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How Negative Publicity (Shaming) Can Impact Your Company and More

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How Negative Publicity (Shaming) Can Impact Your Company and More

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More than a quarter of employers have experienced negative publicity, say it has impacted hiring, morale, turnover and sales.

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By now everyone knows you never get a second chance to make a first impression, today that initial first glance is usually your virtual one.

A recent national survey, which was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder, revealed that 71 percent of U.S. workers would not apply to a company experiencing negative press.

"In today's 24/7 news cycle and social media world, earning and maintaining a good reputation can be a challenge," said Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder. "It's easier than ever before for job seekers to research potential employers. Employers that value transparency and take a proactive approach to issues or complaints will have a better chance of securing trust and loyalty and maintaining a positive reputation that can strengthen their recruitment and retention strategies."

Women were more likely not to apply to companies experiencing bad publicity than men according to this survey. In the recent PEW Research survey, 70 percent of women also viewed online harassment as a major problem verses 54 percent of men believe it's an issue. Especially young women experienced sexualized forms of abuse online at much higher rates than men. Some 21 percent of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online.

As we witness a time in our country when incivility is on the rise, 75 percent of Americans believe it's up to us to change the tides according to the Civility in America survey.

From watching major corporations take on celebrities in tweetstorms, to a restaurant attempting to adjust to new legislation, social media can take on a life of its' own and your company can be left lifeless.
The shame factor and the bottom line.
The CareerBuilders survey noted that more than a quarter of employers (26 percent) say their company has experienced negative publicity, resulting in a hit to their hiring process as well as other areas. Bad press and online shaming impacts employee morale, higher voluntary employee turnover and a decline in sales. Businesses with negative publicity turns off candidates from applying, so companies will risk losing potentially good applicants due to a smear campaign or other forms of unflattering content online. The loss of revenue is why employers must address these issues immediately or may potentially risk going out of business.

Today 90 percent of people rely on reviews posted online before they purchase or use a service, yet shockingly, 1 in 5 people will admit to writing false reviews of products or services they have never used according to a YouGov survey. The bottom line is, your online reviews can literally cripple your company.
Being proactive, being positive.
While negative news travels faster in our social world, companies should share their positive news to strengthen their company overall. This is what online reputation management is about and why people need to learn to maintain it regularly. When [if] a digital disaster does occur, you are already prepared for it.

In my upcoming book, Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate, we discussed with Rich Matta, CEO of ReputationDefender, the rise of online attacks towards businesses. "We're seeing an enormous rise [in] online attacks for three main reasons," he says. "First, attackers now understand that online attacks have significant potential to negatively impact their intended targets-and they're growing more sophisticated, selecting approaches that maximize damage. " You can read his entire interview in Shame Nation being released on October 3rd, 2017.

Previously a CareerBuilders survey shared how social media can impact your chances of landing a job. In reality everyone has social liability they need to be responsible for - both the employer and the potential employee.

When corporations encounter negative publicity or you have been through cyber-warfare online, it's important to address digital disasters swiftly and professionally. As with many trolls, arguing with them can only fuel the fire and increase your exposure. It's imperative to be proactive, not reactive in these situations.

Being proactive means building your social authority online of your brand with positive outreach to people. If your audience knows you and what you stand for, they will be less likely to be influenced by a ban of pesky trolls.

CareerBuilders survey determined nearly 4 in 5 employers who have experienced positive press have seen beneficial impacts such as:

42 percent higher morale among the workplace

36 percent of employees were likely to share positive things about their company on social media

36 percent boost in sales

32 percent more job applications

22 percent more job candidate referrals from current employees

21 percent more jobs being accepted

19 percent lower voluntary employer turnover

If you're a company facing a tweetstorm or social media meltdown it's important to attempt to take it offline as quickly as possible.

You're best line of defense is being prepared before the cyber-bullets arrive. Building your digital platform, encouraging your current clients (customers) for reviews, keeping your blogs and websites up-to-date and using your keypad with respect and responsibility towards everyone - even if they aren't your customer.

It might be a time of incivility and uncertainty in our country, but it can be that time you can shine online. Be the person (business) that takes this shame nation to a sane nation - one keystroke or post at a time.

Follow me on Twitter and join me on Facebook.

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How Negative Publicity (Shaming) Can Impact Your Company and More

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By now everyone knows you never get a second chance to make a first impression, today that initial first glance is usually your virtual one. A recent national survey, which was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder, revealed that 71 percent of U.S.

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Your online reputation is how others see you when they look for you online

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Your online reputation is how others see you when they look for you online

Google yourself. What do you see? Are you represented fairly?

Online reputation management (ORM) means taking control of the online conversation. Its techniques and strategies ensure that people find the right materials when they look for you on the Internet.

Done well, online reputation management creates balance, counteracts misleading trends, and allows you to put your best foot forward.

Online reputation is becoming so pervasive that it's almost time to drop the word "online." Essentially, your online reputation is your reputation, professional and personal. Here's why:

The Internet is our first stop for everything

Two out of three people see the Internet as the most reliable source of information about a person or a business (Edelman Insights)

70% of hiring managers have rejected a candidate because of something they found online (Cross-Tab)

When looking for a local business, 97% of people read online reviews (BIA Kelsey)

Looking at statistics like these, it's clear that what happens online affects your entire life.

Online and offline are blending

With each passing day, the online world becomes more and more enmeshed with the rest of our activities. From smartphones to smart TVs, from the "Internet of things" to the self-driving cars of the future-you are living each day increasingly online, even if you never touch a computer.

That means there are more and more ways for you to leave an online mark, positive or negative.

Now, you might not think that people are searching for you, but chances are they are. Common reasons include:

Employers doing pre-interview research

Landlords looking into prospective renters

Children searching for details of their parents' "real lives"

Curious significant others, past and present

Former colleagues looking to share professional opportunities

No matter how "under the radar" or "low-tech" your lifestyle, there is a good quantity of information about you online-and people are seeing it.

Your online reputation is forever

If someone writes something negative about you online, it can put you at a serious disadvantage over the long term-especially if you're not aware of it. You might never know why you didn't get that apartment you wanted, or why a job offer never materialized after that phenomenal interview.

It's important to keep tabs on what people are saying about you online and then take steps to correct any inaccuracies.

Over 80% of reputation damage comes from a mismatch between the buzz and the reality.

Given how advanced search engines and other information technologies have become, why do we even need to manage our online reputations? Shouldn't these issues go away on their own over time?

Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen. Online reputation mismatches are not technology problems, they're human problems.

Google's algorithms can only give us what we ask for. So if we ask for juicy gossip, conspiracy stories, and negative reviews, that's what gets associated with our search terms.

Online reputation management counteracts that human bias for gossip, ensuring that the materials that actually matter aren't overwhelmed by the rumors.

This need will always exist. In fact, it's probably going to get more and more important to manage our online reputations as search engines and other online algorithms become a bigger part of everything we do.

There are similarities between online reputation management and search engine optimization (SEO) but there are also important differences.

SEO is about promoting a specific website or page to the top of the search results. Online reputation management is about controlling the collection of websites that appear in your search results. That means the tactics and measures of success are different. For example:

Depending on your needs, online reputation management can be a relatively simple, straightforward process, or it can be complex and multifaceted. Regardless, most ORM campaigns follow a few general rules:

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What is Online Reputation Management? | ReputationDefender

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Your online reputation is how others see you when they look for you online Online reputation management (ORM) means taking control of the online conversation. Its techniques and strategies ensure that people find the right materials when they look for you on the Internet.

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Melania no more: why did Donald Trump take down his wife's website?

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Melania no more: why did Donald Trump take down his wife's website?

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MelaniaTrump.com has disappeared, and a kerfuffle over a college degree may be to blame. But experts say it could amplify what they hope will remain unseen

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Donald Trump is notorious for making controversial statements that set the internet on fire. But the relatively mild kerfuffle about whether his wife actually received a college degree appears to be something the Trumps would rather not see broadcast across the web.

Melania Trump's personal and professional site, the Huffington Post reported on Wednesday, has disappeared. A search of Google's cache reveals that sometime after 22 July, MelaniaTrump.com was redirected to Trump.com, the official site for the Trump Organization.

Speculation immediately centered on a claim made on Ms Trump's online biography that she obtained "a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia" shortly before embarking on her modeling career.

An an unauthorized biography of Ms Trump, published in February, claims the prospective first lady left the university after a year without obtaining her degree. Critics have accused the Trump campaign of deleting the site in order to hide her biography.

An image posted to Melania's Twitter account earlier today states: "The website in question was created in 2012 and it has been removed because it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests."

MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP)pic.twitter.com/pDAe8w08ym

The tweet was an unusual one for Mrs Trump, who rarely posts to that account and usually only with photos. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Copies of Melania Trump's biography page containing the controversial claim were still visible on the Internet Archive at the time of writing. However, there are also inexplicable gaps in the archive's record. After 14 March 2013, for example, the MelaniaTrump.com home page is no longer visible.

Mark Graham, director of the Archive's Wayback Machine, said "there are various technical factors ... that can affect the quality of both the capture and replay of web pages." He added no one from the Trump campaign contacted the archive to request the pages be removed.

As a nominee for the presidency, the only way to control your online reputation is through your statements and actions

Rich Matta, CEO of ReputationDefender

According to the domain registration records, MelaniaTrump.com was registered in April 2004 and existed for more than a year as a parody/squatter account consisting of two sentences: " MelaniaTrump.com For Sale @ the bargain price of 1 Million Dollars! Cmon Donald Trump of apprentice, you can afford it!"

Sometime between December 2005 and March 2006, it passed into the control of the Trump organization and served as Mrs Trump's personal site.

This is not the first time Trumps have attempted to stuff things down the memory hole. The Politwoops site, which archives tweets deleted by US politicians, has an entire page devoted to things The Donald tried to unsay, many of them entirely innocuous.

@realDonaldTrump: "Clinton made a false ad about me where I was imitating a reporter GROVELING after he changed his story. I would NEVER Moch disabled. Shame!"

Nor is Trump is the only politician to allegedly attempt to scrub things from the web that might be considered damaging to one's reputation.

In 2013, the UK's Conservative party was accused of purging the party's website of content published between 2000 and 2010, allegedly to remove evidence of unfulfilled campaign promises. It also ensured Internet Archive had not indexed the pages. One of the deleted pages detailed a speech that David Cameron, then prime minster, made at Google in which he said that "political leaders will have to learn to let go of the information that we have guarded so jealously".

Multiple US politicians, including current vice-president Joe Biden and Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, have been caught editing their own Wikipedia entries to suppress unflattering information. Pence allegedly edited his page to remove a reference to a former job as a conservative talk radio host, and adding awards, senior job roles and glowing summaries of his political career. Members of British parliament have been similarly snagged.

If the Trumps were attempting to hide this information, they went about it the wrong way, says Aaron Minc, an internet defamation attorney who specializes in removing things from the net. If Trump really wanted to remove this information, he would have deleted the site before having it redirect to Trump.com, says Minc, and then notified Google to remove it from its search engine cache.

"There are ways to permanently delete things from the net, but you have to act quickly and do the right things, especially if you're under public scrutiny," he says. To keep pages out of the Internet Archive, website owners can add a file to their site's main directory called Robots.txt containing the word "disallow", says Graham. This will prevent the archive's bots from crawling the site's pages.

Rich Matta, CEO of ReputationDefender, says there isn't much a public figure such as Trump can do besides change the behavior that creates the negative publicity in the first place.

"We have worked with some individuals that have similarly massive public profiles as Donald Trump and that have a penchant for making controversial statements," says Matta. "But when you reach the level of intense scrutiny of a major party nominee for the presidency, the only realistic way to control your online reputation is through your own statements and actions."

He adds that one of the worst things you can do is try to remove things after the fact, which can make the negative information spread further and faster - a phenomenon commonly known as the " Streisand effect ".

The best thing Trump could do is create more positive content that will keep the negative stuff from showing up higher in search results, says attorney Bennet Kelley, founder of the Internet Law Center. "Stop being so belligerent and intolerant, and promote stuff that people like rather than attacking others," he said.

"In other words, behave like a grownup."
Topics

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Melania no more: why did Donald Trump take down his wife's website?

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Donald Trump is notorious for making controversial statements that set the internet on fire. But the relatively mild kerfuffle about whether his wife actually received a college degree appears to be something the Trumps would rather not see broadcast across the web. Melania Trump's personal and professional site, the Huffington Post reported on Wednesday, has disappeared.

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The Right (and Wrong) Way to Use Google to Protect Your Reputation

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The Right (and Wrong) Way to Use Google to Protect Your Reputation

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You might think you're staying on top of your online footprint, but if you're not following these tips, you could be missing something big.

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And if you want to get ahead of things that could be more in the hands of others than your own, you have to keep tabs. The question is, when you Google yourself, are you doing it the right way? Online reputation experts say you may not be.

Reputation management companies BrandYourself and ReputationDefender have two key pieces of advice: Google yourself often, and when you do, do so using a private window or incognito mode option so that results are not customized because of your location or search habits.

"Pay extra attention to the first page of your results, as this is the first impression that your personal and professional contacts will see, and 90 percent of users do not bother to look any further," says Rich Matta, CEO of ReputationDefender, the subsidiary of Reputation.com focusing on consumers and small businesses.

"Once something is posted online, it's very unlikely it will go away," says BrandYourself communications director Patrick Leber. "If a negative search result pops up for your name, it's important you catch it early and start doing the work to mitigate its damage to your reputation. The earlier you catch it, the easier it is to suppress."

Ideal frequency of search depends on the person. Leber says most people only really need to Google themselves monthly, but public figures, business owners, and people in services like medical care or real estate may want to Google themselves more often. The reason is that this latter group may be subject to more frequent reviews by the public in relation to their work. His tip: Set a Google alert for your name, which will deliver new results to your email inbox.

Also, when you Google yourself, be careful when and where you click. "If you have any negative or unwanted search results, resist the urge to click into them frequently. Searching alone will do no harm, but extra clicks on negative results may indicate to Google that the world is more interested in those results than everything else that is positive and truthful about you," says Matta.

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Why You Should Google Yourself Every Month (Here's the Right Way to Do It)

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And if you want to get ahead of things that could be more in the hands of others than your own, you have to keep tabs. The question is, when you Google yourself, are you doing it the right way? Online reputation experts say you may not be.

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Meet The Tech Company That Can Re-Create Your Online Identity

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Meet The Tech Company That Can Re-Create Your Online Identity

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Meet The Tech Company That Can Re-Create Your Online Identity

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Now that we're sharing more about our lives online than ever before, how do we keep our identities safe?

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Search Engines are the New First Impression 

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Search Engines are the New First Impression 

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ReputationDefender: Search Engines are the New First Impression

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And the first place people look to learn about you or your business. Search results are your reputation on the Internet. You're affected by anything negative, even if it isn't true! But there is something you can do about it.