All posts by Shannon M. Wilkinson

About Shannon M. Wilkinson

Shannon Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Reputation Communications.

Social Media, , , , , , ,

Two of the most respected magazines in the art world have made headlines by announcing their merger. Art in America, an elegant glossy established in 1913, is merging with ArtNews, established in 1902, which is renowned for its annual guide to the top collectors.

Art in America, ArtNews and their peers represent and report on a rarefied world, one that traffics in the highest levels of taste, education, and finance. They bring together some of the most creatively incandescent people in the world with some of its wealthiest.

When We Transitioned to Digital

My prior company, Cultural Communications, specialized in PR. Because of that, I had a first-hand look at the seeds that grew into this merger. Cultural Communications was an early adapter of the Internet. We were one of the first companies in our industry to offer sophisticated digital content capabilities to our clients.

When the online reputation management (ORM) industry was still in its infancy, Cultural Communications received requests by a range of companies to orchestrate online campaigns. That is when I decided to refocus on digital brand-building and re-form the company as Reputation Communications.

As my company was retained by hedge funds and financial services companies to provide online reputation management services, we reduced the number of art projects we took on to prepare for our transition into a new industry and new verticals.  A book we promoted at that time was Skate’s Art Investment Handbook, published in 2006 and authored by a Russian financier named Sergey Skaterschikov, the CEO of Skate Capital.

The Once-Opaque Art Industry

Mr. Skaterschikov, then in his early 30s, became the first independent provider of stock indices and company data on Russian and later Eastern European emerging capital markets when he was 20. He turned his attention to the art market after he noticed the large size of many of its transactions. As he researched it, he was struck by its lack of transparency– and by its general inefficiency when compared to other investment markets.  He wrote Skate’s Art Investment Handbook in part to explain why the art market’s operational structure was unsustainable. He predicted, among many other things, that auctions and art sales would in coming years be handled online with full transparency – or at least significantly more.

As publicists for his book, we found the business and investment media to be receptive to his ideas. The Wall Street Journal was the first to express interest; Forbes, like many other publications, wanted to meet him personally.  The art world media, though, was skeptical. There were art journalists that met Mr. Skaterschikov, read his book and became colleagues. But ArtNews and many other art periodicals ignored Skate’s Art Investment Handbook. They were as resistant toward his point of view as horse-drawn carriage owners once were toward Henry Ford.

The Deal

Last year Mr. Skatershikov’s investment company, Skate Capital, bought ArtNews. It was later revealed that Skate was acting on behalf of the Polish company Abbey House, though he retained a percentage of ArtNews’ ownership. News has broken that ArtNews will buy 100 percent of Art in America, The Magazine Antiques, Modern Magazine and related archives and digital properties from owner Peter Brant (though he will retain Interview). Skate Capital will sell him 6,400,500 shares of the newly created company Artnews S.A. for $3.4 million. BMP, Mr. Brant’s company, and Skate Capital plan to list Artnews on Germany’s Deutsche Boerse in 2016.

Very notably, the most visible portion of the merger will take place online, creating the world’s largest online art world media property. Digital content can be monetized in a variety of ways, as big players like BuzzFeed and VoxMedia show. (On the same day as the ArtNews and Art in America merger was made, NBC Universal neared a deal to invest $250 million in BuzzFeed. The site is known for its popular cat videos, among other widely-shared content that often goes viral, raising its value to advertisers.)

ArtNews and Art in America are unlikely to get into the cat video arena, but publications in many fields can still learn from the merger. Time Inc, for example, is one of many publications grappling to stay alive and relevant in this new digital age. They might do well to take a page from Mr. Skatershikov’s playbook.

 
 
Branding, , , , , , , , , ,

After leaving his post last year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke joined the Brookings Institute and became a senior advisor to the hedge fund Citadel. He has also been blogging, something he was not able to do at the Fed.

As the June 15 issue of Fortune put it: “Newly christened econoblogger Ben Bernanke has been throwing some rhetorical punches on his Brookings Institution site,” including claims that Larry Summers pays  insufficient attention to global affairs and criticism of Elizabeth Warren’s call for limits on the Fed’s emergency lending powers.

So far, he has followed the mission he laid out in his first blog post in late March: “To comment on economic and financial issues without my words being put under the microscope by Fed watchers.”

Blogging is an effective brand builder for anyone, but it is especially well suited to Mr. Bernanke at this stage of his public life. His blog provides him with a 24/7 opportunity to weigh in on economic issues and gives him a forum to comment freely without the danger of being misquoted. It provides the media with a steady stream of sound bites as well as relevant reasons to interview him. It is also a strong tool for building an audience for his memoir, The Courage to Act:  A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath, which is scheduled to come out in October.

Bernanke’s blogging frequency varies from three posts a week to one every couple of weeks. He tweets whenever a new blog is published (his tweet announcing the launch of his blog was retweeted 946 times). With 44,300 Twitter followers, he’s ahead of Larry Summers (who has 40,330) but behind Elizabeth Warren (who has 245,747).

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , , , , ,
Monica Lewinsky’s Triumphant Return to Public Life

Anyone grappling for an effective turnaround strategy after a humiliating and public experience can take a page from Monica Lewinsky’s playbook. But especially if you are female.  Being shamed, or the fear of becoming the subject of public shaming, has always been used to make women retreat from public life—or even avoid it altogether.

Here are the steps Ms. Lewinsky used to overcome her naysayers, reclaim her name and rebrand after initially withdrawing from the public eye.

– Trying a range of entrepreneurial and commercial spokesperson appearances to earn the money to pay her legal fees, as well as to establish a new position in life.

– Reestablishing her public voice (in 2014) by publishing an essay in Vanity Fair, “Shame and Survival.” She addressed her past directly. That step led to an invitation to discuss the Clinton crisis as part of a National Geographic Special about the ‘90s. She did not play the shamed victim, but discussed the devasting impact of cyberbullying, which played a significant part in her humiliation.

– Becoming a spokesperson against cyberbullying and online harassment. She launched her official new public image by appearing at a 2014 Forbes summit. Portions of her talk there were televised around the world.

In 2015, she delivered a TED talk, “The Price of Shame,” calling for a more compassionate Internet. It has been viewed online 4,712,119 times. She was invited to become an ambassador and strategic advisor for the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolutions.

She was a featured speaker at the Ogilvy and Mather Inspire Lecture at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In conjunction with her talk, Ogilvy launched a viral campaign to encourage more people to take a stand against cyber-shaming.

Her comeback follows three key steps: retreating from public life, reemerging by directly addressing her public image in a high-profile outlet and becoming more visible with TV appearances that also attract large numbers. Those numbers make her a valuable commodity for other media platforms – as well as commercial brands. She is now a celebrity with a mission millions of people support. Many of them follow her on Twitter @MonicaLewinsky.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Now that NBC has fired Donald Trump, do you find the 2016 presidential campaign more divisive than usual? It is. A few campaigns ago, two American political reporters coined a term for the new Internet-fueled political culture: The Freak Show. It explains much about what we’ve seen already.

“The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, was published by Random House in 2006. It identifies the strategies and traits that create winners (and losers) in modern presidential campaigns. The book’s main focus is how the Bushes and Clintons held the White House for nearly a generation. “The Freak Show” is a major theme in the book. It refers to politics in the Internet age, including the rise of ideological extremism, personal attacks and smear campaigns. When they become mainstream news headlines after first surfacing online, they can derail candidates.

These excerpts from The Way to Win explain why The Freak Show now plays a major role in determining who wins Presidential elections:

The Freak Show is about the fundamental changes in media and politics that have converged to tear down old restraints in campaigns and public debates.

The Freak Show…elevates the personal and the negative over an impartial appraisal of an allegation’s relevance in determining a person’s qualifications for the office. The Freak Show’s incentives favor attack over restraint and sensation over substance. The pervasiveness of these incentives is something that a president or serious presidential candidate faces every single day.

In the past, Old Media tended to sift and suppress the angriest and most sensational elements of politics… In the current generation…the extreme and eccentric voices who have always populated the margins of politics now reside, with money and fame as rewards, at the center.

The political opposition and the media (both Old and New) are filled with men and women who prosper by doing damage to personal reputations. No candidate can be considered serious without an understanding of Freak Show incentives and a strategy for dealing with them.

According to Halperin and Harris, Freak Show politics present a huge threat to any politician hoping to keep control of the narrative of his – or her – life story.  When you lose that, they say, you lose the election. As longtime political insiders, they should know. Mark Halperin is the managing editor of Bloomberg Politics. John F. Harris, the editor in chief of Politico, wrote the best-selling biography of Bill Clinton, The Survivor.

 
 
Social Media, , , , , , , , , ,

Social media is an important platform for 2016 Presidential candidates. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram matter because they are where 18-24 year olds are getting their news – and communicating with their friends. Women are big social media users, too. Getting them to the polls will impact who wins the election.

In Hillary’s Race For 2016: Turning Followers Into Votes, on Forbes.com, I examine which candidates are winning on social media. Here are five reasons why Hillary is in the lead:

1.She has the most control over her online image: if anyone enters a Google search for “Hillary Clinton,” much of the first two pages of results will be sites she manages. Her digital assets include:

2. Facebook. She has almost one million likes on Facebook, where women aged 18 to 29 are the majority of users.

3. Twitter. Hillary has almost 4 million followers on Twitter; Jeb Bush just over 250,000. 37% of female Internet users between the ages of 18-29 use Twitter.

4. Instagram. Instagram is the most popular social media platform for people in their 20s.

5. She has an Official Hillary 2016 Playlist on Spotify – a collection of upbeat, inspiring songs to accompany her campaign. They can be widely shared by followers on their Facebook and Twitter feeds.

This doesn’t mean the other candidates lack digital assets (Donald Trump’s substantial media footprint includes almost 2 million Facebook likes).  It just illustrates the importance of social media currency in the 2016 election…and elsewhere in politics.

This post includes excerpts from an essay first published by Forbes.com on June 22, 2015. That article has been shared over 14,000 times on Facebook.

 
 
Social Media, , , , , ,
social media reputation risks

On April 2, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with me: “CEOs Face Reputation Pitfalls If They Avoid Social Media.” It focuses on the dangers social media poses to executives, and on the reasons mistakes seem to happen so often.

The article is behind the newspaper’s pay wall, but you can read the full text here.

I would like to elaborate on some of the important points the interview touches on. Social media can be an attractive way of engaging with your consumers and the broader public, but it can easily turn into a reputation headache. No executive should have a Twitter account – or any presence on social media – unless she or he has a very clear strategy and measurable goals. And for executives in a regulated industry, or that have already been the target of negative publicity, our advice is to stay off.

Your Presence on Social Media May Not be Worth the Exposure

Why? Unless being active on social media serves a specific objective, it isn’t worth the exposure.

In some cases, social media can be a very effective tool. If the public strongly identifies the CEO with the brand, that CEO can use social media to build the audience for the brand. Elon Musk is a good example. He is Tesla (and everything else his company does). Mary Barra is on Twitter and uses it well. Social media is also often a good match for senior execs in advertising, media, fashion and transportation.

On the other hand, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, is not on Twitter. But Starbucks itself is, and has over seven million followers. Howard Schultz gets plenty of media exposure already. If he had a Twitter account there is a chance he may get too much attention…and attention that would detract from the Starbucks brand.

Social Media Tips for High-Profile Leaders

If you are a high-profile leader in any industry – or organization – and have not yet adopted social media but are thinking about it, consider taking these steps:

Study the social media landscape, paying special attention to what your peers are doing. Who is doing it well? Who is not? Who is staying away entirely?

Identify what you hope to achieve. Consider how it could impact your organization and its brand. Who will manage your account?

Mistakes do happen. How will you respond to a crisis? Are the benefits worth the possibility of a crisis? An example of one: 500 Twitter followers lampooning your last tweet…and then protesting your salary and recent layoffs at your firm.

The golden rule for social media is to stay neutral. If you want a presence but don’t want to create waves, post about topics that are safe. Avoid stating opinions that aren’t in line with your organization’s brand. That will help you avoid joining the list of executives whose social media gaffes have made headlines.

 
 
Crisis Management, ,
Social activism impacting reputations

Risk Management has published “The New Reputation Risks: What You Need to Know for 2015,” an article explaining trends I expect to see play out in 2015.

Risk Management is the leading journal for risk managers, and I wrote this piece to help that audience anticipate changes in the risk management landscape—specifically, in the area of reputation risk. It includes our predictions for the biggest potential reputation-related crises in 2015, as well as a look at the current shape of the reputation management industry.

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , ,
Korea Air

Earlier this month, Cho Hyun-ah, the daughter of Korean Air’s CEO and an executive at the airline, caused an international social media firestorm. She berated the crew of a Korean Air flight for serving macadamia nuts incorrectly, then forced the pilot to return to the gate while taxiing out of JFK. Her behavior sparked international headlines. Extensive analyses about the reputational fallout on Korean Air and her father’s business empire followed.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column weighed in and invited me to comment.  (I suggested that Cho Hyun-ah step out of the public eye for a period of time. When she makes a new start, she is in an optimum position to use her access to Korea’s wealth, power and influential as a platform for helping the less fortunate.)

Reputation Risk Isn’t New to Business…But Has Taken a More Prominent Role

Reputation risk isn’t new to business. But over the past two decades it has taken a more prominent role in the business world. The Internet, and social media in particular, has introduced a new level of transparency to business operations and culture, and a new level of empowerment to consumers.

If one employee makes a misstatement on social media, and it gains viral momentum in the community at large, it can be a crisis for the company. When that employee is the daughter or son of the company’s owner, it can become a defining one.