All of a sudden I’m hearing lots of people talking about “reputation management” and “online reputation management”. What the heck are they talking about and how does it different from what we’ve all been doing, trying to put our best foot forward in the digital universe?
You’re right that reputation management seems to have become the new black. Actually, I don’t know what “the new black” means, but I hear that all the time too, as in “blue is the new black”, so it must be trendy to say that. 🙂
Anyway, as far as I can glean, “reputation management” refers to exactly what you say, of putting your best foot forward in the digital world. The issue is really what do people find when they search for you on Google, or Facebook or Flickr, or any other social network or online venue.
It’s nuanced too because if your name is, say “Dave Taylor”, but you sometimes write online as “Danny Danger” and somewhere indicate that the latter is a pen name for Dave Taylor, then the dots can be connected and you need to worry about not only what your own name reveals, but what your pseudonyms reveal too.
This is really a significant issue for people just graduating college too. It might seem fun at the time to have a blog entry on your MySpace account about how you and your buddies crashed a sorority party and slipped some drugs into their water supply, but when you’re trying to get a job two years later with a reputable company like Accenture or Boeing, you’ve now got a significant digital liability you need to overcome.
Worse, imagine that you’re a popular industry figure (or company!) and in addition to your fans, you also have quite a cadre of detractors. You know, the ones that register the “sucks.com” domain (like “walmartsucks.com” or “dellsucks.com”). Further, imagine that when someone searches for you (or Walmart or Dell) that these detractor sites come up ahead of your own in Google. That’s a very serious problem and one that isn’t trivially solved.
You can’t sue them because of freedom of speech, parody laws, offshore hosting, etc. Even if you could, it’s probably not a smart approach anyway. Instead, what you want to do is virtually stuff the ballot box and ensure that the top matches are positive, are information that you control. That’s really reputation management at the topmost level.
How do you get your own material to the top of the heap? By producing good quality original content that other people find sufficiently valuable that they link to it and thereby cast online votes towards its value. That’s how I’m ahead of pro wrestling star Dave Taylor, professional trombone player Dave Taylor, game programmer Dave Taylor and on and on. It’s a popular name, but if you Google my name, I’m the top two or three results and have been for years.
As with any other corner of the industry, there are now books out on reputation management, including Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations and Corporate Communications by John Doorley and Helio Fred Garcia, New Strategies for Reputation Management: Gaining Control of Issues, Crises & Corporate Social Responsibility by Andrew Griffin, Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness by Gary Davies, Reputation Management by Gerry Griffin, Radically Transparent by my friend Andy Beal and Judy Strauss and, of course, a title that has an enumeration too: The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating, Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset by Ronald J. Alsop and Ron Alsop.
To round this discussion out, I asked some of my Twitter friends (find me on Twitter) to define reputation management and here’s what they came up with:
“It’s all about tracking actions and the opinions of others about a particular person/company then working out a reaction or plan to work with these actions and/or what is being said about the company/person. Done correctly reputation management can be an extremely powerful tool in today’s day and age.” — Jeff Ledoux
“Reputation management… an oxymoron; you can monitor your online rep, but can you really “manage” it? Or, what Wikipedia said.” — Paul Chaney
“Keeping tabs on the media to make sure what you want people to say about you is what people are saying about you ;)” — Owen Cutajar
“Reputation management is realizing that the perceived value of your brand is defined by your stakeholders and therefore requires your constant monitoring and participation in their conversations. How do you implement it? Judy Strauss and I spent months writing Radically Transparent in an effort to provide a blueprint for it.” — Andy Beal
“Maintaining & defending a consistent message & style across all social networking and traditional web sites.” — Bob Rudis
One more link: SuretyMail, which is all about email reputation management. Check it out if you do lots of mailing to customers.
So there ya go. I hope that helps you understand what reputation management is all about in the digital age. Boiled down to its essence, it’s “make sure Google likes you”. 🙂
I have been hearing for a long time, but never dug it seriously till now. But now I know it’s importance in the online world. Great article.You are right, I think now to get a decent online presence, all our efforts go in satisfying the Big G or Google 🙂
Preservation of anonymous freedom of expression is essential for a civil and transparent society, and protection for anonymous whistleblowers encourages truth and equity in government and industry. Free speech may also be ill-used for malicious internet libel attacks. A declaration that damages somebody who is untainted must by no means be tolerated, the expense is inordinate.
Still, fabricated assertions & libelous blogs are oftentimes distributed by cloaked jerks. They take joy in tormenting others; they’re in reality driven by the pain they inflict; the victim’s anguish drives them. Typical people like most of the readers of this story can’t imagine how these people think.
This distressing social concern has become out of control within the past decade in the form of anonymous online e-slander. In internet libel law suits in which judges have ordered that anonymous forum posters need to be revealed to the libel victim, such orders are repeatedly a cause of outrage for a trivial yet enthusiastic collection of zealous activists that suggest that freedom of expression should be unconditional and a utterer shouldn’t be held accountable for his/her words, irrespective to the truth or falsity of the assertions. Some believe that should these same vocal groups were to observe the devastation of a Google bomb and the emotional, physical, vocational, and social wellness of themselves or their loved ones; they wouldn’t be so boisterous in their opposition.
Imagine a farmer who has had all of his or her livestock destroyed and fences and crops burned-over by a vandal; the devastating result on his income is extensive. In comparison, a consultant, artist, therapist, banker, or professional who depends on his or her good repute to obtain new clients, and hold on to current clientele, could be as completely destroyed as the farmer depicted above as a consequence of an effective , focused cyber denigration attack. The distinction being that the public, law enforcement, the courts and jurors can more easily relate to the significance of the farmer’s catastrophe.
A natural attribute of anonymous online defamation is that it is generally less credible if critically assessed by shrewd and objective observers. Nonetheless, there is a new dynamic with the issue of malignant and anonymous internet authors. Although the assertions could be seen as not credible, when the victim is being considered for employment, contract applications, Boy Scout leadership (or dating), then the person conducting the due diligence will probably factor in the likely public relations hazards associated with engaging the target. Although the prospective employer can probably see beyond the vitriol, the decision maker will probably consider what their customers and partners will imagine if less sophisticated and open-minded.
Rexxfield
We should think about what J.F Kennedy said in the early 60s: “The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society”, this applies as much to secret and conniving cyber libelers as to the elite networks to which he referred.
You hear about it more and more all the time about how employers will screen their potential employees by going online and seeing if these people have “not so flattering” pictures or content about themselves on various websites. In this day and age, we need to think twice about what we put online. Great read, thanks!
Awesome advice, thank you! I’ll revise the article appropriately. Proof positive that you CAN learn something new everyday!
You see the results of reputation management quite often in the Google SERPS. It’s not even that hard to do. Website or product owners don’t like the press they are getting, so they game the first couple pages using user-generated content sites such as social bookmarking sites.
Many social bookmarking sites will rank extremely well in a matter of hours or days for whatever you will feed them. Since new such sites are popping up every day it seems, they will continue to be gamed in this way.
My personal opinion is they mess up the search results really bad, and that Google will hopefully de-value social bookmarking sites importance in the overall scheme of things.
Dave,
First of all, you came up behind the trombone whiz in Yahoo’s search tonight. But that’s not the point.
I’ve actually been tracking the reputation space now since 2003 / 2004, and actually started a company with Art Brock that provided tools and strategy for what we then called targeted currencies, and now think of as reputation systems.
What I mean by that is what you talked about: the collection of digital artifacts that you create, and the collective representation of them. Until OpenID and OpenSocial launched, it was pretty difficult to track one’s activities across multiple platforms. But now, companies like Lijit, Rapleaf and others are starting to provide services that work across your different accounts to provide access to everything you have written / posted / done / admitted ;).
The points about the frat party photos and manipulating corporate identity are well taken, but I think more in the forward-looking sense. How can you participate in your community in such a way that has the most positive impact on your reputation? How closely is your image connected to your impact? How does your standing in one community translate into another? When and where does a strong reputation result in improved opportunities or other benefits?
Best,
-gb
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Thanks for the mention Dave. Don’t quite agree with your last line. The reason I used “the media” in my definition rather than just “Google” is that reputation management is much wider than just the online sense .. though we techies tend to forget that sometimes 😉
Or one could just have an unusual name.
Google on “Curt Monash”, without the quotes. I guarantee you’ll get bored before you find a hit that isn’t about me. The last time I checked, I was the top 250 or so.
And only about 3 of them were negative. 🙂
CAM