Reputation management is the latest tech industry buzz word to hit the scene much like SEO over the last few years, but in the last few days we have been given a very good example of why online Reputation Management is vitally important and the impact it can have on your company. On Thursday, someone posted a report to CNN’s IReport that later proved to be fake, that Steve Job’s had a heart attack. Within 2 hours of the report, Apple’s stock price dropped over $10, effectively reducing their market capitalization by over $7 billion.
For those not familiar with Ireport, it is a property of CNN and receives a tremendous amount of traffic on a daily basis and is viewed as a trusted source by many people. The downside is that anyone can post a story to Ireport and the crowd votes the story of to determine the importance. The checks and balances of determining the validity of a story is minimal. So the result is that perception becomes reality. The same is true for most social voting sites like Digg and Reddit where the community votes on the popularity of stories. When no one is personally responsible and anyone is free to write posts without regard for validity, then every company has to be very aggressive in managing their online reputation or could be severely damaged by one upset customer.
Although the Apple situation is an extreme case, it is a valid example of how quickly information spreads on the internet and, truth or not, can have a significant impact on the reputation of your company. Reputation management does not stop at just your company name, but extends to your execs, your board of directors, your customer facing employees, and anyone associated with your company that may have actions or events from their past that could negatively affect people’s opinions about your organization.
So what can you do to handle it:
1) Setup Google Alerts. This is a bare minimum and is definitely all that needs to be done. Google Alerts gives your updates by e-mail of instances when your company name has been mentioned. This service works okay some of the time, but I have found that if you use keywords that overlap or that are too general, then you receive a lot of e-mails that have information that do not pertain to your company. It is a free service and although not perfect, it will give you an idea of what is being said about your company.
2) Hire a company or service to handle this for you. This is a situation where you must not consider how much it costs to hire someone to handle your Reputation Management, but how much it will cost you if your DO NOT handle your reputation management. A good company will not only inform you of what is being said, but will respond to those instances to ensure that your opinion is greater than the original person who posted the comments. This will include writing blog posts to suppress incorrect information in the search engines, responding to commenters in blogs and forums to even out the stories, researching all of the senior people at your company and diligently working to ensure that the information about them represents your company positively, and distributing press releases that put your company on the offensive and not on the defensive.
Online reputation management will become more popular in the near future as people search to find information about people, products, and companies. Are you comfortable with how your company online reputation and are you adequately prepared to respond to negative attacks?
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