All posts by Shannon M. Wilkinson

About Shannon M. Wilkinson

Shannon Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Reputation Communications.

Online reputation management, , , , , ,
Reputation Risk for Start Ups

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.

 
 
Online reputation management, , ,
Shannon Wilkinson, CEO, Reputation Communications

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.

You can view it here.

 
 
Internet Legal Issues, , , , , , ,
You Online

We have received hundreds of questions about Internet law over the last decade.

As a result, we publish extensive information on that topic, including the top-ranked article, An Attorney’s Advice for Removing Negative, Defamatory and Infringing Material from the Internet, by Christine Rafin, Esq.

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.

 
 
General, , , , ,
ultra high net worth reputation management

CanadianFamilyOffices.com, a thought leader in topics of interest to ultra-high-net-worth Canadians, quotes me in their new article, Family reputation is everything: How to keep yours intact.

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.

 
 
General, Internet Legal Issues, , , ,
Online reputation management, about

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.

Read it at: Protect Your Online Brand With An Anti-Cybersquatting Federal Injunction, Without Registering a Trademark.

 
 
Google, , , , , ,
How to Avoid High-Risk Hires with Background Checks

The EU’s 2006 passage of the “Right to Be Forgotten” law gives European citizens the ability to force Google and other search engines to remove links to old or irrelevant information.

The passage of that law increases the contrast between legislation regarding online publishing in Europe and the United States. In the U.S. there are still very few legal boundaries constraining the publication and distribution of online content. Authors are free to post most any material anonymously. If anyone finds that material to be damaging, they have little leverage to demand a retraction and no clear target for prosecution. Discussion about new legislation has revolved around freedom of speech issues, issues that have strong advocates.

Understanding the implications of the main U.S. law governing the Internet — Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act – is helpful in knowing how to best protect the privacy, security and reputations of U.S. citizens. That law frees website owners from legal responsibility for what others post on their sites.

There is much discussion in the U.S. about updating Section 230, most recently in The New York Times’ article, What’s Behind the Fight Over Section 230. As reporter Shira Ovide observes:

“…The 26-word law allows websites to make rules about what people can or can’t post without being held legally responsible (for the most part) for the content.

If I accuse you of murder on Facebook, you might be able to sue me, but you can’t sue Facebook. If you buy a defective toy from a merchant on Amazon, you might be able to take the seller to court, but not Amazon. (There is some legal debate about this, but you get the gist.)

The law created the conditions for Facebook, Yelp and Airbnb to give people a voice without being sued out of existence. But now Republicans and Democrats are asking whether the law gives tech companies either too much power or too little responsibility for what happens under their watch.”

The answer is, yes.

 
 
Online reputation management
Reputation Reboot

You hear a lot about thought leadership and content creation these days.

What you don’t hear about is how much they have surpassed traditional public relations as a strategy to:

  • Amplify your brand.
  • Build your credibility.
  • Organically attract clients, investors, partners, and influential speaking opportunities.
  • Interest the media in interviewing you.
  • Establish, reboot or improve your reputation.

In this digital age, establishing yourself as a thought leader entails creating unique, quality online content—like articles, blogs, podcasts or videos—showcasing your expertise, point of view, or commentary. The more intelligent, in-depth and helpful it is, the higher the ranking it will receive online.

When people Google you or the topic you write about, they will find it. That is why content creation is one of the most important reputation management tactics you can take.

When you have a series of top-ranked entries on Google, they counterbalance—or even replace—any third-party content about you that doesn’t contribute to your brand capital.

Once your thought leadership content is published, it can be promoted in dozens of ways. Done monthly or quarterly, you can build a substantial, profitable collection of online information that is not only profitable, but also contributes to your reputation capital.

Don’t have time to create content? Outsource it. We’re here to help. We can amplify it, too. What do you want the world to know about you online? Your thought leadership and content creation will tell the story you want the world to know. Manage the conversation, or else you may not have a voice in it.

 
 
Crisis Management, Online reputation management, ,
Reputation Communications

Here is a common question for online reputation management firms:

“What if all the negative online information about people and companies is true?” If you are one of those people or companies, there are a few ways to address it. The first and most common is to  implement a content strategy that puts positive, authentic information online to replace the bad. When the situation is too difficult or high-ranking on Google to be improved that way, there is another option. It is one often used in crisis management.

Acknowledge the truth. Share how you are taking steps to address the issue, or have addressed it. If you are a successful CEO but spent part of your high school years overcoming a substance abuse problem, don’t wait for commentary about it to surface online. Approach an online publication and offer to write a piece for them about how you turned things around – and how others can, too. Look for an agent to get you a book deal. Donate the proceeds to an appropriate charity.

If it is a company issue, present the facts. Admit the problem. Share what you plan to do to fix it. And follow up with examples of how you are doing that. Invite your customers’ input by setting up an online platform where they can contribute ideas, commentary and feedback. For public companies, this will mean convincing your legal team that the concept has merit.