Participation online is available to everyone who has connectivity and being able to ‘have your say’ is an empowering opportunity. But what if what someone wants to say puts your reputation on the line?

Reputation management is important. Tracking your company name and that of your key employees is part of any online marketing campaign. You can control all your online output but you cannot control the public’s response. Ignoring it could cost you your reputation and as we know, in business reputation is everything.

A recent libel case has highlighted the potential damage that an individual can do. In an unprecedented case, Michael Keith Smith, a member of the UK Independence Party, was awarded £10,000 in damages against Tracy Williams a contributor of a Yahoo! discussion group that called Mr Smith a sexual offender, a nonce, a racist bigot and a Nazi.

In Mr Smith’s case, the judge was probably right when he said that few people would have read the comments made by Ms Williams. In fact more people will be curious about her allegations now that the case has gone to court.

Unlike newspapers where there are only a few publications with a large readership the online environment is vast. Anyone can post anonymously online whether it is in a blog, a chartroom, message board or any of the social networking sites and whilst most comments are usually quickly forgotten others can go viral and spread across the internet within minutes.

Some sites are set up specifically to attract comments about others. Ratemyteachers.com, for example, encourages visitors to give their teachers scores for easiness, helpfulness and clarity. It also leaves space for comments.

Getunvanished.com is a new site still in its beta stage which allows people to leave comments about their bosses. This has important implications for businesses not just for individuals.

During regular checks in search engines for your company name, brand or members of your team can help to nip things in the bud. Setting up Google Alerts is useful too and takes the donkey work out of doing regular searches yourself. Reputation management is also a service that can be provided. Propero Digital can help to keep your company name healthy online.

The Smith case may have set a precedent for libellous online comments. Up till now there has been a great freedom of speech afforded to us all but as with any freedom it can be abused. Of course libel laws have always been there but perhaps people will think twice about making online claims that they cannot substantiate.

Many companies have decided that social networking is not for them. However new developments online mean that companies who don’t opt in could be missing out.

Google search now includes a live search section which updates by the minute with information from all over the web including up to date blog posts, Tweets and feeds from FriendFeed. To a certain extent when Google moves in a direction it is unwise to ignore it. It is the search engine which generates the most traffic.

Choosing not to include a social networking element to your online marketing campaign means that you might be missing out on extra traffic. If your competitors are involved they could have the advantage.

There is also a possibility that you could be misrepresented online too. UK political parties, for example are leaving themselves exposed in the social networking arena. Tamar, a search agency, undertook research which looked at the reputation management of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to see how well they had positioned themselves online. They found that neither leaders had protected their position in Twitter.

The Twitter accounts with the names of the leaders were not official accounts. @davidcameron was featuring unofficial party news but currently has the message:

‘This unofficial Twitter is now shutting down, at the reasonable & very polite request of Tory HQ. Please follow @conservatives for updates.’

The Tamar report said:

‘With the explosion of real-time search recently, it’s even more important for the political parties to take both factual and ’social’ search seriously. Simple actions such as registering the names of key figures, opening Facebook accounts and engaging on Twitter.’

This is good advice for all businesses.

Reputation is everything in business. A good reputation precedes you but so does a bad one. The latest video from Yahoo’s Hack Day shows that someone is not really concentrating on reputation management.

Hack Days are events that are hosted by the search engine company, Yahoo. Participants are invited to create web applications using Yahoo’s API’s or open source libraries.

The latest event took place last weekend in Taiwan. The entertainment included lap dancers and in an industry that is apparently trying to encourage more women to get involved this does not seem to be a wise move.

According to many blog reports lap-dancers are common at Taiwanese events but this is not the point.

Yahoo Developer Network head Chris Yeh apologised for hiring the ‘go-go’ dancers.

In an email he said:

‘Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies… And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.’

The YouTube video of the Hack Girls, as they are known, has now been taken down but the Hack Girls were part of the entertainment at last years event in Taiwan too.

One blogger and techie, Simon Wilson, said:

‘Our industry is still young. If we want an all-encompassing technology scene, we need to actively work to cultivate an inclusive environment. This means a zero tolerance approach to this kind of entertainment. Booth babes, tequila girls, and scantily clad gyrating women simply set the wrong tone, here or abroad. Heck, this isn’t just about offending women—many guy geeks I know would be mortified by this kind of thing.’

Bad PR online can be difficult to control if something goes awry. It is the job of good online marketing companies to handle your reputation management needs but surely this extreme misjudgement by Yahoo is hard to forget.

Social media is a very important aspect of online marketing at the moment but as with any sector there are downsides that a business must be aware of.

Technical Issues
As reported by Propero Digital, social networking site Facebook has been experiencing technical difficulties in its advertising. Customers have been charged for more click-throughs than they have actually received. As with any business service its important to keep an eye on the figures. Human error is part and parcel of the business world so keeping an eye on things is useful.

Social Conscience
Many early teens sign up to accounts that are intended for older users and recent evidence shows that parents are very uninformed as to what their teenagers get up to on social networking sites. The survey showed that 22% of teens check their networks more than ten times a day, although only 4% of parents thought that they did this.

James Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media who conducted the survey said:

‘In today’s digital environment, parents have less time to supervise their kids’ behavior,” . “Communication and socialization in our kids’ world is increasingly moving from face-to-face to face-to-cyberspace, and parents vastly underestimate the amount of time that kids spend on their networks. That makes it more challenging for parents to actually parent in the crucial areas of social interaction and development, and, in a digital world, parents need to play a more important role than ever in ensuring that kids get the best of these technologies and are using them safely.’

Business needs to have an awareness of these online issues.

Privacy
There have been concerns over online privacy issues where social media is concerned. Facebook for example has received much controversy as it uses the information you write in your profile, messages and infact everywhere on its site, to inform the kind of advertising that users get. Whilst this kind of search marketing is very useful to business some users have complained that this is an intrusion into their privacy.

From a business point of view, how will you keep your privacy and confidentiality issues intact? You need a policy and employees need to be very clear of what the rules are when they participate online.

Reputation
Your online reputation is important so any communication via social media must be well thought through. Its easy for bad as well as good publicity to spread like wild-fire. Also this kind of ‘passing on’ of information is a little bit like Chinese Whispers: the real facts can alter as the info gets passed along.

Time Wasting
In any business activity its important to get a return on your investment and working with social media is no different. Interacting online can take up a lot of time. The most important advice here is to develop a social media strategy. What are your objectives? How will you meet them within the time you have available? A recent US survey found that social networking costs employers 1.5% in lost productivity.

As reported by Propero Digital, Microsoft launched its new look search engine, Bing last month. In an attempt to capitalise on its launch it ran a jingle competition. The result – Bing Goes The Internet – a dreadful but amusing video which has sparked a great deal of online buzz for Microsoft.

The video was made by Johnathan Mann who has set himself the mission of producing one YouTube video a day. The Bing jingle is the 202nd.

Microsoft has done well with this in many ways by gaining huge amounts of publicity – good and bad. What are the lessons we can learn from this?

Engage Your Audience
Thousands of people responded to the call for a jingle. People like to be involved. Asking for help can give your company a human face.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage
People like to interact online. Microsoft used people from their community forums to ask for help. They used YouTube, already hugely popular, to host the competition. They then allowed people to vote for their favourite tune and then to discuss the winner. Blogs all over the world then commented and spread the word of Bing further. In other words all forms of social media were involved to best effect.

Cost Effective Marketing
The competition winner received $500 for his trouble. What a coup for Microsoft! Although they could also have run this competition and not offered any reward at all and there would have been plenty of entrants.

On the Downside
Many have criticised Microsoft for their Bing Jingle campaign. Critics say that it is so tacky that it has not helped them in their attempt to catch up with Google but has in fact detracted from their efforts.

Critics of Bing say that people are happy with Google and that the new search engine does not provide anything spectacularly different that would encourage others to move to it.

In response, Google have recently released information about how they are currently developing their new algorithms for Google Caffeine which has more update content than currently available on the standard Google search engines.

A Word of Warning
We need to decide what we are trying to achieve.  Bing Goes the Internet is tacky (although annoyingly catchy) but it has created attention for Bing.  But how might negative attention attention affect your company?  Microsoft is large and can take knock backs and criticism but smaller companies can rely on their reputations.  Reputation management is important. After the jingle uproar Microsoft were careful to add that the winner was chosen by the public.  50% from votes and 50% from online viewing figures.

Those you think that all publicity is good publicity could be along the right lines in this instance. One of the marketing aims of social media is to drive traffic to your site. For Bing to become popular it needs to be seen and tried out. What better way for this to happen than to drive a lot of traffic its way via the buzz of viral marketing that the Bing Jingle has created.  But is it good enough to keep people away from Google? Time will tell.