Online Reputation Management

According to Wikipedia, “Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop.” They further define “Online reputation management (or monitoring) as the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a person, brand, or business, with the goal of suppressing negative mentions entirely, or pushing them lower on search engine results pages to decrease their visibility.” A solid ORM solution needs to provide an organization with a combination of real-time and digest (daily preferably) reports. One or more relevant key terms should be identified and monitored across sites such as Google News, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr, Yahoo!, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and as many other social media outlets as possible. A good ORM practice goes to the places frequented by your customers to monitor, report, and react to their sentiments about your brand.

Companies that listen and monitor the social space are in a better position to respond and defend their brand against potential attacks. Recently a number of services have become available to make this process easier and more effective. Companies such as Reputation.com, Radian6, Keotag, and Sprout Social all offer varying levels of online reputation management. Many of these tools are easy to use. Figure 16-1 shows results using Sprout Social after signing up in about ten seconds.

Figure 16-1 Using Sprout Social for reputation management

In the case of the Catsouras family and the CHP, both parties had an interest in monitoring and removing the leaked information as quickly as possible. Several of the tools listed could have helped provide real-time information on postings. The creation of a series of keywords would have alerted the CHP to the breach and swift legal action could potentially have stemmed the viral tidal wave. It is imperative that an organization has the information that it needs to act quickly to secure its reputation as time is of the essence. Within a few hours, the social web can damage or, in some cases, destroy a centuries-old brand. Understanding the reports generated by your reputation management solution and following an established action plan can greatly reduce the damage caused by possible ORM threats.

Brand Equity

We have already mentioned a number of social media monitoring tools, such as Reputation.com and Sprout Social. The data you monitor for will differ significantly across different industries. Various tools may have a slightly different impact by industry, but as a general rule, you should be able to utilize the same tools across industries.

The key areas we identified in Chapter 2 as being key targets for implementing new tools for brand and employee monitoring and reporting are

Brand equity Determine brand equity by tracking users of the company’s social media profiles along with social media mentions about your company and sentiment about your company. Identify risks to brand equity by implementing tools to monitor all news about the brand name.

Brand attack Identify attacks against the brand by implementing tools to monitor all negative mentions about the brand.

Defense techniques Develop defensive capabilities against brand attacks.

Crisis management Develop crisis management capability.

Employee monitoring Should be coordinated between IT and Human Resources.

Reputation Management and Employees

Employees will actually be more aware of how they are using social media once you have reports on their activity available. The challenge is the vagueness in the laws governing what you can do when you identify an employee talking about the company on social media platforms. The posting of confidential information is easy to identify and there are historical cases that equate posting to social media to sending out confidential material using other platforms.

Recently, in November 2010, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against American Medical Response of Connecticut (AMRC), the reason being that AMRC fired an employee for negative comments posted about her supervisor on her personal Facebook page from her home computer.² The NRLB says the social media policy as well as the action is illegal under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act:

²National Labor Relations Board Steps in on Facebook Postings as Protected Employee Activity, Modern Media Institute (November 9, 2010), http://www.modernmediainstitute.com/2010/11/national-labor-relations-board-steps-in-on-facebook-postings-as-protected-employee-activity.html.

An NLRB investigation found that the employee’s Facebook postings constituted protected concerted activity, and that the company’s blogging and internet posting policy contained unlawful provisions, including one that prohibited employees from making disparaging remarks when discussing the company or supervisors and another that prohibited employees from depicting the company in any way over the internet without company permission. Such provisions constitute interference with employees in the exercise of their right to engage in protected concerted activity.

You may capture information with your monitoring and reporting, but there is a difference between confidential data such as the photos of the Catsouras accident versus opinions and gossip, and your social media policies now have to straddle this fine line.