Social Media Risk

Managing your reputation isn’t what it used to be. It’s not about winning fistfights on the playground to protect your street credibility, or a business issuing carefully-worded media releases to spin stories about their latest foibles.

Now it’s all about online reputation management (ORM), a concept that has become an industry unto itself with all the accompanying accoutrements–experts, gurus, online tools–one expects from the modern internet.

ORM is “the practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across all types of online media” (Wikipedia). You may have your own personal website and blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles, and professional site and writing all out there on the internet, and it all has a story to tell about you.

One of the oldest tricks in the ORM playbook is the practice of purchasing top level domains (TLDs) associated with your name or products. There have been many instances over the last decade of companies suing to gain control of TLDs that reflect trademarked names, including the recent example at Apple. TLDs rank highly in search, as do official pages on social network sites.

ORM is important not just for business but for politicians as well. Politicos are the masters of reputation management and spin, and anything they can do to massage their reputations should be a priority.

Case in point: U.K. Prime Minster and Labour Party leader Gordon Brown and David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party. A post on the Econsultancy blog outlines the issues the two party leaders have with search and ORM. When searches were performed on google.co.uk for “David Cameron” and “Gordon Brown,” the official sites underperformed on search results pages compared to other sites, especially a real estate agent also named Gordon Brown.

Additionally Econsultancy found that neither has an official Twitter account bearing their name, hampering their search relevancy. Even more damaging is the fact that each has an unofficial blog, but the blogs are produced by outsiders and are critical of the two leaders.

Opening an account on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook takes almost no time whatsoever. Even if those sites aren’t put to use, it prevents others from squatting on your brand or using it for nefarious or critical purposes. Businesses and politicians alike, whether or not they’re attuned to the real issues of today’s internet, should be receptive to the notion that their online reputations are very real and manageable.

Or they could meet under the monkey bars after school.

Selected Resources

• WebProNews
• Sitepoint
• Online Rep Management
• Duct Tape Marketing

Related articles by Zemanta

• Website pokes fun at David Cameron’s ‘airbrushed’ poster | Paul Owen (guardian.co.uk)
• David Cameron’s airbrushed poster: part three (newstatesman.com)