Reputation of Reputation Management

There’s a good article on the Computerworld website, Online Reputation Management is Hot… But is it Ethical?”

It explains in detail the growing number of options for tracking online buzz related to companies, people, products and brands.

You might be wondering why this is so important. Well, as Gareth O’Sullivan puts it, without reputation monitoring “Social Media Outreach Can Be Downright Dangerous“. It’s that important.

According to the article on the Computerworld website:

Online reputation management “is a space that’s hot and is heating up
further,” says Jeff Zabin, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. who
recently co-authored a report on social media monitoring and analysis.
Executives are waking up to how the Internet can be used as an early
warning system to alert them if their company’s brand names and
reputations are at risk as a result of a product defect, a disgruntled
customer’s blog rant or some other looming crisis, says Zabin.

The article covers vendors ranging from those that use natural language processing and other techniques to find, report on and classify related online conversations (Buzzmetrics, Umbria and Cymfony), to those using SEO techniques to elevate (or, in the case of bad buzz) diminish search engine rankings of offending content (ReputationHawk, Elixir Systems and Buildtelligence). Others, like Buzzlogic, provide subscription-based dashboards for monitoring the blogosphere and aggregating info.

It should be required reading for anyone in PR – paper clip harvesting services are oh so yesterday, and the range of systems that we as a profession have relied on to track online and offline media can be helpful but do not provide the same functionality or set of services (in fairness, there is a pretty big price discrepancy).

The article cites a number of cases studies and discusses functionality. This is Computerworld, and it takes somewhat of a techie viewpoint, which I actually found helpful in understanding features and functionality of the alternatives.

On the other hand, you can forgive CW for not taking a more nuanced PR view as that is generally not their bailiwick.

The issue is framed as an ethical one, and the article reduces reputation management to just another technology category which it is not. It almost makes it sound like it can be boiled down to an algorithm. The reputation management companies tend to focus more on removing, suppressing, repairing, and monitoring their clients’ online presence with the help of expert advice.