The Wall Street Journal posted an article online today about reputation management and the negative impact of certain unrecommended tactics. Unfortunately, the WSJ journalist, Andrew Lavallee, didn’t take the time to locate and/or cover a successful reputation management agency. Ironically, reputation management - the industry - gets the shaft.
The difference between advisable practices and inadvisable practices can easily be summed up in one word: intent. I had this exact same conversation with a client yesterday. When someone defames your reputation online, you face the choice between “attack and defend” in more ways than one. When dealing with online defamation of character, the rule of thumb is to respect freedom of speech. Companies like Reputation Defender make the mistake of contacting the blogs, websites, and forums responsible for allowing negative comments to be made and they politely request removal. If the party refuses, the language becomes decidedly less polite and friendly.
The problem is that a service is charging customers for something it cannot guarantee. Reputation Defender will try to persuade these webmasters and content managers to withdraw ugly content, but it is at the sole discretion of the owner. Sometimes the owner or person in charge will comply out of sympathy. Other times, the requests for content removal evoke other emotions, and the owner will post additional inflammatory remarks or actually post the requests for removal in an attempt to mock the parties involved.
Two lessons must be learned from this WSJ article:
- Reputation Defender only serves individuals - NOT companies. They are not equipped for professional corporate reputation management and are therefore a bad example to look to as a corporate professional when determining the need or validity of the reputation management industry
- Promoting positive content and addressing negative statements online is a more effective and worthwhile pursuit for a corporate reputation management company
Sure, you might somehow have an unwanted photo on someone else’s MySpace or Flickr account. Sure, something said or exposed may affect a child’s ability to get into private schools or colleges. But this is a far cry from the realm of corporate reptuation management. Even when dealing with the individual executives themselves, this simple manner of attempting to “destroy” negative content is unrealistic and carries the potential of making a bad situation worse.
Ineffective reputation management practices can harm the business image of a credit card. A good example to follow the suit is amex credit card that takes its public image as seriously as it does new product development. Certain business credit card offers come with enhanced features and premium service level for a charge in addition to the credit card fee. The same applies, at a relatively high cost, to the bad credit credit cards.
Organic search engine optimization is a power tool in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. I have seen SEO alone do wonders to the contribution of the search reptuation management. 90+% of all searchers never pass page one in their searches. Dominate that real estate, and 90% of your reputation problems are history. Then and only then should you consider the possibility of requesting content removal. Dominate search first. That way, even a negative response won’t crush your ORM efforts.
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