Comments on: What’s your online reputation worth?

By: catarinaalexon

catarinaalexon — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:19:59 +0000

Glad you like the topic Slim.

By the way, if you google a headline for an article you have written it will come up on top:-)

By: Slim

Slim — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:03:24 +0000

Great topic, Catarina. You've illuminated a problem. While the efforts to protect one's reputations may be prodigious, the one small safety factor may be that with all that is available on the internet, the bad may be buried among the several hundred thousand results of a Google search. I am still shocked when one of my blog pages comes up number one from among 46 million results in a Google search. Still, it is only one Google search. Slim My recent post Merkel and Charybdis

By: catarinaalexon

catarinaalexon — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:18:41 +0000

Glad you agree with me Bethany.

By: projectwhitespace

projectwhitespace — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:10:16 +0000

I'm glad you brought up the importance of having good internal communications. As you allude to, it's one of the best deterrants of keeping a bad online reputation from happening. A bad reputation doesn't start only from customers, but from inside, or from ex-employees. I also love that you said use a blog as a deterrant or as a way to drive the "bad exposure" down the page rank on Google. I'm a big proponent of business blogging, and so I totally appreciate this idea. I had never thought of using blogs in this way, though, so this was enlightening to me. _As for Google alerts, pretty sad that I am the only one in the company where I work that has set these up. There have been several times I've alerted our executives to either what the competition is up to, or what is being said about us. Not sure why they are not doing this themselves, or setting up a process to make this happen (even though I have shown them all about it). Maybe I should be more proactive and encourage this even more than I have been.

By: catarinaalexon

catarinaalexon — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Doesn’t surprise me Lubna.

Social media is interesting. We all work for free for Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter and make billions for the owners.

But we get, or at least think we get, something in return since we build up our personal brand, network and so on.

There are however a multitude of people who promote articles from The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and so forth by starting discussion in groups on Linkedin with a link to articles from those papers. And they don’t get paid to do so. Presumably they believe that by doing so people will believe they are brilliant and associate their name with, say, Harvard, even though they didn’t study there?

By the way, it’s different when you include a video from say Harvard inan article on your blog because then the video helps you promote your blog.

To get paid for mentioning products with links in your blog is a far better idea than promoting articles on social media without getting paid for it. Many times wonder if members of social media are keen on slave labour? If not, why do they devote a lot of time to working for free for the publications in the world?

By: Lubna

Lubna — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:47:09 +0000

A few of my colleagues who also blog were discussing over lunch today the changing cyberspace environment. Can you believe this, large companies are willing to pay bloggers to mention their product in a blog with a link back to the product. The mention of the product is subtle. For instance, I hastily brushed my teeth with my favourite Mint (XYZ) brand of toothpaste and ran to grab the taxi to the airport. Hurrah we were flying to India! The reason, mention of XYZ sound like an advertisement yet it appears in Google searches and improves visibility, the content is not repeated (which means Google does not penalise). I would prefer to stay away from this, it doesn't sound quite right. My recent post Law Street (The Economic Times:April 27, 2012)

By: catarinaalexon

catarinaalexon — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 16:24:36 +0000

Glad you agree with me about the importance of this topic, Geek Girl. Presumably you know a lot about it. The same phenomena exists on social media where, on Linkedin, approx 2-3 percent of members behave badly i.e. bullying, nasty comments, slandering others and so forth. Don't these people realize that they are shoothing themselves in the foot? Their abuse behavior can come back to haunt them 20 years from now and stop them from being accepted for a post in say, The State Department:-)

By: @citherrien

@citherrien — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 16:07:36 +0000

This is such an important topic. People do not realize that with everything happening in 'real time' any comments made can have a quick and immediate response, not always a good response. Better to be proactive than reactive and perhaps too late.

By: catarinaalexon

catarinaalexon — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 15:57:48 +0000

Thank you Susan. Probably the most difficult is someone who was fired, like in Lubna's story. When they are angry they can spread inside information that's not flattering for the company as revenge. Even if the information is true taken out of context it can seem horrendous:-)

By: Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 15:44:10 +0000

What an excellent article. I have many takeaways: It is really scary to know that a negativity false statement aout a company or an individual can reck havock for a greater time then it is possible to imagine. Paying attention to the noise that is out there about your business is more important then ever. Taking decisive steps to mitigate it even more so. I'm going to be checking mine out right now. My recent post Breville “The Hot Wok” Electric Wok: Product Review