New York magazine’s cover story “Cosby: The Women” is drawing a broad and powerful response—from the Chicago Reader calling it “required reading” to Business Insider describing it as a “bombshell.” And it is certainly a powerful story—one that people have been trying to tell for over 40 years.
So why is it finally being told now? It seems to have been kicked off by comedian Hannibal Burress’ comment during a set. But there is of course much more at work. It has become much harder to conceal patterns of criminal behavior: money and power are no longer effective shields.
Cosby was for decades able to block attempts by his victims to go public. But that is impossible in this new age of transparency.
New York article interviewee (and Cosby victim) Tamara Green expresses the change most directly: “In 2005, Bill Cosby still had control of the media. In 2015, we have social media. We can’t be disappeared. It’s online and can never go away.”
Anyone grappling for an effective turnaround strategy after a humiliating and public experience can take a page from Monica Lewinsky’s playbook. But especially if you are female. Being shamed, or the fear of becoming the subject of public shaming, has always been used to make women retreat from public life—or even avoid it altogether.
Here are the steps Ms. Lewinsky used to overcome her naysayers, reclaim her name and rebrand after initially withdrawing from the public eye.
– Trying a range of entrepreneurial and commercial spokesperson appearances to earn the money to pay her legal fees, as well as to establish a new position in life.
– Reestablishing her public voice (in 2014) by publishing an essay in Vanity Fair, “Shame and Survival.” She addressed her past directly. That step led to an invitation to discuss the Clinton crisis as part of a National Geographic Special about the ‘90s. She did not play the shamed victim, but discussed the devasting impact of cyberbullying, which played a significant part in her humiliation.
– Becoming a spokesperson against cyberbullying and online harassment. She launched her official new public image by appearing at a 2014 Forbes summit. Portions of her talk there were televised around the world.
In 2015, she delivered a TED talk, “The Price of Shame,” calling for a more compassionate Internet. It has been viewed online 4,712,119 times. She was invited to become an ambassador and strategic advisor for the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolutions.
She was a featured speaker at the Ogilvy and Mather Inspire Lecture at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In conjunction with her talk, Ogilvy launched a viral campaign to encourage more people to take a stand against cyber-shaming.
Her comeback follows three key steps: retreating from public life, reemerging by directly addressing her public image in a high-profile outlet and becoming more visible with TV appearances that also attract large numbers. Those numbers make her a valuable commodity for other media platforms – as well as commercial brands. She is now a celebrity with a mission millions of people support. Many of them follow her on Twitter @MonicaLewinsky.
Now that NBC has fired Donald Trump, do you find the 2016 presidential campaign more divisive than usual? It is. A few campaigns ago, two American political reporters coined a term for the new Internet-fueled political culture: The Freak Show. It explains much about what we’ve seen already.
“The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, was published by Random House in 2006. It identifies the strategies and traits that create winners (and losers) in modern presidential campaigns. The book’s main focus is how the Bushes and Clintons held the White House for nearly a generation. “The Freak Show” is a major theme in the book. It refers to politics in the Internet age, including the rise of ideological extremism, personal attacks and smear campaigns. When they become mainstream news headlines after first surfacing online, they can derail candidates.
These excerpts from The Way to Win explain why The Freak Show now plays a major role in determining who wins Presidential elections:
The Freak Show is about the fundamental changes in media and politics that have converged to tear down old restraints in campaigns and public debates.
The Freak Show…elevates the personal and the negative over an impartial appraisal of an allegation’s relevance in determining a person’s qualifications for the office. The Freak Show’s incentives favor attack over restraint and sensation over substance. The pervasiveness of these incentives is something that a president or serious presidential candidate faces every single day.
In the past, Old Media tended to sift and suppress the angriest and most sensational elements of politics… In the current generation…the extreme and eccentric voices who have always populated the margins of politics now reside, with money and fame as rewards, at the center.
The political opposition and the media (both Old and New) are filled with men and women who prosper by doing damage to personal reputations. No candidate can be considered serious without an understanding of Freak Show incentives and a strategy for dealing with them.
According to Halperin and Harris, Freak Show politics present a huge threat to any politician hoping to keep control of the narrative of his – or her – life story. When you lose that, they say, you lose the election. As longtime political insiders, they should know. Mark Halperin is the managing editor of Bloomberg Politics. John F. Harris, the editor in chief of Politico, wrote the best-selling biography of Bill Clinton, The Survivor.
Our exclusive new guide to taking ownership of your online image is out. How to Look Better Online: Online Reputation Management for CEOs, Rising Stars, VIPs and Their Organizations was written by our founder, Shannon M. Wilkinson, in collaboration with our editing, content and design team.
How to Look Better Online draws upon our experiences improving and preventing the online reputation issues faced by a range of our clients. It is available as a downloadable eBook for all platforms. You can see a preview, learn more details and order a copy here.
Suppressing legal notices on the Internet is an oft-requested online reputation management service. Old legal notices can be an issue for anyone, including well-established organizations as well as private individuals. (If you operate a business in the investment-related industry, you are almost invariably facing such issues.) Because legal notices rank highly on Google searches they are a constant source of concern. This is especially true when you did not break any laws but were fined for an overlooked tax or professional license fee requirement, are the focus of a claim by a vendor whose work may be under review or are named in a sealed legal action or divorce that was never intended to become public.
SEC, local, state & federal government notices common types
Common types of notices include filings that are made by the SEC as well as by local, state and federal governments. They often include PDFs detailing the legal case as well as press releases that are posted to announce a finding. When these are published on government websites, they may be given their own URL – a customized website address with the subject’s name. That makes it highly searchable. Legal and government sites often host vast quantities of data, have many visitors, and have a high credibility ranking. So relevant pages on their sites usually appear toward the top of search results. In searches of your name, their pages will often appear before your own biographical pages. That is where the problem lies.
A strategic plan will ensure new content ranks highly
If your goal is to suppress (lower) such filings, there are reasons your task will be challenging. The first is that if you are like many individuals or organizations, you may not have a large presence on the Internet. Your organization may have a website; you may have a LinkedIn page. If you are prominent you may have a Wikipedia page (which includes a reference to the legal issue with a link), as well as numerous media articles about you. But you do not own much of that content. That means you don’t manage it—it is out of your control. The second reason is that if the legal filings have lingered for years, they have also probably been aggregated, or republished, by multiple other websites, which has created additional listings about them.
Substantive content has the most credibility online
Overcoming such content on Google entails strategically publishing substantial amounts of new content that is designed specifically to target and minimize the legal notice. It needs to be optimized to attain high ranking. Even then, not all content ranks highly. Optimization is like the cord in a string of beads. If content consists of many beads, they are useless without the string that holds them together, forming a content collection that you want to dominate searches of your name. The more substantive you or your organization is, the higher the quality it should be. This explains why a strategic plan is the first step in all online reputation management campaigns. If maintaining a positive reputation and taking ownership of your brand online is important to you, you have many options for improving the situation. Realize that content won’t stay in place without being continually maintained and refreshed. A good strategic plan will take all of these elements into account to ensure you will see measurable results.
Sports reporter Britt McHenry was in the headlines last week after a video surfaced of her making harsh, verbally abusive comments to a tow truck company employee after her car had been towed away.
This week’s “Crisis of the Week” column in the Wall Street Journal sums up the incident well:
A video of the incident shows Ms. McHenry lashing into the employee, making fun of her appearance and education, and questioning her choice of employers. Ms. McHenry later apologized on Twitter, and ESPN responded by suspending Ms. McHenry for a week. Her comments to the tow-truck employee came days after she put a post on Facebook asking her followers to “take the high road and be nice to people.”
Discussion online and off continues about whether ESPN should have allowed her to return, and whether her apology was sufficient. Our take? Everyone makes mistakes. The best-intentioned of us have bad days (and even very bad days). Living with pressure is part of being in the public eye. Most public figures can recover from an incident such as this, but time—and Ms. McHenry’s thousands of fans—will decide how this rude tirade will impact her public image. That includes whether they want to continue watching her on ESPN.
Business News Daily has published an in-depth guide to choosing a reputation management service.
Three important takeaways:
Whether you’re a business or an individual, it’s important to understand how reputation management services can help you, and to make sure you know what ORM companies can and can’t do and what makes a service trustworthy and effective.
While the majority of ORM providers offer the same basic services, every company is different. It’s important that you choose the best one for you and your business. And handling a reputation management issue quickly and tactfully may be more important than you realize.
Reputation management campaigns often use questionable black hat practices, but they fall into an ethical gray area and can ultimately do more harm to your brand than good. Make sure that the ORM service you choose avoids these tactics and is clear about what it can and cannot do for you.
Shannon Wilkinson, Reputation Communications’ founder and CEO, is a featured expert. Her advice:
“If you are a recent college graduate, you will be best served by a company experienced in removing inappropriate or outdated photographs and information on social media platforms,” Wilkinson said. “Doctors, dentists and attorneys, as well as storefront businesses like restaurants, find online reviews to be their biggest challenge. They might obtain best results using a review management firm.”
And “if you are a high-profile industry leader, VIP or have a rising presence in business, you face different issues and will want a firm that specializes in that sector,” Wilkinson added.
Do you find yourself drawn into articles about the latest lurid scandal? If so, you’ve got plenty of company. It’s hard to avoid being caught by those headlines, especially when they involve powerful, wealthy and influential or connected individuals.
Those headlines have special meaning for online reputation management professionals. When we read the article, we see a slightly different story—one that is hiding underneath the story on the page. There are several questions we always ask:
Is the story credible?
Is there a history of similar behavior or claims, and did they involve legal action against the accused?
Could there have been previous, unreported incidents? Does the accused have the clout or financial resources to prevent such information from going public?
If the allegations are proven correct, will the scandal threaten powerful institutions, families or organizations?
Predicting How the Scandal Will Play Out
After those initial questions, there are several actions we can take to predict how the scandal will play out. First, we evaluate how much information appears online about the participants (about the accused, then the accusers and any witnesses). Does a Google search produce less than a page of results? Are multiple entries on the first page over a year old? Does the online information about them communicate stability? Is there any information online about them at all? If not, there soon will be – and it won’t come from them.
Once those questions are answered we can assess if the tools of online reputation management will come into play. Can any damaging information be removed from the Internet or substantially displaced so it does not show up on the first two pages of Google results? This will be very difficult if there is a reported history of similar behavior—and especially if that history is backed up by court records, which are given high page ranking by Google. Investigative and feature coverage from well-respected media outlets is also ranked highly by Google and holds its place regardless of SEO and online reputation management efforts.
Attacking the Credibility of Watch Dogs
As a scandal begins to unfold we generally see attempts to attack the credibility of the accusers or watch dogs. History shows that strategy is an effective one—and it still is, if the accusations are false. It’s becoming less effective when there is a strong basis to the story. Technological advances allow investigators to find and reveal the truth, which may be found in digital photography, surveillance videos or texts that can be forensically extracted from hard drives and other instruments.
Such content can also be published online. When a scandal is shown to be based in truth, denials and cover-ups will more often than not increase online fallout. Facts and public opinion shared on highly ranked platforms like Twitter and Facebook will keep the story a highly ranked one. So we now see the targets of scandals—or at least those with the best advisors—working to manage public discussion through apology and atonement.
