Tag Archives: AI

Online reputation management, , , , , , ,
P.R. in the Digital Age

Recently Don Aviv, President of Interfor International and a Reputation Communications Advisory Board member, and Shannon Wilkinson, our founder and CEO, were interviewed on the topic of reputation management for an Interfor Academy webinar. Their moderator was Jeremy Hurewitz, Head of Interfor Academy.

Don Aviv, President, Interfor International

Interfor Academy is a speaker’s bureau that enables organizations to book elite presenters for conferences, corporate off-sites, or risk trainings & tabletop sessions.

Don and Shannon come from two different sides of reputation management. He is on the investigative, data research, analytics, and monitoring side, helping organizations listen to conversations about them online and red flagging any that have reputational, privacy, or security risk aspects. (We interviewed him on the topic of due diligence in 2018; and more recently published his article, Scrubbing Your Personal Info from the Internet.)  Reputation Communications, manages, amplifies and repairs reputations.

We are interviewing him about due diligence investigations, self-checks (or reverse due diligence), and how the deep dark web plays a role in threatening reputations.

Recently, The New York Times published a lurid expose about Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential running mate. Do you think due diligence research was undertaken and dismissed? Or not done?

I would be surprised if Kennedy’s campaign was not aware of the allegations connected to his running mate, as many of them have been openly discussed for some time.

We do know that both major political parties haven’t been systematic when it comes to due diligence on opposition candidates. Jeremy and I wrote about exactly that in a piece for The Hill last year. But it will be interesting to see if there is more of this type of reporting. I think it will be tied directly to how he is polling and what type of impact he might have on the election.

How common is it now for deep dives to be done before important hires and partnerships are made?

It is increasingly common. That’s the good news for those of us who campaign constantly for companies to pay attention to reputational and security risk. The difference is in the level of diligence done and making a smart decision about that and what role the individual will play in any sort of company or partnership that is being established.

There is a fast-growing array of technological tools that can help employers get comfortable with low to mid-level hires. That sort of background check is cheap and somewhat effective. These are commoditized services that can give an employer a little reassurance that their prospective employee doesn’t have a criminal record, hasn’t declared bankruptcy, and did indeed graduate from the educational institution they are claiming on their resume.

But when it comes to more senior hires, or major investments being made and partnerships established, it is critical to go much deeper and try to understand the individual’s background and character at a more granular level, and drill down on any red flags to weigh those against whatever that person might contribute to what you’re building. So, in these cases, the more commoditized checks are insufficient.

Those who retain Interfor do so because our analysts have extensive experience in locating and evaluating deep dive public records and providing insight into what they find. True expertise comes into play when it comes to the very human side of collecting qualitative intelligence on a subject.

You used the term reputational “self-checks” during the webinar. What do you mean by that?

We are frequently hired by clients who want to know what their reputational assessment looks like and what might be used against them by someone looking to do them harm – physically or reputationally.

Your firm conducts social media threat monitoring for major corporations as well as for high-net-worth clients. How does that work, and what are they looking for?

While we certainly support HNW clients and celebrities around the world, we also support a large group of executives, nonprofits, foundations and start-ups.  That client base includes any entity or individual that receives negative or unwanted attention through social media, chatgroups, blogs, and other online chatter. We have a global team of highly trained analysts who monitor threats 24/7 for a variety of companies and individuals across all common languages. They are deeply knowledgeable in assessing when someone might turn from an online troll to a true threat. They help identify new threat trends and help clients be proactive in preparing for any incipient risk.

How is AI going to impact what information appears on the internet about people and organizations?

AI will certainly be a force of change. We have seen a remarkable uptick in fraudulent activity ranging from Deepfakes and impersonations, all the way to confidence scams and straight-up harassment and trolling driven purely through AI systems.

For example, one of our clients, a well-known radio personality, has been inundated with thousands of fake product endorsements and ads geared at defrauding his listener base around the world.  Our Social Media Threat Monitoring Team identifies and works to knock down approximately 50 fake ads and websites a week, yet this is likely a drop in the bucket.

Ultimately, without strong regulations, AI systems may add considerable fuel to the “fake news” ecosystem, and your average internet user will have even more trouble discerning fact from fiction.

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As President of Interfor International, Don Aviv directly supports Chief Security Officers and General Counsel of some of the leading corporations, financial institutions and family offices around the world.

An author on physical security, threat mitigation and corporate security matters, he serves as an expert witness on security-related legal matters. His credentials include Board Certified Protection Professional (CPP); Board Certified Physical Security Professional (PSP); Professional Certified Investigator (PCI) and licensed New York State Investigator. He is an executive board member of Strength-to-Strength, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting victims of terrorism. Mr. Aviv is also a board member of The Community Security Service, a non-profit organization dedicated to training and protecting local communities.

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This article is part of our continuing Interview with an Expert series.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , ,
AI.Reputation Communications

Welcome to the era of artificial intelligence (AI). How this tech is being harnessed by tech companies and search engines like Google, in particular, also means your reputation could be on the line.

This is a big threat for people who haven’t worked on managing their reputations online.

Misinformation can be spread easily when there is a vacuum of information about you and your brand. Many people just have LinkedIn profiles that often sit idle and without updates — and that’s it.

Now, it’s time to change that.

The New York Times’s Tiffany Hsu delved into the reputational risks that an unchecked AI can bring. In an article about how an AI-fueled lie can impact your image online, Hsu reports on the fact that many people currently have little to no protection from ever smarter tech.

This is still new. Current AI has a hard time with accuracy. An AI-generated photo of you might give you a photorealistic face — but 12 fingers. The article mentions Google’s Bard chatbot being unable to provide accurate information about the James Webb Space Telescope. These are details that you, my fellow human, would be able to find with a quick manual Google search yourself.

While the initial harm that can come from AI-written inaccuracies about you may seem minimal and harmless, this isn’t something to be taken lightly. Hsu writes this tech can “create and spread fiction about specific people that threatens their reputations and leaves them with few option for protection recourse.” Many leading tech companies have only started putting guardrails in place.

If potentially libelous information appears attributed to your name or likeness, there isn’t much legal protection right now, Hsu adds.

There are current examples of legal fights against the machine, but they are few and far between. As we all know, misinformation tied to our names and our brands can leave an indelible stain online. AI “Frankenpeople” have now become common, which Hsu defines as “AI hallucinations” with “fake biographical details and mashed-up identities” that can emerge easily and be tied to your name if there isn’t much information out there to begin with.

This is where we come in.

  • You must be proactive about shoring up your reputation online by way of a personal branding website.
  • At Reputation Communications, we help you with publishing articles and blog posts, as well as disseminating op-Eds and thought leadership content.
  • We also harness your social media strategically.

We aim to create a reputational firewall to protect against this onslaught of AI threats.

Since search engines rely increasingly on AI, now isn’t the time to sit idle or stick with the status quo. A static public Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in five years isn’t the way to go.

Hsu writes that the AI Incident Database has logged more than 550 entries this year. That number will only grow. She quotes Scott Cambo, the man behind this tool, who says that we can expect “a huge increase of cases” tied to AI mischaracterizations of real people.

AI will undoubtedly change the way we get information and connect with the world. Now is the time to makes sure that information about you and your brand is accurate.

Your reputation is counting on it.

 
 
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.

 
 
Interviews with experts, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Crisis management

The popular TV program Jeopardy recently found itself in a crisis after selecting long-time producer Mike Richards as the late Alex Trebek’s replacement without fully vetting him.

Sony Pictures Entertainment apparently failed to conduct a deep-dive audit of Richards’ social media posts, podcast and other appearances, which, reporter Claire McNear discovered, had plenty of the type of red flags virtually all due diligence agencies now look for.

Jeopardy isn’t alone in this omission. Google landed in the same position this year when the Washington Free Beacon discovered an antisemitic blog post written in 2007 by Kamau Bobb, its global diversity lead. Google quickly reassigned Bobb from the diversity team, but the revelation caused offense to many of Google’s employees. In this case, as in the case of Sony Entertainment’s evaluation of Richards, a review of the prospective employee’s past statements would have uncovered the offensive material and avoided the reputational damage.

Thousands of organizations now routinely conduct deep-dive background checks that focus on blogposts, social media posts and other types of commentary that can be found online by anyone…with some digging. But thousands don’t. That can lead to a major reputational crisis.

Valital Technologies is a Canadian-based company, helping organizations manage reputation risks. With Valital’s AI-powered platform, organizations can stay ahead of unexpected reputation risks by monitoring and analyzing adverse online news on potential and current business stakeholders. Valital believes organizations need to “verify, then trust” in order to make better, more confident decisions about the people with whom they choose to do business.  We checked in with Ronny Aoun, Valital founder and CEO (shown below), to get the latest on how AI is being used to vet clients, business partners, third-party service providers or any individual a business is hoping to work with. 

Ronny Aoun

Q: Why do you think companies like Sony Pictures Entertainment fail to conduct due diligence for such high-profile hires?

RA: Many executives take people’s track records, experience and reputation for granted, especially if they’re star performers or well known within an industry. In the case of Jeopardy, Mike Richards had already proven himself as an executive producer for two well-loved game shows: The Price Is Right and Let’s Make a Deal. There’s a certain level of complacency involved. You often see this in more benign situations, such as in the promotion of a long-time employee into a new, more high-profile role. Some managers subscribe to a one-and-done approach in that instance; that is, if the person has been vetted once before — even if it was years ago— that person is OK. That’s a very naive and potentially brand-damaging way of thinking, as Sony found with Mike Richards.  

Q: Have you helped companies that have had such crises?

RA:  We work with organizations that have run into things like this at one point or another. Luckily, most are never as high-profile as the Jeopardy case. The reason we exist is to help these organizations make better, more confident decisions about who they choose to do business with. Our job is to help them avoid such situations. We don’t give them advice on who to engage with; we make no kind of assessment or evaluation. All the decision-making is in their hands. What we do is provide them with information that will give them a fuller picture of the individual stakeholder.

Q: Do most HR and legal departments of major organizations understand the ways AI are now being used by agencies like Valital? If not, why don’t they?

RA: Based on our experience, people are generally aware of AI and the fact that it can be a gamechanger in so many ways. They don’t necessarily understand the full extent of one powerful aspect of AI, which is Natural Language Processing or NLP. NLP is a form of AI that enables computers to extract language from unstructured text. In Valital’s case, our AI learns human language and uses content and context to perform real-time search and pulse analysis of online media, blogs and tweets, flagging misconducts related to universally recognized misbehaviours: discrimination, fraud, harassment, violence and abuses. We also find that many organizations, even ones that are large and extremely profitable, are still highly reliant on doing adverse news monitoring manually.  They don’t quite appreciate just how much more efficient an intelligent platform can be. They will get far more information, more quickly and consistently. When people are performing manual searches, you will find that in the same team, one person might stop at page 2 of his search engine results page, while another goes further. NLP eliminates the inefficiencies, freeing up resources to focus on more high value work within their organizations.

Q: How is your platform set up to use AI to vet assigned individuals…and do they know they are being vetted?

RA: First, it’s important to note that we see Valital as part of an organization’s integrated risk management efforts. It’s not intended to be the only tool in a team’s arsenal. Many organizations do standard background checks on individuals via databases. Databases are important and will continue to be so. Valital adds another layer to this by scouring the internet for fast-moving, dynamic open-source intelligence (OSINT) to flag universally recognized misconducts.

Valital is a Saas-based platform, requiring virtually no implementation. An organization determines how many validations they need to perform annually as part of their KYC process or third-party verification process, for example. There are no unwieldy and expensive licensing agreements to adhere to, and we encourage organizations to use the platform across the organization’s functions that will benefit from being able to better assess potential business relationships. Because the AI simply gathers and categorizes publicly available information, there’s no concern about breaching people’s privacy. Our AI is simply able to find more information faster, better and more efficiently than a human can.

Q: What advice do you have for executives responsible for determining whether a new business relationship is worth pursuing? 

RA: Here’s the truth: Reputation can either drive value or destroy it. It’s Warren Buffet who says it best, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Effectively managing reputation risk is not an option; it’s an imperative. And that means deploying real-time information and processes by using the right tools and technologies that will build reputational resiliency across the organization. This means investing in rigorous due diligence, especially around these nuanced misconducts that we monitor for.

Behaviour that used to be tolerated in the past is often not acceptable today, and you want to have access to all the publicly available information about an individual before you decide. That’s why we’re constantly talking about verifying first, then trusting. The old adage of “trust, but verify,” doesn’t cut it in today’s world, because trusting the wrong business stakeholder can damage brands, sink stock prices, erode shareholder value and make organizations non-compliant with regulators, thereby incurring hefty penalties. It pays to do proper due diligence, and Valital helps organizations do it better.

This is part of our continuing series of interviews with experts whose work relates to reputation management.