Video is an ideal tool to promote personal brands. It gives you more control over your image and it is an excellent way to establish a new image for yourself (and your organization) as you pursue new initiatives, build new audiences and seek investment capital. As an added benefit, the video will function as a portfolio piece to interest producers of broadcast media in featuring you as a guest expert on their programs.
In this week’s Reputation Reboot, we provide tips for a start-up CEO who is concerned his youthful appearance may be a drawback as he seeks out investors.
The article explains how easy it is to trace any Wikipedia edit (simply click on the “View History” tab in the upper right of a Wiki page. By clicking on each editor’s name, you can also see their Wiki editing history, including every page they have edited.)
We have published extensive information regarding Wikipedia’s policies, including the online encyclopedia’s plans to require disclosure from paid editors. In this case, the PR firm did not disclose their paid status. They also violated Wikipedia’s rules by removing verified information: When a fact is verified on Wiki by linking to a credible citation, you can’t remove it.
PR Firms Grapple with Non-Disclosure Clauses in Client Contracts
Even many well-intentioned firms editing clients’ Wikipedia entries would prefer not to disclose their paid status because client contracts usually include a non-disclosure clause. If you are a paid consultant and hesitate to disclose your paid status and identity for that reason, you can use an anonymous Wiki handle but explain your paid status in your profile. You will be adhering by Wiki’s rules (assuming you also follow their editing rules to a “t” – which you should) and you will be honoring your contract.
Following is the profile of an editor who has been working on the Wikipedia page of a high-profile personality who has been in the news. We recommend it as an example of best practices in disclosing your paid status.
In line with the Wikimedia Foundation’s updated Terms of Use as of June 16, 2014, this is to disclose that I am paid for some of the articles I create and/or edit, in most cases by the subject of the article. Whether paid or not, I always aim to contribute positively to Wikipedia and to edit within Wikipedia’s guidelines, with properly sourced, neutral, constructive edits. I hope my work is judged based on those standards. I will add a paid editing disclosure to the talk page or in the edit summary of any article I am paid to create or edit as of June 16, 2014.
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.
When a photograph of a young Target employee named Alex went viral earlier this month, the teenage cashier demonstrated not only how quickly a person (or a story) can be launched into Internet prominence, but also how easy it is to lose control of the situation. As the Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey puts it, “Alex may be ‘Internet famous,’ but the Internet owns him.”
Stokke and Seida’s stories reveal the havoc that unsought online exposure can wreak. While she at first tried to contain the torrent of attention, Stokke soon “learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet,” according to the Post’s Eli Saslow. In addition to seeing her photo spread across the web, she also had to deal with someone impersonating her on Facebook and an unofficial “fan site” that used her name as its URL—not to mention countless stares and phone calls. Seida tried to get websites to take down her photo, but she makes the important point that “once something like this spreads, it’s out there forever.”
There was probably very little that Stokke, Seida or Alex could have done to prevent their images from going viral. But having an online reputation management strategy in place would have given them some control of the situation, allowing them to mitigate negative effects and use the event to build their brand. Publishing quality content that follows SEO and Google PageRank best practices, for example, can help prevent unanticipated material from suddenly monopolizing that critical first page of search results. Having a well established social media presence allows you to participate in the online discussion. But handling social media thoughtfully is also critical, as Seida learned. “I’d posted the image on Facebook, but like so many before me, I’d failed to pay attention to my privacy settings when I uploaded it,” she writes in her Salon piece.
The Internet casts its harsh spotlight on new subjects every day. One day that spotlight may fall on your or your organization. When it does, being ready could make a world of difference.
Pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has been in the news recently. It is investigating whether its international affiliates may have made improper payments to doctors. But thanks to some excellent crisis management, headlines are focusing on how Sanofi is handling the issue instead of on possible wrongdoings.
I contributed to this piece, published today on The Wall Street Journal’s website, that examines Sanofi’s response in more detail. Other major pharmas, including Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline, have faced similar issues. Sanofi, however, has distinguished itself with a proactive approach to reputation management.
These situations serve not only as examples of how crises unfold in the Internet age. They also illustrate a type of problem that can be difficult to avoid in a global economy: in other countries, payments we would consider bribes are seen as simply a cost of doing business. International industry has not found a way to resolve those cultural dissonances…but Sanofi has demonstrated one way to manage the crises they produce.
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.
The explosive growth of the Internet has dramatically changed the demands of reputation management. The manipulation of search engine results—what used to be considered the central activity of ORM firms—has lost its utility as search engine algorithms have grown more sophisticated.
The National Cybersecurity Institute Journal has published my new paper addressing this topic. “The New Demands of Online Reputation Management” provides an overview of the leading online reputational threats faced by companies in the United States, as well as an explanation how such events unfold, the motivations behind them, and how they can be protected against and resolved.
