News - Reputation Management news & updates
Business helps companies keep up their e-reputations
Canwest News Service
Wed Mar 31 2010
Byline: Jason Magder
Dateline: MONTREAL
Source: Canwest News Service
MONTREAL - When Dave Carroll got angry with customer service at United Airlines, he didn't write a letter, he penned a song.
The country singer from Nova Scotia posted a video version of his song on You Tube, and days later, millions had seen United Breaks Guitars. With each YouTube hit, (now more than eight million) the reputation of United Airlines also took a hit. Carroll shot to fame, and was interviewed on CNN and CBS. Thousands of people rallied behind him and set up a group on Facebook demanding the airline apologize.
United eventually issued a public statement saying it will improve its baggage-handling service and gave Carroll compensation for his broken guitar, which a baggage handler had thrown when unloading it from a plane.
Aside from being an embarrassment for United, the incident illustrates the growing influence of individual consumers who now have the power to broadcast their discontent on social networking sites and potentially reach thousands of people in an instant.
It's for that reason that e-reputation - a new buzz word in the marketing industry - is becoming a paramount part of any company's business strategy.
Now directory companies like Yellow Pages, WebLocal.ca, and Canpages are hoping to cash in on this trend, as they offer their customers ways to manage their e-reputations.
Such services are in huge demand said Mitch Joel, president of the digital marketing company Twist Image.
"More people are paying attention (to what's being said about them online) than you might think, and they're innovating their business models based on what they're hearing and seeing," Joel said.
"As a guy who owns a digital marketing agency, more and more of my clients are telling me: 'We need to understand what people are saying and we need to have a strategy around this whole social media thing'." Joel said most small companies don't have the time or resources to monitor what's being said about them, so what directory companies are offering is "manna from heaven." WebLocal. ca, a Montreal-based company owned by Transcontinental Inc., was the first to launch what it calls a reputation management service earlier this month. It uses advanced web crawling software to monitor Twitter messages, or Facebook fan groups.
Companies that list with Weblocal.ca will get reports of what people are saying on social networking sites, and review sites. They will also see how they're listed on other directory sites, and the service will highlight potential mistakes in a listing, like a wrong address or phone number. Weblocal. ca also has reviews on its site, and allows companies to respond to reviews that are listed there.
"The number of social networking sites and review sites are multiplying and people have trouble staying aware of everything that's being said about them," said Andrei Uglar, the general manager of Weblocal.ca. "It's almost a full-time job." Weblocal.ca, which was founded in November 2008, is a relatively small player in the field of business directories, so Uglar said it was crucial for the company to be first with this technology.
Montreal-based Yellow Pages and Vancouver-based Canpages are working on similar reputation-management systems that will be available later this year.
For now, both companies have a similar goal: to become a one-stop shop for business listings and reliable reviews about those businesses, using social networking tools.
Joel said online reviews have become powerful aides for shoppers; surveys show about 80 per cent of people do research online before buying any product.
"If you look at one of the biggest shifts in online e-commerce, it is peer reviews," Joel said. "Suddenly, you have companies that are serving up literally billions of these reviews. Sites like Amazon are becoming the most trusted places to purchase something, because you don't just hear from the company selling the product, you hear from real people.
"If (directory companies) can take this and bring it down to the local level, that's going to be the silver bullet, I think." That's the dream for directory companies: to be integrated into everyone's social network, so someone searching for a business - from a plumber to a restaurant - can instantly see if their friends used the service and what they thought.
To achieve that, Canpages recently bought GigPark, a social networking site based around recommendations of businesses, and is incorporating GigPark reviews into local searches. Yellow Pages recently purchased the dining review site restaurantica.com. The company also allows Facebook members to post reviews of products and then share those reviews among friends.
It also, on Tuesday, announced that it was buying Canpages in part because of that company's online reach.
"We can see a world where you can start filtering search results through the preferences of your friends," said Nicolas Gaudreau, vice-president of digital media for Yellow Pages Group. "If you can see on our site whether you have friends who have used that service, you're more likely to trust that merchant if your friends like it." For listing companies, getting into social networking isn't just a good strategy, it could become key to their survival, some analysts believe.
They say sites like Facebook and Twitter represent a real threat to listing companies, because word of mouth is always more powerful than a company's advertisements.
Social media makes word-of-mouth scalable, and there is a danger that sites like Facebook and Twitter could move in on the ground once occupied solely by directory companies.
Listing companies also face a threat from Google, as more people look to the Internet giant as a default site for online advertising.
"It used to be that if you were a small company, you'd have to list on Yellow Pages," said Animesh (who goes by one name), an assistant professor of information systems at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management. "Now, you can buy these ad words on Google, and it has a huge reach." He said most people looking for restaurants and businesses tend to start their searches in a search engine like Google, so directory companies must find a way to add value to their searches.
Joel said the shift toward online reputation management ultimately will make consumers more powerful, as companies are now working harder to respond to perceived problems reported online.
Carroll agrees. After rocketing to You Tube fame, he created a consumer advocacy website called Right Side of Right.
"One of the key things I have learned from my United Breaks Guitars experience is that the voice of one person is no longer 'statistically insignificant'," Carroll writes on his site. "And that collectively, we can improve the world one experience at a time."
Calling In Pros to Refine Your Google Image
By Susan Kinzie and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, July 2, 2007; A01
At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings.
Sue Scheff is destroying lives. She is a con. She takes kickbacks. She is the biggest fraud there ever was.
The stream of negative comments began in 2002 after a woman who had sought advice from Scheff turned on her. The postings appeared on PTA Web sites in Florida, where Scheff lives. On bulletin boards and online forums. There were even YouTube videos threatening her.
She sued for defamation and won an $11.3 million verdict, but the attacks only got worse. In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression.
“They created Sue-Scheff.net,” she said. “They created SueScheff.net. They created SueScheff.org. . . . They created my MySpace account, for God’s sake. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.”
Google’s ubiquity as a research tool has given rise to a new industry: online identity management. The proliferation of blogs and Web sites can allow angry clients, jealous lovers or ruthless competitors to define a person’s identity. Whether true or not, their words can have far-reaching effects.
Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don’t promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.
Still, Google is continually refining its search methods, which means that today’s fix may not work tomorrow.
“This is a game that nobody can completely win,” said Chris Dellarocas, a University of Maryland information systems professor.
Dodging Mudballs
The e-mails from friends started showing up three years ago in the Washington lobbyist’s in-basket: Have you seen this?
Over decades in the capital, she had developed a thick skin. But after she took on a foreign regime as a client, an online magazine bashed her. The story was factual, but the tone nasty. Then a blogger wrote that she slept with someone to get a big contract. A political blog posted an e-mail she had written about secret campaign strategy. Truth mixed with rumor. Rumor mixed with lies.
Concerned friends sent her the links. Potential clients would say they had read about her on the Web.
Like Scheff, she realized that the items that made her cringe came up high on the Google results page and stayed there, month after month. Her firm depended on her reputation. The lobbyist would speak only on condition of anonymity because she did not want the attacks to resume.
“There’s no policing, no rules, no standards,” she said. Bloggers are “cowboys,” she said. “It’s the wild, wild West.”
Then one day she heard a talk by Nino Kader, founder of International Reputation Management (IRM) in Washington. His new company, he said, could reshape a person’s online image.
She signed up.
IRM aims to get lots of information out there about clients, in various places, so that a search gives a more complete and nuanced profile of who they are. Kader started with a printout of the top 100 hits on a Google search and went through them one by one, asking whether individual results — such as her campaign contributions — were good, bad or neutral.
He asked what she wanted the world to know about her. Then he started digging for good things, like an op-ed piece she had written and television interviews she had given that he could post on YouTube. He pitched stories about her to various publications. And he created links from popular sites to those online stories to entice the search engine.
Now her firm’s Web site is the first result and other good ones follow.
Still, a story she hates remains on the first page.
“I’m in the early stages,” she said. “I’ve already seen progress.”
Companies like IRM try to outthink Google. Search engines comb the Web with complex and ever-shifting algorithms, evaluating relevance and authority by looking at many factors: Is this a government Web site? How many people have linked to it? And so on.
The point is, said ReputationDefender founder Michael Fertik, “Google’s not in business to give you the truth, it’s in business to give what you think is relevant.”
The goal is to get Google and other search engines to seize on relevant sites that contain positive information on their clients and to downplay the rest.
Google does not object in principle to people adding positive content to outrank the negative. But a spokeswoman said in an e-mail, “if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it.”
Some companies create promotional Web pages for their clients with coding that makes them appealing to Google or create blog pages linking to the client’s own site, ensuring they’ll rise to the top.
Image Makeover
Geoffrey VanderPal knew politics was a nasty game, but the candidate for Nevada state treasurer wasn’t prepared for the blog attacks. Supporters of his opponent posted charge after charge. He briefly considered suing.
But many of his tormentors were anonymous. And U.S. courts have generally protected Web site hosts from civil actions such as defamation, though that may be changing. Besides, he knew as a public figure he’d have a higher burden to prove libel.
When VanderPal lost the Democratic primary last August, he returned to private life as a financial planner. But the blog postings lived on, prominently, at the top of the Google results page. Potential clients avoided him.
He wanted to suppress the negative information about him, both true and false, so he turned to ReputationDefender.
The firm at first tried a low-tech approach: a polite request to a blogger to remove a post about his personal finances. But the blogger declined, saying the item was a matter of public record. Asking politely has backfired in a small number of cases, Fertik said, with Webmasters sometimes posting and mocking the requests.
So Fertik’s team, which works from a Silicon Valley office, offered VanderPal its premium service, using various techniques to promote VanderPal’s own site and suppress the blogs. That service now starts at $10,000.
Within weeks, VanderPal began to see “a remarkable difference.” Though a few nasty comments are still up there, the first three pages are mostly clean.
“Everything’s wrapped up in your reputation,” said VanderPal, 34. “If you don’t have that, you don’t have much.”
The reputation firms won’t take on everyone. Fertik says ReputationDefender won’t work with clients who want to suppress violent crimes, for example.
The clients the firms accept are varied: a real estate mogul wanting to move past a decade-old transgression, a prominent academic falsely accused of murder, a hedge fund manager who doesn’t like seeing his old New York Times wedding announcement on Google years after he divorced and remarried, a college student who regretted once dressing up as a prostitute at a Halloween party.
Then there was the businessman who paid a Securities and Exchange Commission fine a few years ago.
“Does a person in this situation have a chance to start again?” Fertik asked. “Should this be the first or second thing that shows up on the Internet? Is it fair?”
ReputationDefender decided to work with him.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company
A professional presence online; Reputation management has become important for job seekers
National Post
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Page: WK5
Section: FP Working
Byline: Bridget Carey
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
Miguel Merino’s online resume has the usual rundown of work experience and education.
But the University of Miami senior music performance major takes it a step further by letting visitors listen to his tracks, read critics’ reviews, see a list of upcoming gigs and watch videos of his performances.
“It’s the first time I’ve had my own Web site that I’ve put some work into,” Mr. Merino said. And it’s worth the US$20 a month as a personal promotion tool, he said: “It’s super important.”
Mr. Merino was pushed to create the site, migimusic.com, because of a class assignment. But multimedia resumes work for more careers than those in the performing arts.
Recruiters say having a professional online presence is becoming more crucial. Vital bits of information on candidates are found through Internet searches as the market shifts to passive recruitment, and Google searches as background checks have become common in the hiring process.
Paper and electronic resumes are not extinct, but they are only the beginning.
Getting a job offer may depend on social network profiles, personal Web sites, blogs and YouTube videos. It’s about your online footprint and the management of your personal brand.
Joe Laratro, president-elect of South Florida Interactive Marketing Association, has been hearing the term “reputation management” tossed around recently in marketing circles.
Do you know what comes up when you do a Google search on your name? Reputation management is getting the links you want people to see to show up on top.
And if you think bosses aren’t searching for information about you, think again.
A November, 2007, survey by career media company Vault reports that 44% of employers are logging on to sites like MySpace and Facebook to examine the profiles of job candidates, and 39% have looked up the profile of a current employee.
“There’s no doubt that myself and my team certainly scour the Internet for the past experiences of an individual,” said Dan Alpert, a manager at the digital marketing services firm Avenue A Razorfish, and SFIMA president.
“You want to be very sensitive to what type of brand you put forward — one’s own personal brand identity. If it’s not tasteful, it shouldn’t be online.” But you don’t have to be a Web whiz to create a professional online identity. Creating a profile is a small step in boosting your online professional appearance.
“If you are in the professional world and you want yourself to be seen by the best companies out there, using a social networking site is almost as important as having a degree,” said Dion Taylor, an account manager at Technisource, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recruiting firm. About 30% to 40% of the resumes Mr. Taylor’s department gets have some sort of Web link, and he says clients are clicking on those links. He’s also seeing more people turn in video resumes.
“Most of the ones we see are just YouTube-ish. They put on a shirt and tie. My name is Bob. My strengths are this,” Mr. Taylor said. “I think people miss the mark with them.”
Recruiters interviewed have all said the same thing: Having a video resume alone doesn’t make you more likable or stand out more. If anything, it can be risky.
Charles Caulkins, managing partner at employment law firm Fisher & Phillips in Fort Lauderdale, lets his corporate clients know that by accepting videos or photos they open themselves up to the possibility of accusations of discrimination based on looks.
Videos, he said, could be a deterrent to a busy recruiter who may think, “Now I have to click on this video. How long is it? Are they going to get to the point?”
“I think HR people for the most part are sticking with the tried and true, sticking with the paper resumes or electronic PDFs,” Mr. Caulkins said.
© 2009 McClatchy Newspapers