Jye and I were having a discussion today around whether or not reputation management is ethical, which led to an interesting conversation which I wanted to share online for your thoughts and opinions.
For those of you who don’t know what online reputation management is, Online Reputation Management is the process of monitoring a brand/product or person online, understanding how to deal with negative publicity should it arise. Mitigating undesirable search engine results or mentions in online media and ultimately understanding how to proactively protect reputation online by utilising various conversation channels.
Firstly, I believe that reputation management “can” be completely ethical. But even so, it would completely depend on the situation. For example, is it Coca Cola trying to trying to clean up the search results around their brand to stop cocaine related sites from appearing? Or is it Kellogg’s doing the same thing to stop Ketamine being associated with their brand? Or where it goes into a shady area for me, is it Silvio Berlusconi trying to stop naked photos of his house party from ranking?
Other types of reputation management in the past have included trying to counteract other SEO campaigns. There are many brands/public figures who have been targeted to rank for certain terms, such as George Bush with ‘Miserable failure’. This type of activity is known as Google bombing and became a significant flaw in Google’s algorithm which they were forced to correct. Google bombing is much harder to achieve these days, but is still possible.
To me, where it becomes unethical is when brands/people are trying to force out competition or factual data they don’t want people to know about themselves or products.
Would be great to hear your thoughts, do you think reputation management is ethical? What is and what isn’t?
I’m now thinking about the incoming head of MI6, John Sawers, where his wife on her public profile posted on Facebook information about family, residence, vacations and a photo of Sawers in his Speedos! I wonder what strategy is being used behind that?
Alex,
Like you, I think its circumstantial, and that it really comes down to the people behind the brands, and what their intentions are. I also think it articulates the importance of social opinion, and listening followed by responding.
As discussed I think it’s really when peoples feelings and opinions around a product or service are pushed out because of their negativity.
This censorship of opinion I and believe is unethical. However, having said that, if an opinion has greater SEO weight than the site itself, it could be a technical flaw, of it could be that sentiment is shared amongst so many.
I take your point about factual information — and I think this is somewhere that social media response is a great step forward. Sure, that negative-opinion post might be ranking highly, but those viewing the post can see that the brand has responded with correct information, or in many cases, the brand has actually resolved the issue after taking on feedback.
Really great piece, mate.
Monitoring, analysing and influencing is what reputation management should be about. Not simply burying the negative reviews/comments in amongst the Google results. But sometimes this may be neccessary, when do you think ethically this is right/wrong?
Alex, nice post mate. Just on your comment above about “Not simply burying the negative reviews/comments in amongst the Google results”, I wanted to add that it’s prudent to have some negative reviews so as to give consumers a fair idea of what they can expect. From a consumer standpoint, if say a particular hotels reviews were found to be “managed and/or edited” then the detrimental effects would be greater than say 4-5 negative reviews about the hotel.
Dangerous – the crowd will have an unequal and opposite reaction – creating all sort of anti-reputation sites if they suspect that stuff is being buried. Walmart tried to manage and control a lot in the early days including wikipedia and blogs, with a HUGE backlash, but have remade themselves into model social media citizens these days.
I’ve been having a debate on my blog of TubeMogul vs HeySpread – when one posts the other chases with a negative or me-too comment. Two wrongs do not make a right in my book – following up poor decisions with ‘reputation management’ in most cases will cause a bunch of woe.
In personal cases it’s a bit of a different story. In the early days, if you googled “laurel papworth” most of what came up was stuff about my asthma (interviews and forums). I decided that I wanted to be known for more than that online but don’t really have a policy of burying stuff. And what about the guy who, when you Google his name, you get 10 pages of the fact he killed his father in a farming car accident when he was a teen? Can he do some rep management please?
Has this comment impacted my reputation online at all?
As always, honesty is paramount. But honesty in my mind might merely be opinion in the chicken nugget that is truth; nebulous of ingredients, delicious if you can stomach it.
I agree with Jye, the censorship of opinion is not only unethical, if such strategy is revealed it can be more damaging to a company than any single opinion.
I love a debate (online or face-to-face) and a company that is passionately able to engage in debate gets respect from me for having the maturity to deal with the issue instead of playing dirty tricks or burying their head in the sand. Exfoliating the callouses of opinion leaves the epidermis soft and healthy, slicing them off leaves it raw and bleeding.
Thanks for the comments, great responses and opions on an interesting area. I agree with you Oscar, I believe it is unethical when you’re trying to censor opinion. I don’t have issues with removing inaccurate statements or maybe removing photos of John Sawers in his speedos. The line is crossed when it is opinion which often doesn’t have a right or wrong answer is buried away to never see daylight.
Thinking about this in the context of foodblogging and the dramas that have occurred lately (bad Pr approaches, unhappy restaurant owners), it seems as though what’s missing in this discussion is the concept of a two way conversation. Shouldn’t “reputation management” become a “conversation”? That way, using whatever tools are handy and useful, you can engage with someone about the issue, and go someway towards mitigating it or solving it totally. Or is that just a naive point of view?
Hi Reemski, no completly agree with you, reputation management should be about influencing opinion not burying it. Like you have stated this will only ever go towards mitigating the issue. There will always be times where mitigating the problem isn’t enough and other techniques, whether ethical or not would have to be used. Do you think that anything other than trying to influence the citizen journalist is ethical?
Hi Alex, I really believe it depends on the particular situation. That may be somewhat mercenary, but in my situation I had a restaurateur ask me to remove negative comments from my blog, AFTER he had been given a right of reply and I had made an update to the blog post. However, in more commercially sensitive areas, where there may be more formal ramifications, different techniques need to be used.