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.

Marketing executives are increasing their social media spend and its a fantastic marketing tool for businesses. But as with any new (fairly – although not so much in the marketing world) online marketing tool sensible caution needs to be exercised. So are there dangers in social networking and what can we do about them?

According to a Legal and General survey social networking is a potential breeding ground for thieves.

Their survey was put together by reformed burglar Michael Fraser and found that some people are so liberal with their personal information that they could be putting themselves seriously at risk. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow you to leave open messages which can be read by strangers.

People freely give away Information such as their  holiday plans and proposed visits away from the home.

• 5% of respondents said they had includes their address in their personal info section of a social networking site and 9% have added their phone numbers.

Michael Fraser siad, ‘There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that burglars are using social networks to develop relationships with people to identify likely targets.

‘They gain confidence by learning more about them, what they are likely to own and when they are likely to be out of the house, and then target appropriate victims.’

So what are the lessons that business can take from this?

Planning
According to Legal and General, over-exuberance with information is linked to younger people who perhaps are not so aware of dangers. They may be less likely to think ahead and plan. If you use or are interesting in starting to use social networking sites ask yourself the following quesitons:

What are we trying to achieve?
What do we want to say?
When do we want to say it?
Who do we want to say it?

Protect Your Reputation
Think carefully about public perception. Reputation management can be difficult after the horse has bolted. What is the information you are giving out on social network sites saying about you? Anyone can set up a site with your businesses name on it.What are they saying about you?  Keep up with others blogs about you as well as your own.

How would you deal with employees who speak negatively about your company?

Protect Your Staff
Your staff make your company. Are they protected online? Are they happy with the information you publish about them?

If you have members of staff who are blogging, are they fully aware of your expectations and company ethos? Are they trained in copyright laws?

Reputation management is something the town council of Bialystok would do well to invest in as soon as possible to alleviate the mess they currently find themselves in, now rapidly gaining fame as the ‘gay Polish city’.

It could be seen as a silly mistake. The new logo of Białystok bears an obvious similarity to the logo of a gay institution in New York.

So what? They’re miles apart. Nothing else links them. Why should it matter?

However, in today’s digital world, it does matter.

The similarity was noticed by a websurfer who wrote about it on his blog.

In the ‘downtime’ between Christmas and New Year the story was picked up by other bloggers and in no time it is threatening the reputation of a perfectly respectable Polish city. If you type ‘Bialystok logo’ into Polish Google, all the first page stories are about the gay mix-up. The Roman Catholic Church is very strong in Poland – they will not be amused.

This is a classic example of how ‘branding’ can go horribly wrong when it’s not done properly. In a digital world, the rules are changing and the stakes are high – Bialystok is spending 2.7m Polish zloty (£675,000) on a rebranding campaign, and the current result is their fast-growing position as ‘the homosexual city’.

Rebranding: How did it all go wrong?

The officials of Bialystok employed a Krakow firm to rebrand their city. The image they decided to project was Bialystok as ‘the rising city’ and the logo they came up with was a representation (however vague) of the sun.

Unfortunately, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York have a very similar logo – which they have been using for at least two years.

On the evening of Friday 26^th December the first blog appeared in Poland under the heading ‘Bialystok’s homosexual logo’. Today locals are turning up at the Town Hall to give back bags, mugs and various other items bearing the new logo. They’re disgusted that Bialy-stok is becoming a laughing-stock.

Reputation management

What the story shows is how branding is moving beyond the control of the old-style branders and into the hands of any internet user.

This is the power that brings George Bush onto the first page of Google if you type in the keywords ‘miserable failure’ – and which, until Google had to be asked to remove it, used to bring up Tony Blair if you typed in ‘liar’. It won’t be long before the results of googling ‘Bialystok’ will all be to do with homosexuality.

Nowadays it is not enough to ‘have a brand’. The key issue is reputation management – and managing your reputation online, when every amateur blog can affect your rating, has become a new specialism.

Ebranding – what every decision-maker needs to know

Just to clarify a few terms.

Ebranding is about making your brand visible, meaningful and recognisable across all digital media (online, mobile phones, TV, radio, etc) as well as traditional media (print – newspapers, ads, etc).

Your brand is the impression that other people have of you. For example, in the public perception currently Bialystok = homosexuality.

Reputation management is a specialised field which involves counter-blogging to defuse Google bombs, influencing current (negative) bloggers to move them onto different discussions, link-building, and SEO’d copywriting which can counteract the negate online image and re-establish the positive image you want to project.

‘We help address these potential public relations disasters for our clients’, said Rory De Niro, MD of London-based digital marketing company PROPERO Digital, www.properodigital.com. ‘Things happen in business but, naturally, companies don’t wish to dwell on the negatives.  They need to demonstrate to their customers that they are addressing any issues and making their organisation better.  Earlier this year, for example, we were called in to handle negative publicity which reflected badly on a top UK financial institution.  Within hours, the story went from the top of the first page to page three on Google, allowing the correct, solid perception of the company to be at the forefront of the search results for their brand.’

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’, the expertise which brings your product or service to the first page of Google when users type it in as a keyword. Very few searchers look past page one on Google.

Who is to blame?

It is not an easy job to undo bad publicity ­- which is why it is so important to get it right in the first place.

What the officials of Bialystok do now is crucially important. Get it right, and disaster can be turned into triumph. Get it wrong, Bialystok, and you will serve as an eternal warning, not only to mayors in other Polish cities, but also to city councils throughout the world.

The Creative Director of the agency who designed the logo, said in their defence that the similarity between the logos ‘was just a coincidence’. That’s just not good enough.

The branding company should have got it right. They were paid well enough to do all the research into the purity of the new brand to guarantee its uniqueness. ‘Of-the-peg’ branding doesn’t work.

To quote Albert Einstein: ‘You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it’. Resolving this kind of mistake is too important to leave in the hands of people who don’t know enough about what they’re doing. If they handle this wrongly, Bialystok will just be throwing good money after bad.

Global Branding:  Putting it right

From a global branding perspective, the way to put it right is to look for the silver lining ­­- and capitalize on it.

The silver lining here is that Bialystok will be on the international map (even if most people can’t pronounce it: that ‘l’ in the middle is pronounced ‘w’).

But what happens then depends very much on the client. What do they want? What do they want to sell? Who do they want to attract? What image do they want to project locally – and globally?

What do the residents of Bialystok want? Rumour has it that the people who live in Bialystok had no idea what their logo represents, and didn’t recognize the outline of their town which appeared in the centre. Wouldn’t they rather you knew, for example, that Zubrowka Vodka (Bison Vodka) which you can buy in Waitrose, comes from that region? And Mel Brooks brought some kind of fame to the city when he named a character after it in the film ‘The Producers’ (the one with ‘Springtime for Hitler’).  Also the inventor of Esperanto (a constructed language designed for international communication), Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, was born in 1859 in Białystok.

Ebranding goes wrong when inexperienced branders get carried away by their own cleverness. It goes right when the online presence reflects honest values on the ground.

What Bialystok needs now is some expert help in devising a short-term response to the current crisis which will lead seamlessly into a long-term strategy for establishing a distinctive and unique ‘brand image’ which reflects who they are and who they can become, while making sure that they maximize their return on money already spent. It is not impossible to resolve the current crisis to their advantage and to establish Bialystok as a city to be proud of.

Jan Cisek and Susan Norman, 29 December 2008

Ebranding and verbal identity consultants with PROPERO Digital

http://www.properodigital.com