Actively Managing Your Reputation

Once the damage is done, the first consideration should be whether the content should be removed from the Web. On the one hand, leaving the content online while publicly addressing concerns and fixing the problem can turn a bad situation into a large positive win. Domino’s Pizza did just that through a combination of public contrition and a crisis management campaign and by supporting material changes to the company’s operations, including improved training, compliance, and monitoring tools to drive quality throughout the organization. The company’s market capitalization doubled in 18 months following the event.

On the other hand, there may be good cause to request removal of the offending content, which may be done by contacting the authors of the post, notifying the owners of the social media platform, using legal recourse, and using Search and Social Media Optimization to bury negative mentions.

Contacting Post Authors and Domain Owners

When the Comedian Louis CK found a bootlegged torrent of a new routine, he quite simply contacted the person who uploaded the content with a kind message:

HI. I’m Louis CK. Can you please take this down? This show is a work in progress and was not intended to be passed around the internet. I have absolutely no problem, personally, with file sharing, and if you take everything I have on the market on DVD, CD, and put it up for free downloading, I don’t care. But this is an artistic and personal request. Please take this torrent down. thanks.²

² Mike Masnik, “Comedian Louis CK Gets BitTorrent Removed by Asking Nicely,” TechDirt (April 20, 2009), http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090420/0246494561.shtml.

In many cases, such courteous contact is well received and can lead to a cordial and informed discussion resulting in the removal of the material, as you can see in Figure 11-1. In some cases, nothing will happen, or worse, the situation might turn acrimonious with follow-up posts by the author or the domain owner. However, in every case, the first call should probably not be from a lawyer or with a cease-and-desist letter (more on this in “Resorting to Legal Recourse”).

Figure 11-1 Removed torrent from Mininova at http://www.mininova.org/com/2353415

If your company has a good case with facts to back up your own claims about the material, then it is worth at least posting an official rebuttal comment on the offending post to indicate you are listening and addressing the issue.

Requesting Content Removal

In many cases, when the author of the offending post refuses to remove it, contacting the owners of the social media platforms and requesting removal may prove worthwhile. Services such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Google, and others have made their policies explicit and are providing processes for removing material. In Figure 11-2, a user is trying to find a way to remove offending content (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/). Unless the content meets YouTube’s criteria for inappropriate material, getting the content removed might be difficult. These policies are often specific to the platforms, according to the type of content that is likely to be offensive.

Figure 11-2 User concern over allegedly defamatory video

For example, Blogger.com will remove content deemed offensive, harmful, or dangerous, such as hate against a protected group, adult or pornographic images, promotion of dangerous and illegal activity, content facilitating phishing or account hijacking, and impersonated user identity. On the other hand, Blogger.com requires court orders to remove material that represents personal attacks or alleged defamation, parody or satire of individuals, distasteful imagery or language, and political or social commentary.

Wikipedia describes several reasons for deleting an article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy):

Copyright violations and other material violating Wikipedia’s non-free content criteria

Vandalism, including inflammatory redirects, pages that exist only to disparage their subject, patent nonsense, or gibberish

Advertising or other spam without relevant content (but not an article about an advertising-related subject)

Content forks (unless a merger or redirect is appropriate)

Articles that cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources, including neologisms, original theories and conclusions, and articles that are themselves hoaxes (but not articles describing notable hoaxes)

Articles for which thorough attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed

Articles whose subjects fail to meet the relevant notability guideline

Redundant or otherwise useless templates

Categories representing over categorization

Files that are unused, obsolete, or violate the non-free policy

Any other use of the article, template, project, or user namespace that is contrary to the established separate policy for that namespace

Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia

Wikipedia also suggests a number of alternatives to deletion, including editing, merging, redirecting, discussing, incubating, including in other Wikimedia projects, and archiving of the offending content. The Wikipedia definition illustrates that the strategy and process for requesting that the service owner delete material is specific to the service itself and requires a customized approach.

When acting to request the removal of content online by the author or by the platform owner, speed is of the essence because readers and viewers often download content to edit, remix, and publish it in a newly modified version.

Resorting to Legal Recourse

If courteous contact with the author fails and if the platform owner refuses to remove the content, then you might consider legal recourse. For instance, Canon U.S.A., Inc., sent a takedown demand for the Fake Chuck Westfall blog at fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com, which is hosted on WordPress.com.

Legal recourse is an option. However, before contacting either the author or the platform owner using legal means, it is important to understand that often such attempts to suppress content online can lead to the unwanted effect of drawing more attention to the offending material. Sometimes authors post cease and desist letters that they receive or send them to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse (http://www.chillingeffects.org/), an online clearinghouse that studies legal complaints and threats regarding online activity:

The Chilling Effects aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate favorite stars, or criticize businesses, but concerned that not everyone feels the same way. Study to date suggests that cease and desist letters often silence Internet users, whether or not their claims have legal merit. The Chilling Effects project seeks to document that “chill” and inform C&D recipients of their legal rights in response.

Legal recourse may not always work, unless of course it is accompanied by a court order carrying the weight of the law and forcing compliance. It remains to be seen whether certain whistle-blowing websites, most notably WikiLeaks.org, will comply with court-ordered takedown notices.

Utilizing Search Engine Optimization

A separate and parallel way to manage negative mentions online is to take active control of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. The objective here is to own the first page of search engine results for the keywords by securing the top ten search results through active Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO).

This process entails identifying which keywords are most important and creating new content or new blogs and bumping up existing pages that have positive mentions. Adding new domains, subdomains, and top-level domains and adding positive content to external websites with strong authority may be useful. Build links to the new content by requesting them from reputable external websites. Creating and managing new social media profiles can supplement SEO efforts by adding new websites that are well-indexed. For example, well-managed profiles and content on Twitter, Yelp, YouTube, and corporate blogs can easily rise to the top of search engines for selected keywords. To gain a better understanding of SEO, refer to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) or a good paid resource such as SEOBook (www.seobook.com).