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.”
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.
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent entry onto the national political stage, which culminated earlier this month with his first public speech on immigration reform, highlights how many of the key tools in online reputation management can be part of a strategic approach to political involvement and activism. (Strategic political involvement is also often an essential aspect of reputation management.)
Silicon Valley’s elite includes political donors from across the political spectrum. Top tech companies like Twitter are forming PACs and hiring lobbyists. But with his leading role in FWD.us, an immigration reform lobbying group that he launched earlier this year with longtime friend Joe Green, Zuckerberg has taken a step further into the political realm. He “is building a new social network, and this time it’s political,” Jennifer Martinez declared in a recent article for The Hill. Zuckerberg “is using his clout as a top business executive and American success story to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform.” With the right approach, Zuckerberg has the opportunity to repeat the success of Facebook with FWD.us, and build a network that will harness significant political influence. After all, the majority of the public now conducts their research online – and makes significant types of political donations online.
Difficult terrain
Unlike building a friend-based social network, however, that task requires navigating a perilous and intensely divided political landscape. FWD.us didn’t make it far before stumbling. Just a few weeks after its formation, the group faced backlash for ads supporting politicians such as Lindsay Graham and Mark Begich and lost a couple of high-profile members, including influential entrepreneur Elon Musk. In the future, FWD.us might be able to avoid such problems by hewing closer to Zuckerberg’s other political activities. By donating to both New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor and Senate candidate Cory Booker, he was recently able to prevent himself from being pigeonholed or harshly criticized for a more partisan stance.
In his New Yorker essay, Robert Packard skewers Silicon Valley for “solving all the problems of being twenty years old,” rather than looking at bigger-picture solutions. IN that vein, FWD.us has been criticized for wanting to do “little more than securing more coveted H1-B visas, essentially granting an influx of foreign, skilled technology workers to fill the Valley’s talent shortage.” Zuckerberg wisely addressed that point in his speech. “We talk about high-skilled H1-Bs and full comprehensive immigration reform as if they are two separate issues,” he said. “But anyone who knows immigration knows that they’re not.” He described the goals of FWD.us in more detail in a Washington Post piece back in April, and being more vocal about those issues in the future could help the group rise above the political fray. While Zuckerberg and FWD.us can undoubtedly cultivate a powerful political network in support of immigration reform, Elon Musk offered some valuable advice when he left the group: “I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in D.C. and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause.”
Reputation management has always been a concern for prominent brands and individuals, but interest in ORM is much broader. As just predicted in The New Digital Age, most everyone with a significant online presence will find themselves at some point using one of its professionals.
Industry insiders anticipate that one of the first ORM firms, will soon go public. Other ORM firms have attracted $15 million in venture capital: investors are pouring into the field. There are increasing articles about ORM.
Companies ranging from PR agencies, reputation management companies and social media consultancies to law firms are acquiring or partnering with startups in this fast-growing sector. Others are rushing their own ORM services to market. What does this mean for consumers?
A Profitable Industry, Attracting Explosive Growth
All this excitement has encouraged a distorted view of what ORM really is. It is not simply deleting negative information and flooding the Internet with positive information. Unlike reputation management, ORM is less about controlling image perception than about managing something that is far harder to control: all the publicly accessible online information about an organization or individual. That encompasses blogs and message boards as well as the most established media platforms. And unlike public relations it is not about controlling the flow of information—a goal the Internet has made unattainable. Good ORM is about authenticity and facts.
ORM and Efforts to Hide Negative Online Content
ORM began with attempts to hide, suppress, erase, and otherwise miraculously remove negative information from the Internet. Whether with letters to webmasters or through the creation of multitudes of dummy sites, great effort led to sometimes questionable, “black hat” results. With the refinement of search engine algorithms and the tremendous growth in Internet usage, those simple strategies have become even less effective. Online information can’t be controlled. It needs to be managed.
The open nature of the Internet makes that management more essential as well as more difficult. Companies need to watch for leaks from well-placed employees in addition to negative consumer comments. Since anonymous and unregulated they may as easily come from a competitor as a frustrated consumer. The way information endures on the Internet presents special problems for individuals—it has been argued that every time an old piece of information appears in search results it has been republished. So individuals need to be aware of job and company descriptions from early in their career and excerpts from speeches that could be taken out of context. Outdated information is actually a bigger problem for people that don’t maintain an online presence.
ORM Will Become Niche-Based
Some ORM firms still provide the older strategies. But most have developed an approach that integrates public relations, SEO, and multimedia publishing. Different customers have different needs. As the marketplace becomes more familiar with ORM we predict that we’ll see the industry online become niche-based, with providers specializing in specific areas of expertise corresponding to a type of customer. Separate suites of services are already being offered to companies and individuals. But the needs of a recent college grad entering the workforce (or even a teenager entering college), with his or her Facebook-and Twitter-saturated online profile, differ considerably from those of doctors and dentists, who may be most concerned with patient comments on consumer review sites such as Yelp. A dentist in private practice, for instance, might be best served by an ORM practitioner who is familiar with the medical industry and is able to engage reviewers in online dialogues.
CEO’s, VIPS Need Specialized Services
The same is true for managing the online identity of CEO’s, VIPS and well-established professionals and industry leaders, which is what we specialize in. Not only is there an enormous amount of information about them online, they already have the LinkedIn, Wikipedia and other profiles that are essential aspects of the ORM toolkit. Managing that type of online image requires a different approach. High net worth individuals require different skills: they too are usually the subject of considerable online content, which must be managed while maintaining the maximum amount of privacy for security reasons.
These are just some examples of the many different types of consumers who are already using professional online reputation management services. Clearly, the future for the ORM industry is bright. To ensure it remains that way, we must establish a benchmark of ethics, build trustworthy resources to educate and assist consumers and be proactive in shaping a best-practices culture to ensure they are well-served.
Your answers to the following questions will determine whether you need to update your online image. That is the first step forward in expanding, correcting, repairing it…or simply establishing a more comprehensive one.
How much of the content in the first three pages of a Google search of your name includes positive, neutral and negative information and visuals?
What is the context and source of that content?
How up to date, accurate and authentic is it?
How credible are the sources?
Is the prominence of this content the result of benign neglect? Or is the content the result of a well-managed and organized campaign?
How significant are the platforms the content is on: is it a top 10 platform such as YouTube or Wikipedia, or a personal blog with a small audience?
These are questions to use when evaluating you or your organization’s online presence and its impact on your reputation:
Do you have a strong presence online, one that presents a factual, accurate and current image of your strengths? Do you have a monthly or quarterly plan to update and expand it?
Does your current brand identity reflect the direction of your professional, personal and philanthropic trajectory?
Are your photograph, website, blog, biography and related materials still relevant? Do they deliver a consistent message? If not, is this an appropriate time to rebrand?
For businesses whose international presence has increased significantly in non-English speaking countries, is it now necessary to create translated versions of website(s) and marketing materials?
Are your head shots and other photographs online over two years old?
If you are listed or referenced in Wikipedia, is the entry or reference up to date and accurate?
Is your privacy compromised, meaning is your personal address, age and family members’ names published in several public databases?
In its early days—the mid-1990s—online reputation management (ORM) focused on repairing malicious content: anonymous, negative online commentary posted on Internet forums and in the comments sections accompanying blogs and media platforms.
Today it is easier to remove such information. But not always. When that is the case, it can be displaced from one page to the next, and many more, through a combination of strategies. As a result, ORM is often described as “pushing down” or “suppressing” negative content.)
Taking Ownership of Your Digital Profile is Essential Today
With the much larger role the Internet has assumed in our lives and industry, ORM now encompasses taking ownership of your digital footprint—all of the publicly available information about you and your organization online that you have control over, either directly or indirectly. That includes claiming your name on all key social media platforms, whether you use them or not. The goal is to own as much of that digital real estate as you can…especially on the first page of a Google search in your name.
Online reputation management lessens the prominence of and counterbalances negative and false content. It also ensures an accurate and powerful image of you is presented online (ideally, in the top results of a Google search of your name). Done effectively, online reputation management is a proactive tool that reinforces your credibility and influence in supporting the issues important to you. Bottom line: the more control you have over your name online, the less the world does.
If you want to take an active role in determining how others perceive you—rather than leaving it up to others— online reputation management is a must. Our article, The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs, provides an in-depth overview of what you need to know.
Online reputation management is exploding as an industry. As it has grown, so have its components, such as social media management and search-engine optimization, as well as reputation monitoring, which has become much easier to execute thanks to the renaissance in Big Data. There are reputation advisers, branding companies and crisis management firms announcing reputation management services, reputation monitors, global brand and reputation managers at mainstream and public companies, and SEO companies rolling out new reputation management tools.
Venture-capital funded online reputation management firms are preparing to go public. Mainstream PR firms are approaching firms such as this one to explore partnerships and buyouts.
As the fifth anniversary of Reputation Communication’s founding approaches in June (the fourth of our incorporation), this is an appropriate time to revisit the essentials of online reputation management and look toward the future. As the industry continues to expand, it will divide into niches. There will be an increasing need for specialization within online reputation management services. The more you understand them, the better the choices you can make for your organization – or for yourself. So follow these posts in coming days and weeks to learn what you need to know.
You can also follow us @reputationnews for a bird’s eye view of reputation management issues and resources that impact the highly specialized practice of online reputation management.
