The 10 Rules of Reputation Management
Tag Archives: reputation management
How to Manage Your Online Reputation: Our Viewpoint
“Employment Matters” columnist Mindy Stern recently interviewed Reputation Communications’ CEO Shannon Wilkinson about online reputation management. These are highlights of the column:
Why is reputation management important for small business owners? Reputation management is important because most purchasing decisions by consumers are now made after conducting online research. You can’t control what people say about you on the Internet, but you can counterbalance it with compelling, factual information and visuals to tell your story and engage potential clients, customers and journalists. That is what reputation management does.
How is reputation management relevant for job seekers? Reputation management gives you the opportunity to present your best self on the Internet. That is where it is being assessed by potential employers.
What do you consider the most important thing for our readers to know about protecting their online reputation? The average Google page has 10 entries. The more of those you “own,” the more of a protective digital firewall you will create around your online reputation.
Bret Easton Ellis: The Reputation Economy
Bret Easton Ellis has penned an opinion piece about the ascendance of reputation management for the New York Times’ “Turning Point” magazine. “Bret Easton Ellis on Living in the Cult of Likability” claims that reputation management depends on a “blanding” of identity, on “maintaining a reverentially conservative, imminently practical attitude.” But that doesn’t need to be true—the best reputation management does not whitewash or hide valid points of view.
Mr. Ellis has been at the center of a few reputational crises himself. His books have often been controversial (the uproar over American Psycho may still be simmering), so his viewpoint is based on experience. It is certainly worth considering.
Ben Bernanke’s Econoblog
After leaving his post last year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke joined the Brookings Institute and became a senior advisor to the hedge fund Citadel. He has also been blogging, something he was not able to do at the Fed.
As the June 15 issue of Fortune put it: “Newly christened econoblogger Ben Bernanke has been throwing some rhetorical punches on his Brookings Institution site,” including claims that Larry Summers pays insufficient attention to global affairs and criticism of Elizabeth Warren’s call for limits on the Fed’s emergency lending powers.
So far, he has followed the mission he laid out in his first blog post in late March: “To comment on economic and financial issues without my words being put under the microscope by Fed watchers.”
Blogging is an effective brand builder for anyone, but it is especially well suited to Mr. Bernanke at this stage of his public life. His blog provides him with a 24/7 opportunity to weigh in on economic issues and gives him a forum to comment freely without the danger of being misquoted. It provides the media with a steady stream of sound bites as well as relevant reasons to interview him. It is also a strong tool for building an audience for his memoir, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath, which is scheduled to come out in October.
Bernanke’s blogging frequency varies from three posts a week to one every couple of weeks. He tweets whenever a new blog is published (his tweet announcing the launch of his blog was retweeted 946 times). With 44,300 Twitter followers, he’s ahead of Larry Summers (who has 40,330) but behind Elizabeth Warren (who has 245,747).
Our Exclusive New Online Reputation Management Guide
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.
Yelp’s Bully Battle
Billion Dollar Bully is a documentary film about Yelp that “examines the claims by business owners of extortion, review manipulation and review fabrication.”
That is the description posted on the filmmakers’s Kickstarter page, through which they are trying to raise the funds needed to finish the film.
We have discussed the ways in which Yelp and similar review sites can imperil your business’s reputation, and we’ve had quite a bit to say about how to protect against that possibility (essentially, through online reputation management). But Yelp can also be an extraordinary tool for a young business. Yelp is among the highest-ranked websites by search engines. So by creating a Yelp profile, a business immediately has a prominent presence online.
Yelp is an important component of online reputation management. That doesn’t mean it is immune to experiencing a reputation crisis itself: Shares of Yelp’s stock fell 4.7% after the release of the documentary’s trailer.
The Darker Side of PR
The BBC documentary Reinventing the Royals was finally broadcast last night, after an earlier air date was cancelled. The controversy surrounding the documentary is not surprising, considering some of the unpleasant public relations approaches it describes. But that is one side of the PR industry that is deeply entrenched. The consultant described as Prince Charles’ consigliere is far from the first to use such tactics.
Naveen Gupta, CEO of Birdeye, on Managing Online Reviews
Customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business) are a growing concern for most companies. They often have little choice whether they are listed on these sites. Then one day a review appears at the top of a Google search of their company’s name. And it stays there, whether it is authentic, verifiable or anonymous.
In response, services have emerged that help companies track and manage their online reviews. They offer tools to monitor reviews, multiple ways to attract positive feedback from customers and the ability to publish those positive reviews on several websites.
Birdeye is one such company offering these services. We interviewed co-founding CEO Naveen Gupta, a Silicon Valley veteran, on the state of the industry.
How many review sites now exist online? We track more than 100 review sites. I believe there are thousands, but only about 100 are influential. Of those, 50 or so are applicable to every type of business. The rest are in vertical markets — niche sites dedicated to specific industries like dentistry, law or finance.
Which do you consider the most important? Tier 1 directories like Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have the most traffic. In Tier 2 are the verticals – sites devoted to specific industries. Avvo, a site that ranks and reviews attorneys, is in this tier. Tier III sites are general business listings such as Yellow Pages, Insider Pages and Super Pages.
What do you consider the most common misunderstanding of business owners about online reviews?
What we see across all verticals is that businesses small and large have been caught unaware of customer feedback because of the proliferation of review sites. As a result, they don’t know which sites to participate on. Depending on your type of market, the importance of the sites differ. Often, business owners don’t know where, and when, their reviews have appeared.
Authenticity of reviews is a concern. Many sites are not good at validating the identity of users. Or the customer’s review does not include the full issue – just their take on it.
Remediation is another big issue we see. Most review sites are not remediation vehicles. They are just one-way venting platforms. Studies show that happy customers generally don’t write reviews – only the unhappy ones do. Unless business owners actively encourage their feedback, satisfied customers don’t provide it. Proactive services enabling business owners to attract them have become necessary to succeed in this environment.
Review sites are often accused of manipulating results so that only negative reviews show up unless businesses pay a fee to the company. What advice do you give to business owners in such situations?
Not every business owner feels they have the time or resources to invest in managing their online reviews. Yet, your brand is your #1 asset. Don’t outsource it. Pay attention. Rather than focus on ratings, invite and focus on the feedback from your customers. Then address it. Use tools to automate the process. It’s about providing great service, correcting any problems and turning your customers into your advocates.
Larger enterprises and franchises are more concerned with monitoring reviews across the spectrum, comparing customer satisfaction across locations or regions, then feeding the data into their systems so they can make customer management adjustments.
There are new tools to help business owners manage all of this. It has become nearly impossible to handle manually. Fortunately, that is now unnecessary.
Naveen Gupta has had senior executive roles at RingCentral, Monster, Yahoo and UTStarcom. He studied in the Executive Education program at Harvard Business School; has an MBA, Finance from NYU Stern & London Business School; and a B.S.in Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani.
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts whose work relates to online reputation management.