to prevent libel. (The more obscure and independent a site, the less likely it is that they have such practices in place. See our safe browsing tips below.) If you are the topic of such content, look for their user policy. Often they will not only remove the offensive material when requested to do so, but they will block the user who posted it from their site.
Ultimately, you want to control as much of the online content about you and your organization as possible. The more high profile you are, the harder that is. But with strategic online reputation management, it is not impossible. Content drives Google results. It is now the most influential aspect of restructuring them. We are highly experienced in advising clients on what type of content to employ to reboot their Google results. We are experts in creating it, too. To learn more, please visit our Services page.
