RSS feedMarch, 2007
Be There Or Be Talked About: Online Reputation Management
By Reputation Management
Author: Penny Sansevieri
A few weeks ago I had an author call me in a blind panic – someone had reviewed her book online and it wasn’t good, in fact it was downright nasty. She was horrified, and the worst part, there was very little she could do. It wasn’t someone we, the publisher, or the author had ever worked with before, nor had anyone ever contacted her, how she got the book is anyone’s guess, but she did, and she hated it.
The price for online exposure can sometimes be high, but this story brings back the clear truth: regardless of whether or not you market yourself on the ‘Net, somewhere, somehow, you’ll wind up on there. Whether it’s through a review or some other posting, you’ll end up on the Internet and as a vigilant marketer you’ll want to know who’s saying what about you. Whether it’s good or bad, you can still manage it. Also, you want to keep an eye on what people are saying about your topic.
So how do you win the online reputation game? Here are some tips you might want to consider. Keep in mind that in all the years I’ve been online, I’ve not known a lot of folks to go through a negative posting, in fact, it’s generally the opposite. Most of the time those who choose to review a book or comment on a service do so positively, but even positive postings need to be monitored. Why? Well, there’s a lot you can do with them, and these tips will show you how.
1) First, monitoring your reputation online doesn’t have to cost you anything. You can do this very simply with tools that are already available to you for free. Google and Yahoo both have monitoring tools. They’re super simple to use, all you do is go to the links, sign up for them and plug in the keywords you want to monitor. Keep in mind that you’re not only doing this just to monitor who’s talking or writing about you, but to keep track of what’s being said about your topic, so you can both keep track of new developments and engage in conversations with other bloggers. These include http://alerts.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/alerts
2) Use RSS feeds to help keep track of conversations on the Internet that involve you, your topic, or your book. You can go to any of these sites to create these custom RSS feeds: Technorati, blogpulse, google news, spaces.live, feedster, icerocket and google’s Blogsearch.
3) Using http://MonitorThis.com you can keep track of your keywords across 22 different search engines. Keep in mind that you’ll need an RSS Feedreader to monitor the feeds that come in.
4) Online groups might be another place to look. If you haven’t signed up for any groups related to your topic, now might be a good time. Check out the groups at yahoo, aol, msn and google.
5) It’s probably not a wise move to spend your days chasing down every blogger that posts on your topic, so before you decide to connect with a blogger, head on over to http://www.alexa.com to get some site stats first. That way you can make sure that before you go the effort of contacting the blogger, he or she has a wider audience than just mom and Aunt Viola.
Now that you have your monitors in place, what’s next? Let’s look at how you can constructively use this information. First you’ll want to have a blog. Why? You’ll want to use this as a forum to address news on your topic or on you. And don’t wait until you need to post something to start a blog, start one as soon as possible so you’re up and running.
A blog will humanize your site and help you create a relationship with your readers, then whenever your monitors alert you to a new topic, a new review, or a new mention of you, you can respond by offering your own twist, insight or feedback. In the case of the negative review, the author decided to address the thing we all fear most: what if someone hates your book? She posted a blog and got so many positive responses they virtually canceled out whatever the reviewer said.
Next, if you find someone has commented on you, your book or your topic, I recommend connecting with them, offering your insight, or thanking him or her for any positive reviews or mentions you received.
Aside from monitoring, blogging, and online networking, another sure-fire way to protect your reputation online is to have a lot of positive feedback, reviews, features, or mentions. Why? Just like the author who blogged on her review, the good cancels out the bad. The Internet is very self-correcting that way, so get out there and get yourself some great “press,” it’ll pay off not just in the case of a reputation, but also when someone is searching for information on your topic.
And finally, if you’re sitting on a controversial topic, it might not make sense to spend your days policing the Internet. People will say what they say and the ‘Net has given many a voice even as they remain in obscurity. That said, remember the golden rule of PR: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Internet Reputation Management: “CRM” with a strategic twist?
By Reputation Management
Public Relations Quarterly, Summer 2000 by Nakra, Prema
Fritz Hoffmann was 28 years old when he formed a company F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland, to develop and manufacture novel drugs of uniform strength and quality to market them internationally. The company, formed in 1896, was named after himself and his wife, Adele La Roche. The company has remained at the forefront of biomedical knowledge through virtually every decade of its existence. Roche has approximately 70,000 employees worldwide and operates in more than 100 countries. (HoffmannLa Roche, 2000).
Surprisingly, in a recent study, Corporate Crime Reporter (CCR) placed the Swiss pharmaceutical giant – Hoffmann-La Roche – on top of the list of leading corporate criminals of the 1990s. The list `CCR 100′ was released on September 2, 1999 at a press conference by Corporate Crime Reporter, a legal publication based in Washington, D.C. (U.S. Newswire, 1999). The impact of negative news about this company may not be reflected in its market share or its ability to develop new products in the immediate future, but it has definitely done damage to the corporate image and reputation. What happened to this Swiss giant could happen to any corporation, unless it takes its CRM seriously. As in the cases of Mitsubishi and Archer-DanielsMidland, the negative effects of high profile problems can be far-reaching and long lasting.
Technology weary may read the title of this article and say: “Oh! No! Not another acronym!” In the solutions integration market several acronyms including CRM, CIM, ERM, CIS and ECM have emerged in the past twelve months alone. These acronyms stand for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM), Customer Interaction Management (CIM), and Enterprise Customer Management (ECM). They all mean approximately the same thing: enterprise level, outward-facing, front office, applications designed to achieve better customer relationship.
The Concept
The concept discussed in this paper under the acronym CRM has nothing to do with the $9 billion CRM market (Jacobs, 1999). CRM, in this article refers to Corporate Reputation Management. Often contained within a corporate communications function, reputation management is about building a sound corporate reputation and maintaining the strength. While some define corporate reputation as “corporate identity” others define it as the “collective opinion of stakeholders toward an organization” based on its past record. It has also been described as a method of building and sustaining of an organization’s good name, generating positive feedback from stakeholders that will result in meeting strategic and financial objectives (Kartalia, 1999). A company’s reputation affects its ability to sell products and services, to attract investors, to hire talented staff, and to exert influence in government circles. Poets and PR professionals agree reputation is a mighty thing, worthy of nurture, deserving of praise. And once lost – or even tarnished – incredibly difficult to regain (Winkleman, 1999).
Environmental Factors Demanding Reputation Management
A number of trends are converging to put enormous pressure on the modern corporation and its relationship with the rest of the world. “Corporate reputation has become a driving factor in the business of managing the nation’s largest corporations,” says Tom Hoog, President and CEO of Hill and Knowlton USA (Miller, 1999). The most significant consequence of a negative corporate reputation is the adverse effect on share price and market capitalization.
Chairman and CEO of Waste Management Steve Miller believes that on every front, from sales to customers, dealing with suppliers, recruitment, retention of employees, fending off regulators and pleasing your financial stakeholders, it is infinitely more difficult if you do not have reputation behind you (Donlon, 1998). Several factors, discussed below, have contributed to the renewed interest in CRM especially among the global market leaders.
Internal Pressures
During the last decade, there has been a tremendous increase in pressure to reach cost-saving productivity, and profitability performance goals. Some managers have achieved dramatic results by pushing subordinates to achieve aggressive performance objectives – commonly called “stretch goals.” Their impulsive action to secure short term financial gains are frequently linked to negative outcomes including social disintegration, low employee morale, predatory financial practices, and emphasis on limitless economic growth over sustainable developments.
Management Philosophy and Culture
The long term impact of “do whatever it takes managers” who push themselves and others to achieve ever escalating stretch goals without regard to the tendency of such practices to spawn illegal and unethical behavior, is always negative (Wah, 1999). People may produce spectacular results for a while, but it is inevitable that techniques depending so heavily on fear as a motivator generate survival strategies that include cheating, distortion, and internal unhealthy competition. This undermines the organization – its image and reputation – and erodes employee goodwill and confidence.
How Do Internet Reputation Management and Legitimacy Affect Organizational Performance?
By Reputation Management
International Journal of Management, by Thomas, Douglas E
This paper explores the overlap between two similar constructs, reputation and legitimacy, and their effect on organizational performance. Firms face pressures to both develop reputations based on differentiation and to achieve isomorphism by attaining legitimacy. In this paper, we discuss how an organization’s ability to balance these two pressures is related to its performance. Further, we discuss how these constructs are created at multiple levels (e.g., individual).
Introduction
The construct of reputation is central to many branches of the social sciences including economics (Shapiro, 1983), sociology (Podolny, 1993), and the organizational sciences (Weigelt & Camerer, 1988). In the field of management, various theories include reputation to explain organizational outcomes including the resource-based view (Barney, 1991), transaction cost economics (Hill, 1990), and game theory (Weigelt & Camerer, 1988). Reputations have also been studied at the individual level to explain intra-organizational outcomes (Kilduff & Krackhardt, 1994).
Despite the fact that organizational reputation is central to the study of organizations, reputation is often interchanged for related constructs. For example, related constructs such as image, identity, status and legitimacy are used throughout the literature; however, they mean different things depending on the author (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991; Gatewood, Gowan, & Lautenschlager, 1993). The two constructs of legitimacy and reputation have been confused and used interchangeably (Rao, 1994). This leads to confusion for readers and impedes progress in the accumulation of knowledge on this important subject.
For the purposes of this paper, a corporate or organizational reputation is a “set of attributes ascribed [socially constructed] to a firm, inferred from the firm’s past actions” (Weigelt & Camerer, 1988:443). Legitimacy is defined in this paper as 1. “the normative justification of organizations” and 2. “the cognitive validation of an entity as desirable, proper and appropriate in a widely shared system of beliefs and norms” (Rao, 1994:441). Reputation and legitimacy overlap but result from different pressures that organizations face: pressures to be different and pressures to be the same.
Research on organizational legitimacy indicates that it is ascribed based on factors at different levels including the organization itself and its institutional environment (Kostova & Zaheer, 1999). Research on organizational reputation has not yet focused on the multi-level sources of organizational reputation. We attempt to clarify this issue by explaining how organizational reputation is constructed by external actors based on factors at several different levels: individuals, products and capabilities within the organization, the organization itself, and its institutional environment.
Thus, this paper contributes to the literature on organizations and organizational reputation in several different ways. First, it provides a clarifying review of reputation and similar and related constructs, including legitimacy. second, it explains how reputation and legitimacy result from different pressures. Finally, this paper explains how external actors construct organizational reputations based on factors at different levels both internal and external to the organization.
Organizations: Homogeneity or Heterogeneity?
One of the most salient organizational outcomes to researchers is organizational performance. However, performance is understood in different ways in different theories. For example, the resource-based view is generally concerned with understanding differences in performance across organizations while institutional theory is concerned with organizational survival. The theories also differ as to what factors give rise to organizational performance. For example, several relevant theories argue that relative homogeneity across organizations is important for organizational performance; others argue that differentiation across organizations will be positively associated with success. In the following section, these theoretical explanations will be explained.
Organizational Homogeneity
Classical micro-economic theory argues that under perfect competition firms will be indistinguishable from each other, none will have a competitive advantage, none will have above-normal profits, and consumer welfare will be maximized. For example, Connor (1991: 123) points out that in neoclassical perfect competition theory, “firms are identical because perfect information together with a specifiable production function assures that each firm has equal access to product technology.” Industrial Organization economics recognizes market imperfections and thus allows for some firm heterogeneity – within industries (Porter, 1980). Competitive advantage and above-normal profits are possible in industries where there is imperfect competition due to market failure. From the I/O perspective, there is intra-industry homogeneity and inter-industry heterogeneity of firms.
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