Tag Archives: Shannon Wilkinson

Online reviews, , , , , , , , ,

Commusoft, a U.K.-based software provider, just published a blog series by Linda Formichelli about customer service management. The last post features an interview with our founder and CEO, Shannon Wilkinson. While the article focuses on a particular service industry, the principles of managing reviews apply to all organizations. Here are key takeaways:

“When you discover that a customer has left an online review slamming everything from your products to the color of your trucks, your first instinct is probably to come back at the reviewer with guns blazing. That will make you feel good, but it will also make your company look bad.

“How the owner, marketing manager, and other employees at a field service company handle bad customer reviews can either make the company look even worse—or demonstrate the company’s stellar customer service.

“We talked with Shannon Wilkinson, founder and CEO of Reputation Communications and author of How to Look Better Online, for expert advice on how your field service business can turn negative reviews into raving fans. Try these tips, and bad reviews can become good news for your field service business.

Prepare for the Worst

“Every field service company is bound to get bad online reviews at some point. Competitors and disgruntled employees may leave unverified bad reviews, some customers just like to vent no matter how hard you try to please them…and sometimes, well, you make a mistake and a customer calls you on it. ‘Statistics show that frustrated or unhappy customers are far more likely to publish reviews than satisfied customers,’ says Wilkinson.

“The solution: Set up a feedback system to ask your customers to leave reviews on the sites that are relevant to your business, with the aim of encouraging your happy customers to put a good word in. Wilkinson notes as an example that restaurants that solicit feedback tend to attract a more balanced collection of reviews

“For example, you might send a personal or automated email after every job asking the customer to review your company. Some businesses also offer an incentive for reviews, such as a percentage off the customer’s next service, but be sure to check the review sites first…this practice goes against some sites’ policies.

Go Farther Afield

“Make it a habit to regularly check your company’s reviews on Facebook, Google, and review sites like Yelp, but don’t forget that negative feedback can also hide on other social media platforms, personal blogs, and employee review sites like Glassdoor. If you can’t handle all this tracking solo, look for review management software that will alert you to new reviews.

“Google offers a lot of free help in this area as well: Set up a Google Alerts account to be the first to know when your business is mentioned online, and list your company on Google My Business to easily track and respond to Google reviews.

Look for the Good

“’People are becoming very good about filtering out those reviews that are either too effusive or too biased,’ Wilkinson says. ‘Biased’ reviews are those where the reviewer is overly critical without providing actual details as to why the service they received was bad.

“For reviews that are negative but not biased, keep in mind that these reviews are valuable sources of feedback from your customers. They give you the opportunity not only to improve your services if needed, but also to impress the complaining customer (and everyone who reads their review) with your response.”

Read the complete article: Here’s How to Handle Bad Reviews—And Turn Haters Into Customers

*Related reading:

Employees’ Online Reviews Are Now Important Reading for CEOs

Best Ways to Manage Online Reviews

Naveen Gupta, CEO of Birdeye, on Managing Online Reviews

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , , , ,

Huffington Post has published an interview with Reputation Communications CEO Shannon Wilkinson about personal branding online. These are highlights from Stacey Cohen’s article:

“Personal brands are complex, shaped by our skills, our interests and the content we create, from our tweets to our blog posts.

But at the foundation of any personal brand is a singular – and paramount – trait: our reputations.

Without a positive reputation, no personal brand can flourish. If you’re not viewed as a dependable and trustworthy professional, your skillset, interests and output – no matter how impressive – won’t matter much.

And in today’s digital world, where photos, social media profiles and news stories are immortal, upholding a sterling reputation is more important than ever. One hiccup, whether an awkward photograph, or unforgiving article, can haunt a professional for years.

Few people know the nuances and importance of modern reputation care better than Shannon Wilkinson, a leading expert on online reputation management, or ORM. Wilkinson’s NYC-based firm Reputation Communications serves a suite of international clients and offers services ranging from reputation-building and reputation research to reputation repair. Wilkinson is a familiar byline in the Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column,” a seasoned speaker and regular blogger at her website, You(Online).

I recently caught up with Wilkinson about ORM and polishing and protecting reputations in the age of the Internet.

Wilkinson paints a vivid picture of just how important ORM is in today’s world and shares guidance on how to best navigate this new realm.

First, assess what’s already out there – and resist the belief that you can be invisible online. “The digital age ensures that each of us have an online reputation, whether we want one or not,” Wilkinson explains. If we throw up our hands and surrender, our reputations will be determined by “bots that scrape, index and republish the publicly available information about you,” Wilkinson warns.

Next up: Start creating content that accurately represents, and enhances, your reputation. “Counter-balance third-party content and replace it with new, positive and authentic material,” Wilkinson says. “This is a key ORM strategy.” Ensure the items you do have control over – your LinkedIn profile, your company bio, your blog and your Twitter – carry the right messaging.

There’s lots more to ORM than just this, and mercifully Wilkinson is quick to share her agency’s most popular blog post, “The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs.” It’s a useful inventory of strategies and tactics you can use to start burnishing your online reputation today. If you have a presence online (and remember, everybody does), it’s worth the read.”

Read the article: Online, Your Reputation is Everything.

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , , , , ,

Last week, Dynamic Network Services Inc., a web-technology provider, suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted in some of the top sites on the internet being disrupted, including Twitter, Netflix, PayPal and Spotify. An investigation is ongoing. The Wall Street Journal’s “Crisis of the Week” column asked experts to assess Dyn’s crisis communications response.

Shannon Wilkinson, our CEO, was one. Her take:

Dyn has embraced the most important quality in responding to most every crisis: transparency. It very quickly informed the public about the attack, including with a blog post from its chief strategic officer that conveyed its desire to clearly explain both the attack and its ramifications.

“Dyn communicated through real-time alerts on Twitter and through its ‘status site,’ a platform dedicated to informing the public about site maintenance and ‘any incidents in progress.’ If you were among the many perplexed consumers who couldn’t access their favorite sites on Oct. 21, you could Google ‘Internet down?’ and find Dyn’s messages– as I did–on its status site. For many of us, it was our first introduction to Dyn. And it was a reassuring one.

“The blog post from Dyn’s chief strategy officer, Kyle York, played a vital role. Rather than apologize for the inconveniences the outage may have caused, York focused on educating the American public about the seriousness of the attack and its complex, unsettling causes. In the process he recast Dyn as the protagonist in our collective war against hackers, even as frontline troops protecting liberty. Dyn gets five stars for its exemplary crisis communications.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance section often reports on corporate crises. Its Crisis of the Week column is behind a paid firewall and comes out once weekly. If you are a communications professional and follow crisis management, it is well worth the cost to gain insight from the experts.

Related reading:

Rebuilding a Reputation: Volkswagen’s Long, Winding Road

Carnival’s Triumph Crisis Shows Value of Social Media

Toyota Case Study: A Strong Reputation Is Worth the Expense

LinkedIn Crisis Highlights Big Data Challenges

 

 
 
Social Media, , , , , , ,
Reputation Management in the Elon Musk Twitter Era

Daniel Grant, a business writer for re:sculpt — The International Sculpture Center’s blog — interviewed Shannon Wilkinson, our CEO, about the importance of social media in art marketing. As the art industry expands, social media is an important adjunct to mainstream marketing and PR. So we appreciate the opportunity that ISC has provided to contribute to the growing dialogue about this issue. An excerpt:

Social media culture is a community,” she said. “First and foremost, it is about connecting and sharing. It is not about endless self-promotion, although many people misuse it in that way.”

The first step is building a community of what she called “influencers,” referring to gallery owners, museum staff, grant-making and awards organizations, journalists, critics, collectors and sponsors, as well as other artists – “people who play active roles in making decisions, policies and statements that impact the art world, in particular, the art world that is most relevant to an artist.”

Building that community involves researching the audience that matters to the particular artist. For instance, a sculptor might conduct a hashtag search for “#sculpture,” which will offer a sense of what is currently on Twitter and Instagram in that space. Next, artists should conduct searches for the magazines, writers, institutions and organizations that are most active in supporting their particular type of art, following those that interest them and are relevant to their careers. After that, artists might start examining who those people and institutions follow, following the ones who interests them.”

You can read the full article at this link: Using Social Media to Market your Work. If you are an artist or art gallery and would like to learn more about how our services can help you reach your promotional goals, please contact us here.

Related articles:

Art Marketing Authority Caroll Michels: Interview with an Expert

ArtNews, Art in America & the Digitization of the Art World

 
 
Google, Online reputation management, , , , ,
online reputation maangement

Over 3 billion people worldwide now use the Internet. That number grows each day, making a compelling argument for strategically using the internet to showcase your reputation capital. Online reputation management (ORM) helps people achieve that.

At Reputation Communications, we are often asked questions about how ORM works. Recently Hungry Marketing, a New York City agency, invited our founder and CEO Shannon Wilkinson to provide advice for the entrepreneurs they serve. This is an excerpt from her article.

False advertising has led the public to believe that unwanted Google content can be “suppressed.” Consumers spend a lot of time seeking that result. They are confused or disappointed when they find it is not a viable option.

To change the order of content on search results, you must replace it. To replace one piece of content, you may need ten, twenty or more new content entries. That content must be high-quality. If it doesn’t add value to a brand, it can devalue it.

For that reason, consumers need to be wary of guarantees from providers who assure “suppression.” Typically, they create masses of low-quality content to populate internet “flogs” (fake blogs) and similar types of sites in the hope of lowering unwanted material. Google and other search engines don’t favor that type of material and can penalize such sites. But consumers don’t know that.

Here is the complete article: You, Online: Manage Your Reputation.  If this topic interests you, we also recommend The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs. 

 
 
Social Media, , , , , , , , , ,
Coptics workshop

Law enforcement agencies have traditionally been behind the curve with using digital, social media and reputation management tools in their day-to-day operations. To help police departments become more effective in engaging with a digital media savvy public, three other experts and I have become active presenters in The Hetty Group’s Coptics Program. With the Coptics workshops and consulting program, Florence Chung, Bill Carmody, Matt Horace and I aim to help law enforcement professionals expand their use of the platforms that are helping shape public perception.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article about our new initiative. “Business Offers Blueprint to Improve Law Enforcement Optics,” by Ben DiPietro, is reprinted in full here.

“A group of reputation-management experts has banded together to create a program to help law enforcement agencies better manage their social media engagement and improve their perceptions with people and within communities. The so-called “Coptics” program developed by the Hetty Group draws from best practices employed by large companies that already have seen the value in being active members of social media to tell their stories and address issues that if not handled properly could blow up into big controversies, said Florence Chung, founder of the Hetty Group.

“We believe that if you aren’t telling your story, the world will,” said Ms. Chung. “And the world often doesn’t know the facts.” Shannon Wilkinson, chief executive of reputation-management firm Reputation Communications, said that although many people in law enforcement have stayed away from social media out of fear or because they prefer to stay out of the spotlight, doing so only cedes the conversation to their critics and others who aren’t representing their viewpoints. For law enforcement agencies or companies wanting to get more active in social media, Ms. Wilkinson said they need to ask themselves two questions: “How do we want to be perceived and by what audience? And how are we currently perceived and by whom?”

Bill Carmody, a digital marketing expert and chief executive of the firm Trepoint, said by teaching law enforcement how to be part of the digital conversation, and giving them tools to properly engage their audiences, will allow for departments to get involved in discussions before they go viral. Through better engagement, when incidents do occur, law enforcement will be in a better position to respond in real time because “that’s where the conversation is happening,” he said. “Your brand is being shaped by social media if you’re not shaping it yourself.”

Matt Horace, a former law enforcement official who now serves as a law enforcement analyst on CNN, said whether it’s a law enforcement agency or a big corporation, an organization needs to know how to manage a crisis and the communications surrounding it. And a key part of that is engaging on social media, knowing what’s being said and interacting in a way that is authentic and not in a way that seems disingenuous or that will erode trust. “This can’t be a stunt,” he said.”

If you work in law enforcement and would like to schedule a workshop or consulting session, please visit The Hetty Group. We also welcome support from corporations and philanthropies that would like to underwrite a workshop series in their community.

Left to right: Shannon Wilkinson, Matt Horace, Bill Carmody and Florence Chung lead an August 18, 2016 Coptics workshop at the National Asian Peace Officers Association Conference in New York City. Photo by Leven Bastian/Jolie Photography.

 
 
Online reputation management, , , , ,

“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.

 
 
Crisis Management, , , , , , , ,
Baylor’s Sexual Assault Crisis

Baylor is the oldest continually operating university in Texas.  Chartered in 1845, the private Christian University is a nationally ranked research institution. Now it is embroiled in a crisis: sexual-assault victims, administrators accused of being indifferent to the issue and athletes who reportedly conducted the assaults. Kenneth Starr, a former U.S. Solicitor General, has resigned as chancellor at Baylor as “a matter of conscience.”

Benjamin Wermund, higher education reporter for the Houston Chronicle, has been covering this story since it broke.  He interviewed several communications experts about Baylor’s handling of the crisis.   Reputation Communications’ CEO Shannon Wilkinson recommended more transparency, including participating in the discussion on social media:

The school could do more to go on the offensive online, where the news about the scandal initially broke and where most people are forming — and sharing — their opinions of the situation. It could push its message out more on social media, including via Twitter, where the school has said little about the situation to its more than 68,000 followers. They aren’t addressing the crisis on Twitter, and they need to. They need to have a system to participate in the discussion, otherwise they completely lose control over public perception of how they are managing this.”

An Epic Crisis Facing Higher Education

We have written extensively about the sexual assault crisis at U.S. universities. Here are our most relevant posts, including a recent one about a different type of scandal at UC Davis.

Learning from UC Davis’ Online Reputation Debacle

Sexual Assault Cases Change Colleges’ Reputation Equation

Can Amherst Improve Colleges’ Response to Sexual Assault?

Institutions throughout the U.S. have failed to provide the information and resources that students need to protect themselves from becoming victims of sexual assault on campus…and to appropriately address the crisis when they are.  If you would like to learn more about the issue, we recommend viewing The Hunting Ground, a documentary film about institutional cover-ups of campus sexual assaults. CNN premiered it last year.