Earlier this month, Cho Hyun-ah, the daughter of Korean Air’s CEO and an executive at the airline, caused an international social media firestorm. She berated the crew of a Korean Air flight for serving macadamia nuts incorrectly, then forced the pilot to return to the gate while taxiing out of JFK. Her behavior sparked international headlines. Extensive analyses about the reputational fallout on Korean Air and her father’s business empire followed.
The Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column weighed in and invited me to comment. (I suggested that Cho Hyun-ah step out of the public eye for a period of time. When she makes a new start, she is in an optimum position to use her access to Korea’s wealth, power and influential as a platform for helping the less fortunate.)
Reputation Risk Isn’t New to Business…But Has Taken a More Prominent Role
Reputation risk isn’t new to business. But over the past two decades it has taken a more prominent role in the business world. The Internet, and social media in particular, has introduced a new level of transparency to business operations and culture, and a new level of empowerment to consumers.
If one employee makes a misstatement on social media, and it gains viral momentum in the community at large, it can be a crisis for the company. When that employee is the daughter or son of the company’s owner, it can become a defining one.
Every day, it seems, another major American brand experiences a crisis. Despite a large and experienced industry of experts that fix them, they don’t seem to be going away. Last fall the CEO of Microsoft became one of many corporate leaders to unwittingly create one.
Why are so many CEOs stumbling in the diversity department? The problem often starts internally. Statements and actions by CEOs and other leaders portray them as out of touch with the people their companies target as consumers. Outrage ignites online, goes viral, and then lands on prime-time news. CEOs and boards are surprised over the impact of their actions or statements. They are often puzzled as to why a backlash occurred at all.
If you are a CEO, there are several steps you can take to ensure you don’t become the next target of online backlash. The first is to understand why these crises are happening so often and what they share in common.
My recent Forbes.com piece, The Most Successful CEOs Embrace Customer Diversity, sheds light on the problem. How else can CEOs incorporate a more well-balanced blend of diversity within their corporate cultures? Conduct a search for #diversity and you will find plenty of suggestions.
Links to five New York Times articles have been removed from some search results on European versions of its search engine to comply with Europe’s “right to be forgotten.” The Times reports that Google recently informed them of the action. This excerpt provides an example of what is being removed:
One Times article that is being shielded from certain searches in Europe is a report from 2002 about a decision by a United States court to close three websites that the federal government accused of selling an estimated $1 million worth of unusable Web addresses. The complaint named three British companies, TLD Network, Quantum Management and TBS Industries, as well as two men who it said controlled the companies: Thomas Goolnik and Edward Harris Goolnik of London.
Links to such articles continue to be available in the U.S. The full article can be read here.
Customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business) are a growing concern for most companies. They often have little choice whether they are listed on these sites. Then one day a review appears at the top of a Google search of their company’s name. And it stays there, whether it is authentic, verifiable or anonymous.
In response, services have emerged that help companies track and manage their online reviews. They offer tools to monitor reviews, multiple ways to attract positive feedback from customers and the ability to publish those positive reviews on several websites.
Birdeye is one such company offering these services. We interviewed co-founding CEO Naveen Gupta, a Silicon Valley veteran, on the state of the industry.
How many review sites now exist online? We track more than 100 review sites. I believe there are thousands, but only about 100 are influential. Of those, 50 or so are applicable to every type of business. The rest are in vertical markets — niche sites dedicated to specific industries like dentistry, law or finance.
Which do you consider the most important? Tier 1 directories like Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have the most traffic. In Tier 2 are the verticals – sites devoted to specific industries. Avvo, a site that ranks and reviews attorneys, is in this tier. Tier III sites are general business listings such as Yellow Pages, Insider Pages and Super Pages.
What do you consider the most common misunderstanding of business owners about online reviews?
What we see across all verticals is that businesses small and large have been caught unaware of customer feedback because of the proliferation of review sites. As a result, they don’t know which sites to participate on. Depending on your type of market, the importance of the sites differ. Often, business owners don’t know where, and when, their reviews have appeared.
Authenticity of reviews is a concern. Many sites are not good at validating the identity of users. Or the customer’s review does not include the full issue – just their take on it.
Remediation is another big issue we see. Most review sites are not remediation vehicles. They are just one-way venting platforms. Studies show that happy customers generally don’t write reviews – only the unhappy ones do. Unless business owners actively encourage their feedback, satisfied customers don’t provide it. Proactive services enabling business owners to attract them have become necessary to succeed in this environment.
Review sites are often accused of manipulating results so that only negative reviews show up unless businesses pay a fee to the company. What advice do you give to business owners in such situations?
Not every business owner feels they have the time or resources to invest in managing their online reviews. Yet, your brand is your #1 asset. Don’t outsource it. Pay attention. Rather than focus on ratings, invite and focus on the feedback from your customers. Then address it. Use tools to automate the process. It’s about providing great service, correcting any problems and turning your customers into your advocates.
Larger enterprises and franchises are more concerned with monitoring reviews across the spectrum, comparing customer satisfaction across locations or regions, then feeding the data into their systems so they can make customer management adjustments.
There are new tools to help business owners manage all of this. It has become nearly impossible to handle manually. Fortunately, that is now unnecessary.
Naveen Gupta has had senior executive roles at RingCentral, Monster, Yahoo and UTStarcom. He studied in the Executive Education program at Harvard Business School; has an MBA, Finance from NYU Stern & London Business School; and a B.S.in Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani.
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts whose work relates to online reputation management.
A few weeks ago I attended the S.H.E. Summit, one of a growing number of women’s empowerment conferences recently highlighted by the New York Times. A variety of factors have fueled this trend, but one major catalyst is the increasing influence of hashtag activism, especially in the corporate world.
A 2011 Guardian article about Occupy Wall Street was the first to use the term “hashtag activism,” but writer Eric Augenbraun’s wariness about “breathless claims about the birth of a new form of technology-based social movement” is still shared by many today.
Speaking at S.H.E., MSNBC host Krystal Ball challenged those reservations. She highlighted numerous examples of how social media activism has had a real impact on women’s issues, including a successful campaign to get an offensive plastic surgery simulation app removed from the iTunes store, a project that has crowdsourced sexual violence data in Syria, and the online outrage that forced Lululemon to replace its CEO. “Even when it’s just sparking a conversation through a hashtag, I think that’s important,” Ball said when talking about #YesAllWomen. And hashtags have certainly sparked quite a few conversations recently.
Hashtag Power
While introducing Ball, S.H.E.’s Margaret O’Brien White’s quoted a recent Forbes piece by Susan McPherson, “Empowering Women and Girls, One Hashtag at a Time,” which compiles a wide range of noteworthy campaigns. “This is truly the breakout year for driving awareness on women and girls’ issues through hashtag activism,” McPherson writes. Millennials and the LGBT community have already made waves in this arena, but women form a majority on social media, and the collective power they can wield is becoming increasingly clear.
As the Lululemon and other crises have shown, that power can effect a change at the highest levels of corporate leadership. “Leadership is about feeling that you are the owner of your own experience and future,” McKinsey & Company’s Joanna Barsh remarked in another S.H.E. Summit talk. As more and more women realize that fostering this sense of ownership on social media moves them toward similar empowerment in the real world, the momentum is only going to pick up.
How Corporate Leaders Can Navigate this Growing Movement
How can corporate leaders navigate this growing movement? Follow the conversations I’ve referenced here as they continue to develop, including #hashtags on Twitter. Stay aware of the key issues concerning women, especially those regarding employment opportunities, the lack of women on boards and the glass ceiling that continues to face many. If you’re a CEO, tuning in to these and related concerns will help you avoid becoming the focus of the next wave of hashtag protests (and nightly newscasts). It will also help ensure you avoid the type of online reputation crisis that can impact your brand as well as your company’s stock valuation.
CEO Mary Barra has not been able to stop GM’s crisis. But her 2.0 crisis communications skills are an asset to GM. They can be judged by the transparency and skill with which she handled the recall catastrophe on the Internet.
Barra’s communications strategy incorporates multiple digital media platforms. She has used these channels to respond to the crisis with a strong and genuine message. In addition to harnessing social media like Facebook and Twitter to connect directly with customers, she has also addressed the recalls in a series of videos, a USA TODAY editorial, and even her commencement speech at the University of Michigan earlier this month. CEOs can learn much from studying her playbook.
Online reputation management (ORM) is commonly thought of as the way to remove negative commentary. But it is far more than that. This list provides many examples of how and why online reputation management is utilized. It also includes examples of some of the crises we have responded to with ORM:
– To create a strong online presence that acts as a protective barrier against third-party content, including anonymous and defamatory content.
– To remove home addresses, ages and related personal information from online databases, which often continuously scour the Internet to populate themselves.
– To replace old, unflattering photographs or caricatures and doctored images with new photographs. When the old images are cached or can’t be removed for some other reason, we minimize their prominence in searches.
– To ensure that factual, credible reference material is readily available online, minimizing the chance that fraudulent information will impact a brand.
– To provide insurance that your story is told by you and not by former partners or other biased parties.
– To rebrand Millennials when they enter the professional arena and Boomers when they reinvent themselves.
– To establish a reputation within a particular area of expertise on multiple online platforms.
– To create an online legacy for a VIP who is preparing for retirement or to exit a company or organization.
– To pair content with the most up-to-date SEO strategies to maximize its impact—keeping in mind that the quality of the content is the most important factor Google and most other major search engines now consider.
– To monitor social media and online forums for red flags signaling potential on- and off-line threats against high-profile individuals.
– To ensure up-to-date and accurate information dominates search results for an organization or individual’s name.
These are examples of some of the crises Reputation Communications has successfully mitigated using online reputation management:
– Emails and internal company documents were leaked and published online by inside sources.
– Online defamation campaigns—against both an organization and its key executives—organized by anonymous operators.
– Impersonation of prominent executives on social media and other online platforms.
– Long-resolved controversies were still commanding prominent placement in searches of an organization’s name.
When an engine fire left Carnival Cruise Lines’ Triumph drifting in the Gulf of Mexico for several days last month, the story swept across social media, even causing the hashtag #cruisefromhell to trend on Twitter.
As the Triumph disaster unfolded in real-time, Carnival’s response demonstrated how social media can be an important asset during such a crisis. Carnival did many things right. But the company was too slow in launching a social media response, most notably on Twitter. That crippled Carnival’s opportunity to participate in the social media discussion from the moment it started.
“Well aware of the potential fallout, Carnival Cruises’ crisis team has sprung into action,” AdAge’s Rich Thomaselli wrote on the same day that the Triumph finally reached port in Mobile, Alabama. Thomaselli observed that Carnival “has been consistently updating its Facebook page, which has more than 2 million likes” and “is also using two Twitter feeds (@CarnivalCruise and @CarnivalPR) to issue updates.”
The Groundwork for Success
Crisis expert Melissa Agnes said that the company “did a thorough and sincere job at communicating with their audience throughout this crisis on their social media channels.” Social media expert Allison Matherly even heard about the incident for the first time from Carnival’s lengthy statement on Facebook. “It put out the facts and needed information,” she writes. “In fact, I didn’t feel the need to read about the situation from another news source.” Carnival, Matherly observed, is “not only being transparent about the situation, but they are actively talking about it.”
Without such an established online presence, Carnival would likely have found itself in a situation not unlike the Triumph, stranded and powerless in a sea of viral outrage. This event is an excellent example of why it is important to have an extensive social media structure in place before a crisis hits.
Room for Improvement
Carnival did many things right, but some saw ways the company failed to capitalize on the full potential of social media. Carnival “could have turned its Triumph crisis into a social media success, but it did not,” according to Skift’s Samantha Shankman. She points out that the company’s “Twitter account didn’t kick into high gear until Thursday, four days after the Carnival Triumph engine fire” and, after the ship reached port, “both Facebook and Twitter went silent until Tuesday, February 19.” The Build Network expressed a similar perspective: “Loved ones monitoring social media for official updates from the company found radio silence on Facebook and Twitter.”
In a CNN opinion piece, David Bartlett, a senior vice president of crisis and issues management and strategic communications firm Levick, offers some good advice on how Carnival could have done a better job. In addition to showing that it was sincerely concerned and working to fix the problem, Bartlett says, Carnival should have “aggressively and clearly deliver these messages now, and for as long as it takes to restore the public’s trust.”
What Else Could Carnival Have Done?
The media focused far less on Carnival’s social media response than on the anger tweeted, posted and otherwise shared by customers and the general public. That could have been different. As The Build posted in a sidebar to their piece:
“Imagine if the Triumph crew had posted video of people spontaneously helping one another aboard the distressed vessel? Would this have changed the conversation about Carnival during the crisis? Yes.
“Online video has already become one of the most powerful tools in the crisis manager’s arsenal, yet many fail to fully realize the real-time ability of video integrated with Twitter to break through a crowded online conversation,” writes Dallas Lawrence, chief global digital strategist for Burson-Martseller, in a Mashable blog post. “The question every crisis manger should be asking today is this: If you had a significant crisis occur on a Friday evening, how long would it take you to shoot, edit, and tweet a video response?””
