Tag Archives: reputation

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Reputation Communications' online reputation management glossary

Online Reputation Glossary: AI Update

These are the terms that shape how people and organizations appear online today, from search rankings and social media to the AI platforms that now answer the question “Who is this person?”

Glossary A–Z

AI Hallucination. When an AI platform presents false or invented information as fact, such as a fabricated quote, lawsuit, or job title attributed to a real person.

AI Overviews. AI-generated summaries that Google displays above traditional search results, drawn from several websites at once. What they say about a person or company may be the first, and only, thing a searcher reads.

Algorithm. The set of rules a platform uses to decide what to show and in what order. Search engines use algorithms to rank results, social media platforms use them to curate feeds, and AI platforms use them to choose which sources to draw on.

Answer Engine. An AI tool, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot, that responds to questions with a written answer rather than a list of links.

Astroturfing. Creating the false impression of grassroots support or opposition through fake reviews, comments, posts or accounts. It is increasingly done at scale with AI-generated content. In the U.S., an FTC rule finalized in 2024 bans buying or selling fake reviews.

Authenticity. The quality of being genuine. Audiences, journalists and online communities value content that is consistent, verifiable and clearly attributable to its real author.

Black Hat SEO. Manipulative tactics that violate search engines’ guidelines in order to boost rankings. Examples include link farms (networks of sites created only to link to one another), keyword stuffing, hidden text and paid link schemes. Search engines penalize sites caught using them, often by demoting or removing them from results.

Brand SERP. The search engine results page that appears when someone searches your name or your organization’s name. It is often your first impression, which is why online reputation management focuses on what appears on page one.

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

Cheapfake. Manipulated media made with simple editing rather than AI, such as slowing down a video, cropping a photo, or splicing audio out of context.

Content. Information delivered in any medium, whether text, video, podcasts or images. When two or more media are combined, it is described as “multimedia content.”

Content Aggregator. A platform or app that collects and republishes content from many sources, such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts and videos. AI answer engines act as a new kind of aggregator, summarizing sources rather than listing them.

Content Credentials. Embedded information that records where a piece of digital content came from and how it was edited. Also called content provenance, it helps verify authenticity in an era of synthetic media.

Content Farms. Operations that mass-produce low-quality content designed to rank highly in search results. Many now use AI to generate thousands of pages, sometimes including inaccurate information about real people.

Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior. Networks of fake or linked accounts working together to mislead audiences about who is behind a message or how widely it is supported.

Data Broker. A company that collects personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, relatives and property records, from public and commercial sources and sells it.

Deepfake. AI-generated or AI-altered video, audio or images that realistically depict a person saying or doing something they never did.

Defamation. A false statement presented as fact, communicated to others, that harms the reputation of a person or organization. Written or published defamation is libel; spoken defamation is slander. Opinions and substantially true statements generally are not defamatory.

Digital Assets. The online content a person or organization owns and controls, such as websites, bios, images, videos and articles, which can be used to shape their online presence. The term is also used for cryptocurrency, which is a different meaning.

Digital Footprint. The total trail of information about a person online, including both content they created and content others have published about them.

Disinformation. False information spread deliberately to deceive. See also Misinformation.

Domain Squatting. Also known as cybersquatting. Registering or using a domain name to profit from the goodwill of someone else’s name or trademark, often by offering to sell it to the rightful owner at an inflated price.

Doxxing. Gathering information about an individual from online sources, then publishing their private information with malicious intent.

E-E-A-T. Short for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google’s search quality guidelines use to assess content. Strong E-E-A-T signals help credible content perform well in search.

Entity. A person, company, place or concept that search engines and AI platforms recognize as a distinct “thing” with associated facts, rather than just a string of keywords.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Shaping online content so that AI platforms find it, trust it and cite it accurately when answering questions. Also called answer engine optimization (AEO).

Knowledge Panel. The information box Google displays beside search results for well-known people and organizations. It draws on sources such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and official websites.

Large Language Model (LLM). The type of AI system behind chatbots like ChatGPT, trained on vast amounts of text to generate human-like responses.

Link. A clickable connection from one web page to another. The number and quality of links pointing to a page (“inbound links” or “backlinks”) is one of many signals search engines use to rank it.

Misinformation. False information shared without intent to mislead. See also Disinformation.

Online Audit. An assessment of how a person or organization appears online, across search results, social media, news, review sites and AI answer engines.

Online Communities. Online spaces where people with shared interests hold discussions, including forums, Reddit communities, Discord servers, Facebook groups and comment sections. Also called “virtual communities.” Their discussions are often surfaced by search engines and cited by AI platforms.

Online Monitoring. Real-time tracking of the information available about a person, business or topic across the Internet, including social media, news, review sites and AI-generated answers.

Online Reputation Management (ORM). Establishing, improving, monitoring and protecting the publicly available information about a person or organization, in search results, on social media and in the answers AI platforms generate.

Review Gating. Soliciting reviews only from customers expected to leave positive ones. The FTC has warned that the practice can be deceptive.

Right of Publicity. The legal right to control commercial use of your name, image and likeness, and in some jurisdictions your voice.

Right to Be Forgotten. A legal right, recognized in the European Union and some other jurisdictions but not broadly in the U.S., to request the removal of certain outdated or irrelevant personal information from search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Improving a website or page so search engines can find, understand and rank it, attracting more visitors. See also White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO and Generative Engine Optimization.

Section 230. The U.S. law, part of the Communications Decency Act, that generally shields websites and platforms from liability for content posted by their users.

Sentiment Analysis. Software that classifies online mentions as positive, negative or neutral, used to monitor reputation at scale.

Social Media. Platforms where people create, share and interact with content, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, YouTube and Reddit. A person’s connections on these platforms form their social network.

Sock Puppet. A fake online identity, such as an email, social media, review or forum account, used to praise oneself, attack others, or create the illusion of independent support. See also Astroturfing.

Synthetic Identity. A fabricated persona built from a mix of real and invented details, used for fraud or impersonation.

Synthetic Media. Any image, video, audio or text generated or substantially altered by AI. Deepfakes and voice clones are types of synthetic media.

Training Data. The text, images and other material used to build an AI model. Information about you in that data can shape what AI platforms “know” about you.

Transparency. Openness and honesty in online communications, including disclosing who is behind content and any paid relationships.

Troll. A person who sows discord online by posting inflammatory, provocative or off-topic messages.

Viral Content. Content that spreads rapidly as people share it across social networks and messaging apps, gaining wide visibility within hours or days. Virality can help or harm a reputation, and is difficult to reverse.

Voice Cloning. Using AI to replicate a person’s voice from short audio samples. It is increasingly used in executive impersonation and wire-fraud schemes.

White Hat SEO. Search engine optimization that follows search engines’ guidelines and relies on quality content and legitimate techniques rather than deception.

Zero-Click Search. A search in which the user gets an answer directly on the results page, from a snippet, Knowledge Panel or AI Overview, without clicking through to any website.

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

 
 
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.

 
 
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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.

 
 
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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.

 
 
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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.

 
 
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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.