All posts by Shannon M. Wilkinson

About Shannon M. Wilkinson

Shannon Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Reputation Communications.

Internet Legal Issues, , , , , , , , , , ,
reputation management for lawyers

Despite frequent outcries about data breaches affecting millions of Internet users, U.S. citizens continue to have the lowest level of privacy protection in the world. Not surprisingly, the U.S. law governing online content is also outdated.

Our article,  Right2Remove: Bringing the “Right to be Forgotten” to America, highlights the work of an important organization focusing on changing that. The issues it faces are nothing new.

A 2011 ruling in a New York City court of appeals that would still stand today illustrates why the law needs to be updated to reflect current Internet use.

The court dismissed a businessman for filing a suit against a competitor for consistently posting “false and defamatory statements of fact” online that were clearly intended to injure the claimant’s reputation.

The judge noted that the comments about the claimant were “unquestionably offensive and obnoxious,” but held that the defendants were protected under the Communications Decency Act, which shields Web site operators from liability when they publish and edit material that they did not create.

In plain English: nothing could stop the poster from continuing to publish libel that, were it in print, would probably make him the subject of a successful lawsuit.

We Support the Right to Be Forgotten

Situations like the one above influence reputations in a way that is unfair (and in our view, should not be legal). That is why establishing and maintaining a strong online reputation is an asset for individuals and businesses alike. It is also why an update of internet laws is far overdue.

We support the Right to Be Forgotten on Google. Increasing numbers of other concerned Americans are raising their voices to demand that option come to America, too. Why Americans Need And Deserve The Right To Be Forgotten, by security expert and Inc. columnist Joseph Steinberg, presents a compelling reason why it should. With Dan Shefet’s help, it will.

Dan Shefet is a Paris-based attorney who forced Google to remove links to defamatory information about him in 2014. The case made worldwide headlines and led to the Right to be Forgotten law in Europe, which allows citizens to request Google remove links to certain types of personal information about them online. He has since established the Association for Accountability and Internet Democracy (AAID) Its goal is to to make search engines legally responsible for the information they publish. Dan’s goal is to establish a chapter of AAID in the U.S. You can learn more about his views in our interview with him: Dan Shefet: Creator of the Internet’s Ombudsman.

Related reading: An Attorney’s Advice for Removing Negative, Defamatory and Infringing Material from the Internet.

 
 
Privacy, , , , , , ,
Google

The European Union has introduced some of the world’s strictest online privacy rules. The “Right to be Forgotten” on Google — not yet available in the U.S. — is a notable example.

Now, according to The New York Times, the French data protection authority has fined Google 50 million euros for not properly disclosing to users how data is collected across its services. That includes its search engine, Google Maps and YouTube and other platforms. (If you’ve seen personalized advertisements following you around when you are using the internet, that is where they originate. Tech companies make massive profits from collecting and selling your data to marketers.)

Organizations like Facebook and Google make strenuous efforts to keep such laws from entering the U.S. Nonetheless, Europeans who have spearheaded such efforts are laying the groundwork here to begin bringing more protective laws to U.S. consumers.

We support bringing the “Right to be Forgotten” to America…along with better privacy laws. These are articles we have published about the issues:

Protecting the Privacy of High Net Worth Families

Right2Remove: Bringing the “Right to be Forgotten” to America

Electronic Frontier Foundation Primer Helps Protect Your Online Privacy

How Google’s Content Removal Request Process Works

For more insight, read this Times’ article: What the G.D.P.R., Europe’s Tough New Data Law, Means for You.

 
 
News, , , ,
Howard Schultz, Presidential candidate?

In 2018, when Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced his plans to step down from the company, it fueled instant rumors of a possible run for U.S. President. We weren’t surprised: for years, he has called on American CEO’s to provide the economic leadership that our government has at times been unable to.

Now he is exploring a possible Presidential run. His plan is to explore  it during the three-month promotional tour for his new book, “From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America.”  That is a perfect cross-marketing strategy. He will sell more books while using the multi-city appearances to reintroduce himself to the American public. 

As founder of one of the most popular companies in America, Schultz has proven to be an effective agent of change. A classic American success story, he is a master of the practice known as “personal branding.” He has a compelling origin story and an authentic image.  He has also long expressed his concern over the state of America and its politics.

In 2011, he made headlines when he called on fellow CEOs to boycott Washington by stopping all political campaign contributions. “The CEO of Starbucks wants Washington to wake up and smell the coffee,” reported Huffington Post writer Dan Froomkin.

In television interviews that week, Schultz was praised for showing more decisive leadership than any elected official in Washington had in recent months. He was calm, focused and respectful toward Washington leaders as he presented solutions to address a then-growing crisis. Estimating that “a third of the states are facing a crisis of insolvency,” he said that Washington’s political infighting is causing great damage and harm to business in America. He also warned that businesses are “going to have to do more to provide the kinds of services to the communities we serve, and a safety net for the people that we employ, because the federal government is not going to have the resources.”

Howard Schultz has stumbled at times. Who hasn’t? As a citizen activist, he is an inspirational role model for other CEOs. Starbuck’s popularity reflects it, as does the company’s responsive handling to its 2018 racial discrimination case in Philadelphia. We look forward to reading his book.

 
 
Reputation Case Study, Social Media, , , , , , , , , , ,

Cory Booker served as Major of Newark, N.J., from 2006 to 2013.  We originally published this piece in October 2013, during his race to become the junior U.S. Senator from New Jersey. It highlights how his deft embrace of social media has played an important role in his success. Follow him on Twitter @CoryBooker to gain insight into his strategy.

Though Booker has utilized a variety of social media platforms, his active and engaging presence on Twitter has been particularly exceptional. In 2010, for instance, he used tweets to communicate directly with Newark residents during a major snowstorm—a move that in turn drew national media attention. “Not only do Newark residents know that Booker is clearing the driveways of people with Twitter handles, so does much of the national political twitterati, which is blogging about him,” the Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson observed at the time.

Recognizing opportunity

“We all need to be who we are and be ourselves but not being in social media is almost like Nixon not wanting to put make up on for a TV appearance,” Booker told Reuters’ Paul Smalera during an interview in June. The mayor also recounts to Smalera how his first foray into Twitter was inspired by a chat with Ashton Kutcher:

“I remember I was travelling back to my law school and driving up highway 95 talking to him. He spent must have been 45 minutes on the phone, really challenging me and explaining to me the benefits of taking control of your own media, of connecting with thousands of people. He said, “Look, I want you to do it but I don’t just want you to do it. I want you to dive in head first and be authentic on the platform, take risks.’

Booker’s social media skills have earned him the title of “Hometown Hero” in “TechCrunch’s 20 Most Innovative People In Democracy 2012,” which observed that his “million-strong Twitter feed spouts everything from dense nuggets of inspiration to real-time problem-solving with his constituents.”

Earlier this year at SXSW Interactive, Booker spoke about how he has “used Twitter to interact with his constituents on a daily basis, responding to questions and complaints at all hours of the day,” as well as how, with the help of Twitter, his “constituency is technically only 280,000 people, but it’s also the United States.”

Even someone as tech-savvy as Booker is prone to the occasional social media misstep, as his brief, past correspondence on Twitter with an Oregon stripper has shown. But Booker’s response to the incident was characteristically cool and collected. “The mayor talks with people from all walks of life on Twitter,” Booker spokesman Kevin Griffis said in a statement. “The most shocking part of the story was learning that there is a vegan strip club in Portland.”

A potent tool

If he wins the special election next week, Booker, who even announced his run for Senate via Twitter and YouTube, “would arrive at the senate armed with a social media army that includes 1.4 million Twitter followers and a drive to shake up the system,” according to NBC News’ Kasie Hunt. The exact impact Booker would have in Washington isn’t easy to predict, but if his campaign is any indication, social media will be a central part of his strategy. On the day of his primary win back in August, Booker “posted prolifically to his various accounts — more than 100 times on Twitter, 12 on Facebook and three on Instagram, including one video,” according to Mashable‘s Fran Berkman.

 
 
Branding, , , , , , , ,
Long Island City, NY

Arthur RosenfieldLong before Long Island City, New York, hit Amazon’s relocation radar, a pivotal resident, mover-and-shaker and reputation guru was instrumental in putting it on the map.

Arthur Rosenfield is notable for many reasons. But his insights into reputation-building interested us from the time we met him. That was the morning the world learned Amazon plans to build a major anchor in Long Island City, New York. We met at Coffeed on Northern Boulevard, in the same building where Brooklyn Grange’s famous rooftop farm exists.

In his 35 years as an investment, marketing and, later, social media entrepreneur, he has been passionate about bringing diverse communities from business, political and entrepreneurial worlds together. An early adapter of the internet, he developed several large scale, branded internet service across news, search engine, city guide, and matching services for businesses and consumers.

OurLIC.com (OurLongIslandCity)

One of these was OurLIC.com, a digital news and information site dedicated to Queens, the borough where Long Island City is located. This site connected the area’s burgeoning entrepreneurs, established local businesses, community organizations and local politicians to attract 100,000 monthly users at its peak.  “The two-way dialogue of the internet changed everything,” he says. “People have a bigger voice than ever. They want to connect with each other online in a way that replicates real life and adds value to theirs.”

In 2008, drawing from the connections made with OurLIC.com, he began forming the Long Island City / Astoria Chamber of Commerce. There were only three high-rise buildings in LIC then, but he created a Board of Directors with 30 successful immigrant entrepreneurs and led a visionary ‘place-making‘ and economic development initiative for the emerging community. That contributed to LIC attracting people and investment, becoming one of the fastest growing communities in the United States. It also attracted a wave of hotel construction and tourism.

Your reputation is your brand

Arthur shares and continually updates the lessons he has learned about entrepreneurship, marketing and reputation management on websites like 100SecretsforSelling.  Always attuned to the craft required to build and maintain a successful reputation, he emphasizes the need to attend to how we brand ourselves – both online and offline. To him, the nature of how we create and develop our own web of personal and professional relationships is what identifies our brand. 

“Your reputation is a branding of your ability to form relationships,” he says. “To build them, the success of the other person must be essential to yours. And you have to build them in person. True relationship-building can’t be done online. And relationships drive everything in business.”

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , ,
Facebook crisis

Facebook’s image as the world’s trusted über-connector is in crisis mode. Now, the platform used by millions is in reputational freefall.

According to a New York Times article, Facebook used a Washington-based consulting firm to “spread disparaging information about the social network’s critics and competitors…to discredit activist protesters that were against Facebook… to deflect criticism of the social network by pressing reporters to look into rivals like Google.” Why?  To deflect its early knowledge of Russia’s manipulation of Facebook to manipulate American politics. And to maintain growth at all costs.

Fake news

Pushing out continuously positive information about your brand is an essential aspect of online reputation management. Publishing fake articles on fake “news” websites that are created for reputation management purposes, then amplifying them using armies of fake Twitter and Facebook users,  were early online reputation management industry tactics. Some consultants still use them. But they have fallen out of favor in some circles because their fakeness is so easy to spot. 

Where Facebook Failed

For crisis and reputation management campaigns to resonate, they need to be authentic: based on real actions, identities and facts. Without those traits, they may work over the short term but ultimately disintegrate and fade away. In today’s digital world, it is very hard to hide conceal the truth for long.  It almost always comes out. That is why Facebook would have been better served to embrace transparency about this crisis at the onset, before it became public knowledge. 

Instead, Facebook’s complicit approval of hardball disinformation tactics has contributed to its loss of credibility. Now Facebook faces a far deeper crisis than it might have otherwise: the potential loss of trust from its users, and the resulting blow back from its stakeholders.

 
 
General, Online reputation management
Reputation Diligence

Just as we thought the Internet couldn’t get any more—choose your favorite word: annoying? invasive? chaotic?—a series of unprecedented events has stirred up even more drama. This is an opportunity to note their relevance to the world of online reputation management, privacy, and ethics. 

– Google was found to have concealed a breach related to its largely-unused social platform, Google+. 496,951 users’ full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation and relationship status have been “potentially” exposed since 2015.

–Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk paid a $20 million fine after a series of Tweets he sent out were viewed as misleading by the SEC. This confirms that if you are a CEO of a public company, it is a mistake to manage your own social media accounts. If you want to present an authentic online image of yourself or engage your audience, use a trained professional. Better, stay off of social media altogether.

–50 million Facebook users were hacked—and nobody knows how extensive the privacy breach is or what the hackers will do with the private messages and other data they have gathered. This reinforces the wisdom that you should never put your real birthdate on any social media profiles like Facebook; it just makes it easier for your identity to be stolen. 

–The U.S. Supreme Court nomination debacle showed us that virtually anything from our past can and will surface on Google (perhaps worst of all, our awkward high school yearbook photos). All the more reason to ensure that the portraits you actually want the world to see are well-situated online, should CNN or The Washington Post decide to run unexpected coverage of you.

–Europe’s highest court was charged with deciding whether the “Right to be Forgotten” on Google should apply across the entire World Wide Web. This would require search engines to remove selected information from results anywhere in the world. Right now, that law applies just to Argentina and the EU. The final decision—anticipated sometime next year—will represent a landmark moment in addressing whether the global Internet, namely tech companies and other intermediaries, will remain free of legal responsibility in safeguarding your name, reputation and privacy.

How are you and the Internet? Are you satisfied with how the world sees you online?

Related reading: Reputation Issues Faced by CEOs, Celebrities & VIPs

 

 
 
Crisis Management
Crisis management

After editing the “Crisis of the Week” column for The Wall Street Journal for nearly five years, it is safe to say Ben DiPietro has seen it all when it comes to crisis management. When he left the Journal in August, we asked him about the landscape of online and public-opinion crisis cycles, and what you need to know if you find yourself face-to-face with a reputation-based crisis to manage.

Genesis of the Crisis of the Week Column

Ben-diPietroWorking with Nick Elliott, his editor at the WSJ, DiPietro launched the inaugural “Crisis of the Week” column on Sept. 20, 2014, following the emergence of video footage depicting NFL running back Ray Rice violently abusing his wife–and the ensuing public opinion backlash. There is a great deal of nuance in the way affiliated professional organizations handle such crises and they saw the column as an opportunity to pull apart the narrative threads behind media messaging and crisis management.

During his time at WSJ, DiPietro and his stable of prominent crisis-management experts pulled the covers back more than 100 crises, all corporate-focused in nature, offering insights into what was being done well–and not so well–in the crisis response, messaging and delivery. The column ended with an Aug. 7, 2018 column on the Urban Meyer crisis at Ohio State University. (As one of Ben’s Crisis commentators, I had the opportunity to weigh in on that one.)

The column profiled a wide range of crisis scenarios–sexual misconduct, corporate malfeasance, product-related deaths, stupid comments–that resulted in everything from major reputational disasters to more favorable outcomes. “Location, cultural mores and political climate all are factors in how big a crisis becomes,” said DiPietro.

Results Range from Disastrous to Mundane

There is great variety in the ways organizations handle emerging crises, with results that range from disastrous to mundane. In some cases, DiPietro said companies gamble they won’t suffer much negative fallout and so they don’t even bother to manage a crisis.

“If you have a garden-variety crisis, companies often rely on the intuition that it will blow over,” or that more consequential news will drive their crisis out of the media spotlight, he said. “Their best bet might be not to engage.”

On the other hand, being proactive can be valuable in re-establishing trust in a company or brand. By clearly outlining the situation in question and what they are doing to improve, companies can double-down on following their stated ethical standards and brand values.

A code of conduct can be important in such instances, as it sets expectations for how an organization wants to be thought of, and sends a strong signal for how it wants employees and partners to act. DiPietro said a code is “only as good as the organization’s overall culture, and how much senior and middle management live the values spelled out in it. Employees and stakeholders will see through empty words, and a leader who doesn’t lead by example won’t have much of an organization to lead.”

Additionally, being the first to draw attention to an issue can afford a company narrative control. When it comes to a complex or significant crisis, “get the bad news out first — companies that don’t do that get sucked into the vortex,” he advises.

How to tell garden-variety from five-alarm fire?

How to tell garden-variety from five-alarm fire? Check first for how much attention is the crisis receiving on major media and in the social media octagon; look for how other groups are using your crisis to advance their cause, DiPietro said. Are federal law enforcement and regulators involved? That could spell trouble, react accordingly.

Other questions to ask:

  • Did the company/individual respond appropriately?
  • Is there a perceived systemic issue or an individual case that needs to be addressed?
  • How much trust do people have in a company/individual and its reputation?
  • How much trust is there within the organization?

Whatever a company does, it’s important it doesn’t bluff to obscure wrongdoing or poor behavior, as DiPietro warns “the cover-up is worse than the crime,” and can inflict permanent damage on public and private trust.

When corporate crises arise, they don’t always have to be considered as negative moments for a company; they can prompt growth and change that improves internal culture and the bottom line. In taking the initiative to correct for any issues highlighted by crises, DiPietro indicates there is an opportunity for good publicity: “Bad news travels fast now. But on social media, good news does, too.”

Follow Ben @BenDiPietro1