Whatever you may think about the Kardashians, their reality TV show, social media dominance and growing presence on runways, commercial beauty and other products makes them a fascinating business story.
Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?, a feature profile in The New York Times Magazine by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, tells the inside story about how Kris Jenner, the mother of the Kardashian children and Bruce Jenner’s former wife, built the family brand and fortune. That process began with hard work and sweat equity promoting Bruce Jenner’s early motivational speaking career.
In a world where businesses and high-visibility people go to great lengths to manage their reputational capital, Kris Jenner offers an almost unparalleled level of transparency for the world to discuss, debate or disdain. She has leveraged that transparency into a core element of her family’s brand. That’s why they are the focus of cultural conversations and icons of the new celebrity. You might not approve of her, but her drive, vision and strategic approach to brand building is something we can all learn from.
International Investor’s new list of top earning hedge funds of the last year has put them top and center of the financial industry’s news cycle. Not that they are ever far from it. That is part of what makes their online reputation issues unique.
For hedge fund managers, maintaining inner-circle confidentiality is a priority. But their rock-star status within the financial community makes that hard to achieve. With the media focusing on the private lives of top earners, it also hard to stay out of the public eye – and off the Internet. That is why privacy ranks high on my list of the top online reputation issues facing hedge funds.
But there are several online reputation issues facing hedge funds and their founders. The most important include:
Privacy Threats
Inside leaks that impact their trades. Take Greenlight Capital’s legal move to force investment site Seeking Alpha to reveal the identity of an anonymous contributor last February. (S/he leaked information on a large purchase by the firm—23 million shares of Micron Technology). Greenlight’s experience is not unusual, but its willingness to take legal action is. Most hedge funds steer clear of this type of public statement. (The firm dropped the suit after independently identifying the blogger.)
A high level of unwanted online visibility.News about hedge fund managers’ personal lives, complete with photographs they didn’t create, populate the web and in some cases can damage their professional brand. Their personal addresses—and even satellite pictures of their homes—can be appear on a variety of websites. This information can originate from a source they considered safe (for instance, making a political donation that is subsequently published with a list of home addresses) but is then aggregated and republished.
Due to the lack of laws governing Internet content, this is legal, at least in the United States. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the main law regulating Internet content, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Parody Blogs and Twitter Accounts
Common online issues facing hedge funds include third parties that take up their name space (a URL, or website address, resembling a person or company’s name). This can involve blogs and twitter accounts that appear to post information in their name but are actually platforms through which anonymous users can parody (or perhaps praise) the person or company. Many hedge funds choose to ignore such sites. But when the sites take up residence near the top of search results – the first and second pages after a Google search of the company or founder’s name – they don’t just consume online real estate, they can also impact a brand.
Reviews
The private nature of hedge funds limits their involvement with investor reviews and comments, factors that are much more important in the greater financial services industry. But these can now come from a new and unexpected source: Google’s Places for Business. If you own a hedge fund and suddenly see a box in the upper right corner opposite your company’s website with your business’s name, a description, map of its location and an invitation for anyone to post a review of it there, you are looking at a relatively new aspect of Google+ local. This can serve as valuable marketing for businesses that rely on and benefit from reviews and walk-ins (such as restaurants, tailors and even some investment firms). But it is probably not an asset for hedge funds.
Keep an Eye on Your Brand Name…Lower Down on Google
Online reputation management firms maintain 24/7 monitoring of their clients online to keep track of new online content that appears about individuals and brands. But there is a quick way for hedge funds and their managers to glean insight into potential new privacy or reputation management issues: watch pages four through seven of the results in a Google search of your name and your organization’s name. New and unwanted content often first shows up on those lower pages before climbing higher. Depending on its source, relevance and quality, this content can take several weeks to rise—if it rises at all. That delay can provide an opportunity to develop an effective response.
Even hedge funds that have not had any reputation management issues would be well served to consider potential problems and develop a plan that addresses them. In the era of social media, that should also include social media and BYOD (“Bring Your Own Device”) policies for employees so you both know your rights.
Excerpts from this article were published in selected Hearst Media Services Connecticut newspapers on 6.7.14.
“Twitter is an opportunity. Facebook is an opportunity. To say what you feel. To try to pick people up. To try to be positive. To try to add something to society. To let people see you transparently. You cannot be defined if you’re on social media by someone else. You will define who you are, and if you’re negative, that’s your fault. But here is who you are. If you are negative, it will come through. Five years of being on twitter and facebook, are you gonna lie for five years? You are who you are. But we’re trying to tell those kids, you build your brand or you break your brand down. You are who you are through social media.”
A Master at Online Reputation Management
With NCAA violations blemishing his past success at UMass and Memphis, and critics accusing him of exploiting the NBA’s “one-and-done” rule to win his first national title in 2012 and lead the Wildcats to this year’s final, Calipari has certainly had his share of controversy. Through that, it’s been clear that he is shrewd and effective at managing his online reputation.
Since joining Twitter in 2009 (right around when he took over at Kentucky), Calipari has averaged 4.6 tweets per day, according to his account’s statistics on Socialbakers. “I give out information, I’m transparent to our fans,” he explained on ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike. “I tell them how I’m feeling.” He gets help from CoachCal.com editor Eric Lindsey, who “oversees Coach Calipari’s social media platforms.”
Adept at Using Social Media to Build His Brand
Such candor has helped earn Calipari praise as “NCAA’s last honest man,” but it’s not the only aspect of online reputation management that he’s been adept at harnessing. He also recognizes how celebrity can bolster his brand and recruiting power, as he demonstrated while attending his friend Jay-Z’s concert at Barclay’s Center in 2012. “Calipari didn’t hesitate when it came to letting his 1.2 million Twitter followers know about his backstage pass to the concert, tweeting out this picture of himself in front of the stage,” Rob Dauster observed in a Sports Illustrated piece.
Even Calipari’s comments about social media above seem to be part of “selling his program,” as Dauster points out in a recent NBC Sports article. Calipari understands that the premier young players that are key to Kentucky’s success view social media not as a “waste of time,” as Pitino argued, but as a normal part of everyday life—and something they’ll need to know when they make it to the NBA.
At midnight last Thursday, Beyoncé put her own stamp on social media marketing. She bypassed the traditional music industry marketing machine and released a brand new album directly to her fans — on Instagram. Her team was so successful in avoiding leaks that it was a complete surprise.
Ben Sisario reported the unexpected release in The New York Times:
“The release of a blockbuster album has historically come with a few standard marketing moves. Flood the radio with an early single. Book as many TV appearances as possible. Line up partnerships with big retailers and consumer brands.
But at midnight on Thursday, when Beyoncé released her latest album, she did none of those things. Instead, she merely wrote, “Surprise!” to her more than eight million Instagram followers, and the full album — all 14 songs and 17 videos of it — appeared for sale on iTunes.
The stealth rollout of the album, “Beyoncé,” upended the music industry’s conventional wisdom, and was a smashing success.”
The Take Away for Traditional Business Leaders
What can more traditional C.E.O.’s and other business leaders take away from Beyoncé’s successful stealth move? The most important is that social media is a tool that enables users to take ownership of their message.
In online reputation management, the more control you have over the information about your brand online, the more well-balanced your online image is. If it is authentic, interesting and informative, it will have credibility.
Using social media to communicate directly to the public, with no filter of spokesperson or other third parties, enables your message to be viewed exactly as you intend it to be. You still can’t change how the media, critics and consumers respond, but you have complete management over what, how and when you introduce what you want them to know. That results in a more authentic picture of your point of view – one that is less easily skewed by others. It also enables a message that the media can use — including national news outlets.
In more traditional corporate cultures, doing this requires the participation of a lot of team members – including risk, compliance and legal officers. So planning such strategies and having them in your playbook before you need them, is a good strategy for 2014.
If you scroll through this blog’s archives, you’ll find many different examples of how being authentic is central to successful online reputation management. But there are few better examples of the value of authenticity than Gary Vaynerchuk.
If you’ve read David Segal’s recent New York Times piece—or any of the countless other profiles on Vaynerchuk —you know the remarkable story of his rise from the savvy social media manager/über marketer for a New Jersey wine retailer to one of the top branding and social media thought leaders. In today’s climate, where building a personal brand has become an almost universal concern, we can all benefit by looking at the strategies and tools that have fueled his success. Loud, brash and profane, Vaynerchuk’s personality doesn’t appeal to everyone. But he doesn’t try to.
Uncompromising authenticity has been at the heart of his approach since his breakout video blog, Wine Library TV, which Segal describes as “Mr. Vaynerchuk sitting at a table in his office, demystifying chardonnays, rieslings and other wines by describing them in terms that any mook could understand.” The blog not only presents Vaynerchuk as an unvarnished, passionate and accessible wine enthusiast, but also demonstrates his shrewd understanding of his medium. “My high quality content definitely factored in, but that might not have mattered had I not also made native content—authentic content perfectly crafted for that particular new platform, YouTube,” he reflects.
Early Adopter of Twitter
As an early adopter of Twitter, Vaynerchuk has harnessed it with a similar combination of candidness and insight. “It was the platform that came most naturally to me, because it was perfectly suited for small bursts of quickfire conversation and idea exchanges,” he writes in his latest book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. Vaynerchuk understands that the platform is about more than just “microblogging.” It’s about engaging directly—or, as he puts it, “creating context.”
“Twitter is the cocktail party of the Internet—a place where listening well has tremendous benefits,” he observes in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And listen he does. “About 90 percent of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s tweets are direct replies to people who have written to or about him,” Segal points out in the Times. “I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral,” Vaynerchuk wrote in an Entrepreneur article, “but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships,”
Content Is King
Vaynerchuk also emphasizes the importance of creating content. Arecent Forbes article went so far as to call it “the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society” and encouraged people to create as much as possible. “It literally doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist,” he has declared. Vaynerchuk’s characteristic hyperbole aside, this argument has resonance when it comes to online reputation management.
If you don’t publish content that provides accurate and appropriate information about yourself, your company, area of expertise or organization, you are not just losing an opportunity to build your brand—you are endangering it, essentially relinquishing control of your online image anyone else who decides to post content about you. Bringing together engagement and authenticity as well as content and context, Vaynerchuk’s approach highlights some valuable tools and strategies for managing one’s reputation online. G.E.’s Linda Boff may sum it up best. “When I think about Gary, I think about scrappiness before anything else,” she tells Segal in his Times piece. “He lives his own life out loud.”
She may not have won last Sunday’s Daytona 500, but rookie NASCAR driver Danica Patrick definitely attracted the most buzz. Most of that attention focused on how she became the first woman to earn the pole position at Daytona. While some may still know her by her appearances in risqué GoDaddy.com ads than for her driving, a closer look at her story reveals just how much time, effort and planning has gone into her brand. According to an in-depth ESPN Magazine profile by Janet Reitman, it all started with “Plan Danica.” Reitman describes how Patrick caught the racing bug as a young girl and soon had her own “hero cards, the flashy racing version of baseball cards, as well as T-shirts featuring her name and picture.” After her father signed her up for a public speaking course, Patrick “blossomed into a polished pitchwoman,” said Reitman.
Off to the Races
When major media outlets came knocking a few years later, Patrick was ready, and her hard work both on and off the track continued to pay off. In 2002 she was picked up by David Letterman’s and Bobby Rahal’s Rahal Letterman Racing, and in 2005 she was named “Rookie of the Year” at the Indianapolis 500. Another major strategic decision was Patrick’s move from IndyCar to NASCAR. Her recent success will surely be a boost for the racing league, which is already a huge industry. “Right now, the spotlight is on Danica Patrick, someone who has no problem making headlines and handling same,” writes Forbes’ Darren Heitner. “Her 720,000+ followers on Twitter do not mind the attention Danica is demanding. Neither does NASCAR.” An early start isn’t the only factor that has contributed to Patrick’s success and high profile. Her gender has made her story unique in the racing world, but her management of that story has been the key. Sally Jenkins’s Washington Post column sums it up perfectly:
“What’s most interesting to me about Patrick, though, is not her womanness, but how she deals with it. Watching her walk through her fledgling career as the only female in NASCAR is not unlike watching a driver adroitly pick off cars, negotiate curves and avoid trouble in a crowded field. It’s an essay in control. In talking to her about this larger performance, what you get is a blast of cool intelligence, a fundamentally composed whip-smartness.”
Shifting Gears
After earning her place at the front of the pack, she has begun tackling her next challenge: getting major wins on the racetrack and refining her brand. “Patrick finally seems ready to shed her reputation as a model and finally contend in races this year,” writes The Sports Quotient’s Will Hayman. Her success at Daytona was a big step, and she’s also been letting the public see more of her genuine self. “The difference between the Patrick of old and today’s version is the newer one appears to be more open and less guarded,” observes NBC Sports’ Tony Dizinno. Another smart move was picking up a Coca-Cola sponsorship last year. “It’s amazing how much my message aligned with [their brand] so well,” she told USA Today. “I feel you really can have it all in life if you do it right and work hard enough.”
Sallie Krawcheck is a top candidate to become the next head of the SEC, according to Dealbook, but it’s not just her record and resilience as a Wall Street executive that’s put her in the running.
Since she began tweeting last spring, Krawcheck has gained more than 11,000 followers. On LinkedIn she’s attracted an even larger audience—75,000 and counting. “She has drawn a significant following with her conversational style and posts on investment issues,” Dealbook says, referring to an earlier article in which Krawcheck called her move “part of a larger effort to style herself as an industry analyst” and “lend her Wall Street experience to the broader debate about the industry’s evolution.” Already among LinkedIn’s top “Thought Leaders” and Business Insider’s “101 Finance People You Have To Follow On Twitter,” she’s clearly had a great deal of success with her strategy.
Social Media Savvy
A big part of that success comes from Krawcheck’s deft use of social media to take ownership of her image and message. In the past, she would have had to rely on a public relations intermediary to arrange interviews and keep her name out there, as many prominent figures do. However, she has used social media to take more direct control of her voice and reach a larger audience at the same time. In a recent RIABiz.com article Dina Hampton examines how Krawcheck “used those months of technical unemployment to cultivate a distinct and intimate online voice that may, industry watchers say, deftly position her for her next move.” Speaking to Hampton, Gregory FCA Communications’ Joe Anthony adds that Krawcheck’s strategy has “broadened her footprint to where more people are recognizing her beyond the financial services space” and “gone from being seen as a sharp mind within wealth management/banking to a thought leader and business titan.”
While she may describe herself in her Twitter profile as a “current mom” and “crazed UNC basketball fan,” a closer look at Krawcheck’s online presence shows that her approach is far from amateur. In addition to regularly sharing useful links and poignant thoughts on both Twitter and LinkedIn, she has self-published popular posts like “Lessons Learned in Leading During a Crisis” and “What I Learned When I Got Fired (the First Time)” and penned op-eds for outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Politico.
Those posts have given her a chance to share her own perspective and narrative regarding her previous experience, while the op-eds appear to be setting the stage for her next move. “Lately Krawcheck has been peppering the media with her thoughts and strong recommendations about how to address, if not solve, the gigantic, chronic, almost genetic, ills of the global financial industry,” The Daily Beast’s Allan Dodds Frank wrote in October. “If she can continue her nonpartisan stance,” Frank observed, “she might be the ideal person to be in charge of consumer protection, be nominated to the Securities & Exchange Commission or to a Treasury Department job.”
Setting the Stage
Her undergraduate degree at the UNC School of Journalism has likely helped Krawcheck communicate effectively, but perhaps more important is how she has applied the same strategies that made her one of Wall Street’s top female executives to her social media endeavors. “The secrets of Krawcheck’s success, however, hinge on her social skills,” Heidi N. Moore wrote in 2009, adding that “she has built a reputation as Mrs. Clean” and combined “a warm interest in others’ feelings, an obsession with preparation” and with “frank talk and open ambition.”
Speculation about where she’ll end up next will surely continue, and there’s no guarantee that she’ll be tapped as the next SEC chair. But one thing is certain: as one of the first major names in the banking world to dive headfirst into social media, Sallie Krawcheck has reaped the vast potential of an open and savvy online strategy.
Coco Rocha is one of only a few contemporary fashion models that has a very strong online brand—one of the few whose name is well known outside the fashion industry because of her social media strategy. This New York Times article examines advice she gives to young models on establishing a brand using her techniques. Early in a career, a key challenge is distinguishing yourself from your peers. Building a brand can be the answer, and social media is most often the most accessible platform to use.
Most any brand will benefit an emerging career. Ms. Rocha’s advice to a young model creating a Tumblr content: “I don’t care if it’s about cats, just make it the best cat Tumblr out there.” And any audience you can muster is a clear asset you can offer clients. Her savvy is very likely to extend her modeling career…because of the added value her large audience brings to the products she is hired to showcase.
