We have seen significantly increasing cases of reputational damage resulting from social media commentary or perceived inappropriate behavior in the workplace. The possibility of being canceled is something that everyone with a public presence must take seriously—and through social media at the least, most people do have a public presence. The damage occurs quickly, and it can last for years, with devastating financial and emotional impact.
Merriam-Webster noted the emerging use of the term “cancel culture” in a “Words We’re Watching” post back in 2019. A New York Times podcast on The Daily is a great two-episode feature delving into “cancel culture.” (Covering numerous important instances of the phenomenon, The Daily offers a detailed and nuanced examination of its history and implications.)
As it has become so easy to place material about oneself or one’s view in the public square, there is a temptation to approach it more casually. We advise carefully considering all the potential ramifications of your actions and speech, including the impact and potential response from those beyond your own communities. Racist, sexist or discriminatory statements are a clear red flag that often result in cancellation for businesses as well as individuals. Others include sharing sexually explicit material, which led to author and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin being cancelled, and violent or potentially illegal acts or threats, as those who stormed the Capitol learned. Avoiding objectionable behaviors is of course critical, but we’d recommend being very cautious about commenting upon or associating oneself with controversial statements.
On March 8, 2022 from 1 – 2 pm EST, I will present a Continuing Legal Education (CLE)-accredited live audio program, Managing Your Online Reputation: What Every Attorney Needs to Know Now, via the West LegalEdcenter. It is part of the legal solutions provided by Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.
West LegalEdcenter offers the most current and comprehensive library of online CLE programs, including programs from the nation’s most respected national, state and local bar associations and distinguished CLE providers. They include live webcasts, as well as recorded programs that can be taken on demand.
My program will provide participants with the most essential steps for protecting and expanding their reputation and that of their practice where the world sees it: online.
Attorneys are often the first people contacted by clients who have reputational damage online. Your clients want to know what their legal rights are for removing negative content; how to identify the (often anonymous) attacker; and how to get it “wiped” away as quickly as possible. Now, attorneys are among those whose names, work and reputations may be attacked by deep fakes, online defamation, domain squatting and privacy invasions.
So, please save the date. if you are not able to attend the live presentation, it will be available online at the Thomson Reuters West LegalEdcenter for 180 days.
We all know the impact that negative publicity can have on a brand, whether it is your own, or a professional-services brand like a law or consulting firm. Negative information tends to be more clickable, driving search engine algorithms to put them higher in the results. And in an online world where a potential new customer or investor has an abundance of choice, one negative result headline can persuade her to choose another firm or partner.
That’s why online reputation management exists – to help businesses and individuals navigate negative publicity, whether or not it is true.
Maintaining a good online brand is not only about avoiding negative publicity, however. There are other steps that any business or individual should take, especially if they operate in industries such as finance, law, or security where trust is an essential component of any client relationship.
Invest in positive publicity
o Making sure the Internet reflects all the positive things you accomplish – awards you win, important achievements, etc. – creates impressions that help to instill trust at the moment a potential client comes in contact with your brand.
Provide information
o Whether you’re a business or an individual in a professional space, you possess knowledge that potential clients need. Sharing that knowledge through articles and blog posts helps to establish credibility, and it is an easy way to allow clients to get to know you.
Making sure that negative publicity is managed to have a minimal impact on your brand is critical, but positive brand building is just as important. And even if no negative publicity exists, investing in a positive impression of your brand builds trust and credibility, as well as acting as an insurance policy against information that could damage your online reputation down the road.
During a decade-long stretch of speaking with successful leaders seeking online reputation management (and being engaged by many), I’ve observed that the effect of reputational harm can be most acute when it threatens a new business venture.
When you are preparing to launch a start-up, you’ve often spent years developing an app, service or product. You have brilliant partners, a gifted team and the prospect of serious VC interest. During an immersion into preparing your new venture, what you may not anticipate is the amount of scrutiny you (and everyone associated with you) may face by prospective investors and partners, much of which you are not aware of.
Among the red flags they are looking for are signs or accusations that you (or your college-aged former self) have participated in behavior that may threaten the business in the future, including:
· Racist, sexist, or discriminatory language or acts, even as a joke
· The dissemination of sexually explicit material
· Threats of violence
· Other behavior that may be viewed as inappropriate by people vetting you
Not just you, either. Your whole team, as well as any partners.
Investors Avoid Reputation Risk
In today’s world, investors can’t afford to be associated with anyone with a record of those red flags. Their fear of potentially being liable in any lawsuit that may result from your past behavior, or your potential future behavior, is chief among their concerns. They don’t want the reputation risk, either.
We have seen tragic consequences for clients who have been perceived as being inappropriate in their language or behavior during college, upon graduation or later in their career. In more than one instance, clients have been named in baseless lawsuits, filed against them and later dropped by a party with malice, which still show up online. Some have also been cancelled or fired with no investigation or proof. This can happen over any number of perceived wrongdoings, and even if they did nothing wrong the harm to their reputation is the same as if they had engaged in the behavior of which they were accused.
High Cost of Perceived Wrongdoings
In these and other cases, high-caliber leaders were either unable to find a job or lost a job and could not attract a new one, despite years or decades of expertise in their industry. (Men, in my view, are especially vulnerable to such issues. In my article, The Reputation Risk of Being Male, I cite how even a simple misunderstanding can have grave professional and reputational consequences. But women are by no means immune from baseless allegations of wrongdoing.)
Deep-dive due diligence is increasingly done using AI and big data. Searches of you go back years, as long as the internet has been used, and once-buried information such as legal notices that were published in a long-dead newspaper, can suddenly become digitized and available online. Those pictures of you on college break 5, 10 or 20 years ago; the messy divorce; all your social media postings, litigation history, and complaints filed with regulatory authorities – literally anything you’ve done wrong can be unearthed and become a cause for concern.
For investors who are considering backing your venture, for potential partners whose reputation will be tied to yours, and for everyone you’ll lean on for help while you build your venture toward success, any cause for concern is one too many. New ventures are always a risk. A reputational challenge puts that risk outside nearly every appetite.
How to Prepare
However, if you have such issues and are preparing to launch a new venture, there are many ways to prepare. Even if you aren’t aware that you have these issues, approaching your personal online brand as if you do is the best positive publicity you can create for your business.
The first is to initiate a personal branding campaign to position positive, credible information about yourself and your achievements online. Next, if you are on social media, vet it to assess if it positions you for where you are now…and where you want to be. Making sure the Internet reflects all the positive things you accomplish – awards you win, important achievements, etc. – creates impressions that help to instill trust at the moment a potential client comes in contact with your brand.
Invest in the Same Reputational Deep Dive in Yourself that Potential Investors Will Do
Provide information as a thought-leader. Whether you’re a business or an individual in a professional space, you possess knowledge that potential clients need. Sharing that knowledge through articles and blog posts helps to establish credibility, and it is an easy way to allow clients to get to know you. It’s also an effective way to increase the volume of information available about you on the Internet. The more present you are, the more seriously partners and potential clients will take your new venture.
Finally, invest in the same reputational deep dive in yourself that potential investors will do. Find every negative piece of information, every rumor, every half-told story that paints you in a negative light. Those can be confronted through a multifaceted online reputation management strategy, and it’s always possible that there’s something out there that you don’t even know exists.
Reading my firm’s article, The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs, is a good place to learn more about how an online reputation can be threatened and how to manage those threats. It is a highly ranked article on Google that provides step-by-step actions for ensuring your brand is top and center on Google, where the world (and AI) vets you.
The Beverly Hills Bar Association, a nationally recognized major metropolitan bar association, serves the 15,000 + lawyers who live or work on the Westside of Los Angeles County. With 6,000 members, it is the largest voluntary bar association in California that is not a county bar association.
So, it was an honor to be interviewed by Hillary Johns, a Los Angeles trial lawyer and Beverly Hills Bar Association (BHBA) Litigation Committee Chair, on the BHBA’s Litigator’s Corner platform, a YouTube channel with 1.26K subscribers.
In the 45-minute interview I discuss how online reputation management works, what aspects of it are most relevant for attorneys, and my work as an expert reputation witness in defamation lawsuits. While the interview is especially helpful for attorneys and law firms, the process of online reputation is universal and applies to all types of professionals and organizations.
As part of a three-part discussion on the reputation risks facing high net worth families, we filmed this conversation about internet law with Ms. Rafin, an Internet law expert and Associate General Counsel – Media and Compliance at American Media, LLC, and Dan Shefet, a French lawyer based in Paris, and a leading expert in Internet and privacy law in Europe and other countries.
If you have questions regarding your legal rights online, it is a good starting place for learning more about what you need to know: the law is the same for everyone regardless of your economic standing. The video is 30-minutes long and addresses the most common reputation damage and related issues harming people online.
When you do not have any legal recourse for the reputation issues you face, an online reputation management strategy will create positive new on the Internet that will appear on the first page or two of Google, and replace much or all of what is there.
It is a timely piece, as the number of ultra-net worth families has risen everywhere. These are highlights of the piece, written by Kira Vermond.
Another way to be proactive? Protect the family name. Literally.
Shannon Wilkinson, founder and CEO of Reputation Communications, an online reputation management firm in New York, has worked with wealthy families for more than a decade. She says some families give their newborn babies more than silver rattles – they register their usernames online, or open their Twitter handles so they can’t be hijacked and misused years later.
Yet even if a family wants to remain out of the limelight, complete silence online is not an option.
Without a LinkedIn page, or a family office website, “you have no digital defense,” she says. In other words, if a family finds itself feeling the heat over, say, a former employee’s tell-all interview, those articles will be the first links readers find when they search. And those links won’t drop to the second page – and essentially out of sight – unless something else takes their place. That can take months or even longer.
The best line of attack is, again, to anticipate problems and create a wall of neutral online information. Hire an online reputation management firm to create a website that lists philanthropic interests. Or have articles written and placed in publications about family causes.
…Finally, perform thorough background checks on any employee who will be in contact with the family. That goes double for new love interests, says Wilkinson. Their background could come back to bite the family.
“If you’re dating someone who has a history of making lewd or racist or inappropriate comments on social media, your relationship with them is kind of an endorsement. It can really impact your reputation,” she says.
If you spent years branding your name without filing for a trademark, you can still protect your brand with a federal injunction under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (“ACPA”), according to New York attorney Susan Chana Lask.
She filed a federal complaint using the Anti-Cybersquatting law and won a permanent injunction to protect her brand after someone hijacked her name and registered it to a dot com using an anonymous domain registrar called NameCheap. They also parked the domain with her name on a pay for click page and had her name up for auction.
“The injunction I obtained established that my name is my common law trademark and directed NameCheap to transfer to me the domain they registered using my name. It also prohibits anyone from infringing on my name again,” she said. Ms. Lask has written a helpful, detailed blog post with what you need to know to do the same.
