July 2, 2008

How to protect your online reputation
By Celeste Altus

A look at what communicators are doing to combat negative Google results and other damaging posts

Imagine launching a new product with an extensive public relations campaign, only to have one media outlet get your product wrong, then slam its price and feature it in a column called “Worst of the Week.”

That happened to SPOT Inc. of Milpitas, Calif., which makes a handheld device to transmit location using GPS and a data network. Its product was called “nutty stuff” by a Web site, so its representatives, Moroch + PR, Dallas, took action, asking for a correction, offering a spokesperson for interviews and clearing up mistakes with a detailed letter to the editor.

In the digital age, search results on Internet sites like Google, Yahoo! and Wikipedia have the power to alter a company’s image overnight.

“It is like standing in the middle of the highway with a blindfold on,” Russo says.

DefendMyName is among a new breed of reputation-management companies doing brisk business in online brand management. DefendMyName creates links to promotional sites and blogs on clients in order to push negative search engine results to lower pages. Costs range from a few hundred dollars to thousands, and DefendMyName is one agency that is paid based on results.

But is it worth it to hire a service?

“It depends how important your reputation is to you,” said Richard Dukas, president and CEO of Dukas Public Relations in New York said. “If you’re a thriving business, and you have a reputation to uphold, it is always worth it.”

The importance of online reputation was clearly illustrated when Beth Haiken, an Ogilvy senior vice president, was working for a San Francisco-based credit card company. She got a call early in the morning, and the person on the line asked her if she knew that her company’s ad was running on the home page of the Church of Satan.

"A question to which the only possible answer is, ‘Thank you for letting me know,’" Haiken said.

Her research confirmed the ad was running on the Satanists’ Web site, along with low-end pornography and other sites clearly not in line with her firm’s image. The problem had occurred from an affiliate click-through program that had not set limits on who could participate.

“So I would certainly encourage people to consider online reputation risk in the broadest possible way!” Haiken added.
When hiring a service, the matter of measurement arises. How do you prove that spending thousands of dollars to move negative publicity off Google’s top-ranked links pays off in terms of time and energy?

Visible Technologies, maker of TruView, provides hard numbers to its clients. For example, after a packaged goods company was bogged down with negative press, TruView increased its positive coverage in the first 90 days by 50 percent, and in less than 100 days, increased positive coverage from 48 percent to 72 percent across four major search engines.

Of course, if your organization is free from large-scale scandal or links to Satanism, an expensive, months- or years-long process of reorganizing your online profile may not be warranted. In that case, you may want to look into taking the reins and managing the company’s reputation in-house.

To do that, consider the following steps:
• Set up a Google news alert with your company’s name, says Rich Klein, vice president and head of the law firm group at Beckerman Public Relations, New Jersey. “You will always get early word about a story written about your firm that you didn’t know about, as well as those you did,” Klein says. It's also smart to set up RSS feeds for news about your company and competitors.
• Ask business associates such as clients and other third parties to defend your reputation by posting positive comments to counteract negative ones online.
• If you are in crisis, consider diving in to the conversation by contacting media outlets directly and presenting your side.