Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Online reputation management, , , , , , ,

Like many of you, we are transfixed by Donald Trump’s ascendance to the top of the Republican Party. His boldness has dominated the GOP Presidential campaign. His Twitter stream keeps him at the top of the news. His message resonates with millions. Watching the GOP grapple with this startling situation provides an insightful lesson in messaging.

Consistent messaging is an essential part of reputation management. That means presenting a unified brand—and a clear and distinct identity–all the time, across every platform. Once that unified brand is established, it can be amplified. That ensures your audience will encounter your brand in mainstream media outlets, at the top of Internet searches and on social media.

Like political campaigns, successful reputation management programs share three factors in common:

  1. The campaign begins by identifying the image you want to project.
  2. That image is authentic. (Otherwise, your audience won’t find it credible.)
  3. That image is expressed through a clear message that is transmitted across all the platforms where it will reach the audience that matters most to you.

Donald Trump’s message is clear. But the Republican Party’s is less so. Division within its ranks has led to an identity crisis that helped fuel Trump’s rise.  (Even the Koch Brothers, the Party’s most important supporters, have been utilizing a PR campaign to reboot their image.) It will be fascinating to watch how the Republican Party resolves this issue after the GOP Presidential candidate is officially announced this week.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

 
 
Social Media, , , , , , , , , ,

Social media is an important platform for 2016 Presidential candidates. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram matter because they are where 18-24 year olds are getting their news – and communicating with their friends. Women are big social media users, too. Getting them to the polls will impact who wins the election.

In Hillary’s Race For 2016: Turning Followers Into Votes, on Forbes.com, I examine which candidates are winning on social media. Here are five reasons why Hillary is in the lead:

1.She has the most control over her online image: if anyone enters a Google search for “Hillary Clinton,” much of the first two pages of results will be sites she manages. Her digital assets include:

2. Facebook. She has almost one million likes on Facebook, where women aged 18 to 29 are the majority of users.

3. Twitter. Hillary has almost 4 million followers on Twitter; Jeb Bush just over 250,000. 37% of female Internet users between the ages of 18-29 use Twitter.

4. Instagram. Instagram is the most popular social media platform for people in their 20s.

5. She has an Official Hillary 2016 Playlist on Spotify – a collection of upbeat, inspiring songs to accompany her campaign. They can be widely shared by followers on their Facebook and Twitter feeds.

This doesn’t mean the other candidates lack digital assets (Donald Trump’s substantial media footprint includes almost 2 million Facebook likes).  It just illustrates the importance of social media currency in the 2016 election…and elsewhere in politics.

This post includes excerpts from an essay first published by Forbes.com on June 22, 2015. That article has been shared over 14,000 times on Facebook.

 
 
Internet Legal Issues, , ,
Internet law

Donald Trump has won a cybersquatting lawsuit against a man who developed four parody websites using his name. The sites published anonymous “commentary, often disparaging, on Trump and his television shows,” according to CNN.

Such practices have proliferated on the Internet for years. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are also used for cybersquatting. Celebrities and other public figures are a common focus of such sites. So are CEOs and other high-profile executives.

Many “domainers,” as the instigators are known,  purchase unsecured domain names with the intent of charging high fees to sell them back to their victims. Creating parody sites can be a ploy to force them to do so faster.  Victims often feel they have little recourse over the situation or don’t want to take legal action that would attract publicity.

Trump’s attorneys used the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act as the basis of their suit, which was filed in March 2013. (The sites were created in 2007.) The law permits damages of up to $100,000 for each unauthorized domain. In this instance, the court ruled that the domainer must pay $32,000 in damages.

This Harvard Law link summarizes the law. Wikipedia provides an in-depth overview.