Tag Archives: reputation

Internet Legal Issues, , , , , , , , , , ,
reputation management for lawyers

Despite frequent outcries about data breaches affecting millions of Internet users, U.S. citizens continue to have the lowest level of privacy protection in the world. Not surprisingly, the U.S. law governing online content is also outdated.

Our article,  Right2Remove: Bringing the “Right to be Forgotten” to America, highlights the work of an important organization focusing on changing that. The issues it faces are nothing new.

A 2011 ruling in a New York City court of appeals that would still stand today illustrates why the law needs to be updated to reflect current Internet use.

The court dismissed a businessman for filing a suit against a competitor for consistently posting “false and defamatory statements of fact” online that were clearly intended to injure the claimant’s reputation.

The judge noted that the comments about the claimant were “unquestionably offensive and obnoxious,” but held that the defendants were protected under the Communications Decency Act, which shields Web site operators from liability when they publish and edit material that they did not create.

In plain English: nothing could stop the poster from continuing to publish libel that, were it in print, would probably make him the subject of a successful lawsuit.

We Support the Right to Be Forgotten

Situations like the one above influence reputations in a way that is unfair (and in our view, should not be legal). That is why establishing and maintaining a strong online reputation is an asset for individuals and businesses alike. It is also why an update of internet laws is far overdue.

We support the Right to Be Forgotten on Google. Increasing numbers of other concerned Americans are raising their voices to demand that option come to America, too. Why Americans Need And Deserve The Right To Be Forgotten, by security expert and Inc. columnist Joseph Steinberg, presents a compelling reason why it should. With Dan Shefet’s help, it will.

Dan Shefet is a Paris-based attorney who forced Google to remove links to defamatory information about him in 2014. The case made worldwide headlines and led to the Right to be Forgotten law in Europe, which allows citizens to request Google remove links to certain types of personal information about them online. He has since established the Association for Accountability and Internet Democracy (AAID) Its goal is to to make search engines legally responsible for the information they publish. Dan’s goal is to establish a chapter of AAID in the U.S. You can learn more about his views in our interview with him: Dan Shefet: Creator of the Internet’s Ombudsman.

Related reading: An Attorney’s Advice for Removing Negative, Defamatory and Infringing Material from the Internet.

 
 
Reputation Case Study, , , , , , , , , ,

Outdoor apparel brand Patagonia was in the news last spring, and not just for designing a bikini that always stays in place. Business Insider reported that the company is poised to fight the Trump administration’s threat to America’s national monuments. No wonder Patagonia is a role model for reputation-building in the corporate world. 

“We’re watching the Trump administration’s actions very closely and preparing to take every step necessary, including legal action, to defend our most treasured public landscapes from coast to coast,” said company CEO Rose Marcario. According to Business Insider, “The executive order would specifically put 25 national monuments — named protected lands under the 1906 Antiquities Act — under review, in danger of losing their status. A national monument has never had its protected status rescinded before, and it’s unclear if the laws allow such a maneuver.” The move is classic Patagonia, and illustrates why the company enjoys such strong support from its loyal customer base. Its reputation is enviable…and strategically earned.

Five years ago, Yvon Chouinard, the company’s founder, published The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years. Chouinard offers not just a story about how to create a responsible company. It is also a story about creating a company that is known for that responsibility.

A Passion Project Patagonia’s beginnings can be traced back to a California falconry club, where a young Chouinard discovered his love of climbing. Unsatisfied with the equipment available for climbers, he began making his own. He and his new wife Malinda soon ventured into apparel, founding Patagonia in 1972. “The point was not to focus on making money; focus on doing things right, and the profits would come,” according to a 2007 Fortune cover story. That mentality has been a defining part of the company’s image.

Environment First Patagonia became a leader in environmental responsibility by giving it an equal priority to profits—reportedly without sacrificing profits. In 1985 the company began donating one percent of its revenue to environmental organizations, a move that has since inspired more than 1,400 companies to join its 1% For the Planet initiative. It was also one of the first companies to switch to more environmentally friendly organic cotton, despite its higher costs.

Limitations Following accelerated growth spurred by the unintended trendiness of its brand, Patagonia’s limits were revealed when the early 1990s recession hit. Growth skidded to a halt and the company was forced to lay off a fifth of its employees. Rather than yielding to the economic circumstances, however, Chouinard doubled down on his original mission. “I decided the best thing I could do was to get profitable again, live a more examined corporate life and influence other companies to do the same,” he told the Wall Street Journal‘s Seth Stevenson.

Beyond Transparency Since that crisis Patagonia has placed even more emphasis on its environmental agenda. Chouinard started “The Footprint Chronicles,” a soul-searching online project dedicated to “exhaustively cataloging the environmental damage done by his own company,” as the WSJ described it. Taking a stance against consumerism, one holiday season Patagonia even ran a Black Friday ad asking people to buy less of its products. At the same time Chouinard’s perspective has rubbed off on other, larger corporations. Through all of this Patagonia has been consistently reported as profitable, despite its large donation programs, the extra costs it imposes on its supply chain and other activities whose direct effect on the bottom line would seen to be negative. And other companies have seen the value in Patagonia’s approach. The Wall Street Journal detailed how even Walmart turned to Chouinard, seeking his advice and working with Patagonia to form the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which has attracted other top brands.

Hopefully, this is part of a growing trend.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Reputation Communications' online reputation management glossary

Algorithm

The formula search engines use to rank websites and determine whether they merit appearing on page 1 or elsewhere in search results.

Authenticity

The quality of being genuine; a valued quality among bloggers and the larger online community.

Astroturfing

Writing fake comments and reviews.

Branded Content

Content that promotes and cultivates a rapport between a targeted audience and a brand’s products and/or services.

Black Hat SEO

Using unethical methods to attempt to raise the ranking of websites in search engine results.

Content

Information delivered in any medium, whether text, videos, podcasts or images. (When two or more media are juxtaposed it is described as “multimedia content.”)

Content Aggregator

A software or web application which collects, combines and publishes a range of syndicated web content (such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts and video blogs).

Content Farms

Companies which create low-quality Internet content with the goal of having their content rank highly in online searches.

Digital Assets

Online images, multimedia and textual content files.

Domain Squatting (also known as cyber squatting)

Registering or using a domain name with the intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cyber squatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns the trademark contained at an inflated price.

Doxxing

Tracing someone or gathering information about an individual using sources on the Internet, then publishing their private information with malicious intent.

Forum

An online discussion site.

Link

A URL name or description providing an instant connection to a different Web site or section of a Web site. A Web site’s page rank on Google (and other) searches is influenced by the number of links pointing to it (“inbound links”), and the quality of the sites they are linking from.

Linkbait

A marketing technique to increase a website’s popularity by providing content that entices visitors to include a link to the website at their own sites.

Link farms

A website created solely for the purpose of increasing the page rank of other sites with indiscriminate outbound links. Most search engines penalize sites connected to link farms.

Name space

A person or company’s name online.

Online audit

An assessment of a subject’s online image: typically a person, business or organization.

Online communities

Social networks where people communicate online. Also called “virtual communities.”

Online image

A subject’s online reputation. Mainly determined by the content appearing in top results in a Google (or other search engine) search of the subject’s name.

Online monitoring

Real-time monitoring of the information available about a person, business, organization or other topic on the Internet, including on social media.

Online reputation management

Establishing, improving and monitoring the publicly available online information about a business or individual.

Page rank

A continually changing value based on a complex algorithm assigned to a Web site or page to determines its position in a search engines’ results – the higher the page rank, the more likely people will find the web site or page.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Strategically designing a Web site so it gains a higher page rank and consequently attract more new visitors.

SEO-optimized

Website or page that has been designed to be accessible to search engines and improve the chance that the website will be found and ranked by search engines.

Social media

Online communication between people using a variety of platforms, including blogs, forums and Twitter.

Social network

A network of individuals connected through a social media platform such as Facebook.

Sock puppet

An email or social media account set up to publish fake online content.

Transparency

Openness and sincerity in online communications.

Troll

A person who sows discord on the Internet by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.

White Hat SEO

Search engine optimization techniques that involve no deception.

Viral Media

Content that attracts new viewers mainly through word-of-mouth in social networks and possibly result in significant and rapid visibility.

For more in-depth information, read The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQ.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , , ,

Social innovator and technology consultant Rachel Botsman is the leading global authority on the new era of trust. Her name often surfaces during conversations about the reputation economy. She’s an award-winning author, speaker, university lecturer and media commentator. Her specialism is an engaging and intelligent long-view of how technology is transforming human relationships and what this means for life, work and and how we do business.

A recent EUobserver article, Trust is ‘gold’ in digital age, quoted her on this topic. “Many parts of the world do not appreciate that trust is society’s most precious and fragile asset,” she said.

As early as 2012, she observed that we are at the start of the shift from trusting people more than corporations or government. She called for a measure for this new era, “reputation capital,” defining it as the ‘the sum value of your online and offline behaviors across communities and marketplaces.’ That year at the annual TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland,  she posed this question: “If someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say?”

Botsman has spoken of a time where you won’t need to answer with a traditional “elevator pitch,” or even a list of references or credentials. Instead, she sees “a future in which resumes and even credit scores are irrelevant, replaced by an aggregated digital reputation based on our interactions in the collaborative economy.”

“I believe we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the industrial revolution,” Botsman told the TEDGlobal audience in Edinburgh. She has further explored such ideas as the co-author of  What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Pointing to services such as the vacation rental hub AirBnB, errand outsourcer Taskrabbit and community-based learning marketplace Skillshare as examples of how “the old market principles of sharing, swapping and bartering” have been “reinvented for the Facebook age,” Botsman notes that “we have moved from sharing information and music online to transferring trust about how we get things done.”

She forsees an “age where reputation will become your most important asset” and “reputation dashboards” will provide “a real-time stream of who has trusted you when, where and why.” Botsman acknowledges that privacy would be a major concern and a simple algorithm or score wouldn’t suffice, but she still believes the outcome would be worth it: “When we get it right, reputation capital creates a massive positive disruption in who has power, influence and trust. Reputation data will make the resume seem like an archaic relic of the past.”

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , ,

“Content” is text, video, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information placed online.

It is the biggest influence on a webpage’s rank. Your webpage’s rank determines where it shows up in Internet searches of your and your organization’s name.

Ranking also determines the prominence of third-party content about you, which is a large part of the reason it is important to understand where that content is coming from. Understanding those sources will play a key role in deciding how to manage that content—which is the heart of online reputation management.

Generally, the sites with the most daily visitors and views have the highest rankings, and the most prominent content. Top 10 websites include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as major media sites. But there are other factors that influence where a webpage shows up. Even obscure sources can show up in the first page of searches.

Strategically crafted headlines

People often see an article about them – or their brands — from a little-trafficked blog (or some other relatively obscure source) on the first page of a Google search. This can often be the result of the way the headline is written, making the article seem especially relevant to the search terms. The longer the article stays near the top of search results, the harder it is to dislodge.

Tags

If you notice pictures of you showing up prominently on Google, it is because someone has tagged them. A tag is a caption that is added to the metadata of a photograph or to an article, blog post or other piece of text that is published online.

Internet data scraping

Data scraping is how your home address, age, family members’ names and age and satellite pictures of your home end up online. Programs (called ’bots) continually scrape the web for data from publicly available sources like county courthouses, telephone directories and other sites. It is then collected by public databases that package, publish and sell that information.  If you find a lot of references to your address online, that is how it got there.

Aggregated content

Aggregated content means content that is republished from another source. The Internet is full of sites that republish content, especially content that will attract a lot of viewers, which includes celebrity- and VIP-related content. When you see versions of your photographs or other content about you on multiple minor sites (including sites that look junky or low-quality), they have aggregated that content.

Anonymous commentary

It is difficult to have anonymous comments about you removed from an online forum or other platform—but it can be done, especially if the material is clearly defamatory. Increasingly, websites are revising their comment and user policies to prevent libel. (The more obscure and independent a site, the less likely it is that they have such practices in place. See our safe browsing tips below.) If you are the topic of such content, look for their user policy. Often they will not only remove the offensive material when requested to do so, but they will block the user who posted it from their site.

Ultimately, you want to control as much of the online content about you and your organization as possible. The more high profile you are, the harder that is. But with strategic online reputation management, it is not impossible. Content drives Google results. It is now the most influential aspect of restructuring them. We are highly experienced in advising clients on what type of content to employ to reboot their Google results. We are experts in creating it, too. To learn more, please visit our Services page.

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

Popularity does not necessarily follow power. But it isn’t its prominent role in shaping international affairs that earned the United States its middling score in the 2016 Reputation Institute study of the most reputable countries in the world. Ranked at 28th, the U.S. not only lags far behind leaders like Canada and Australia, but also trails some developing countries. Most countries with our ranking are under a dictatorship or in a state of instability. A significant factor in weighing down the U.S.’s reputation is the partisanship that has increasingly dominated its politics.

The link between partisanship and negative perceptions of the U.S. is nothing new. As partisan division grew steadily over the last two decades, almost doubling under George W. Bush and President Obama, the nation’s global standing dropped significantly. Obama’s 2008 win actually gave a boost to the United States’ international reputation, but that gain has been eroded as divisive politics has thrust the 2016 Presidential race into the world’s watchful eye.

A Call for Change

The value of individual voices in changing perceptions should not be discounted. Bill Clinton’s speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention seemed to resonate with a broad desire for political harmony, attracting praise even from Mitt Romney. The “politics of constant conflict” may be effective, Clinton said, but “good politics does not necessarily work in the real world.” If November 2016’s victor can translate Clinton’s words into real-world cooperation and compromise, he or she might be able to break through the gridlock and set the United States on course for a revitalized international reputation.

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , , ,
Internet law

High-profile defense attorney and former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz defends his reputation in this New York Times interview. For followers of reputation management, law and public relations, it is an interesting strategic move: he is telling his side of the story on a public platform.

Mr. Dershowitz’s reputational crisis has been produced by a case against him related to sexual impropriety, which has roots in another sexual impropriety case he defended. He confirms in the Times article that it is his association with that client that has led to this crisis.

Before the digital age, it was far easier to make such allegations “go away” by destroying the credibility and reputation of their source, who is typically younger and has few resources. But this story began years ago and has only gained traction since then—and it will continue to as long as his opponent perseveres. That his opponent is represented by another legal superstar, David Boies, helps ensure that. It is a match-up that experts and laypeople alike will follow closely.

 
 
Reputation Case Study, , , , , , , , ,
Rihanna: Beyond Her Hits, Authenticity

In Vanity Fair’s current cover story on Rihanna, she discusses the chasm between her reality and her reputation. Jay-Z confirms that her authenticity is one of her biggest attractions.  That was our take, too, when we published this in December 2012.

At 24, Rihanna is one of the world’s biggest pop stars. She’s become the most-liked person on Facebook by acting in a way that many celebrities don’t: genuinely.

The combination of authenticity and transparency has earned her recognition ranging from TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” to Forbes’ “Celebrity 100” and “Social Networking Superstars.” “Rihanna’s fans love her all the more for being so brazenly imperfect,” wrote Huffington Post’s Kia Makarechi, whose take rings true in the singer’s candid talk in a recent Vogue profile.

Recent 777 Turbulence

Given her self-proclaimed “Good Girl Gone Bad” reputation, the reports from Rihanna’s recent 777 Tour weren’t that surprising. To promote her new album she invited some lucky fans and more than 150 journalists to jet around on a seven-country, seven-concert jaunt. First-hand accounts offered harrowing tales of what transpired, but they steered clear of blaming Rihanna, instead lamenting the exhausting travel and poor execution of the weeklong trip.

She ended up showing her travel companions the other side of being a global pop icon—it can be incredibly grueling. “It’s impossible to spend time with everybody, and I’m sorry I didn’t,” she told the press as the tour came to an end, later elaborating in an interview with BBC’s Radio 1.

Image counselors might advise that she reward the participants with an all-expenses-paid trip to one of her concerts in Paris or Las Vegas. Or, to make a donation in their names to organizations that support less fortunate fans, like homeless teens. (She already supports many charities.) But the spin control long utilized by other superstars may not be necessary – and isn’t in keeping with her approach to her career.

“…Rihanna, who earned $53 million last year… is the pleasure principle incarnate,” wrote Camille Pigalia last week.

That may explain why.