Managing Online Reputation

How to Protect Your Company on Social Media

Charlie Pownall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137382306
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Managing Online Reputation is a comprehensive look at online reputation management. Drawing on recent examples of organizations managing their online reputations effectively and ineffectively, it provides a practical and visual tool-kit of processes and techniques to help limit and respond effectively to negative situations on social media.

chapter 1

The New Abnormal

I write this book in an office with a birds-eye view of the Occupy protests in Hong Kong. Far below, a multi-colored tented village strewn with umbrellas, agitprop and Post-it Notes nestles uncomfortably between anonymous, glass skyscrapers. The days are eerily quiet. Steel and wooden barriers keep the traffic at bay while students at makeshift classrooms pore over accountancy manuals and medical histories, their movements tracked by the police, a phalanx of journalists, and gaggles of bemused tourists. It could be a scene lifted from a J.G. Ballard dystopia.

At night, the atmosphere transforms as locals stop by on the way home from work, and student leaders and politicians take to improvised platforms to call the government to account over its reluctance, unwillingness or inability to countenance more democratic elections. Suddenly a group of masked protestors moves close to the main stage and demands to speak, only to be turned away when they refuse to identify themselves. Angry, they start to dismantle one of the barricades but are turned back by outraged students. The mob, it transpires, has been organized in response to a post by a user called “Rather too naïve” on HKGolden, a popular local online community, that is calling for people to tear down the protestors’ main speaking stage and replace it with one that anyone can use, not just the student groups and their acolytes.

Much of the ebb and flow of the protests is marshalled online. The two principal protest groups – Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students – use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to recruit and organize their troops and communicate their point of view. But the weapons of choice are Snapchat and FireChat. Snapchat is an encrypted mobile photo sharing service that enables users to set how long recipients can see their messages, while FireChat is a “mesh” mobile application that uses WiFi and Bluetooth links independent of internet connections or data networks, meaning messages can be delivered even if the internet is blocked or mobile networks are shut down. These kinds of tools enable people to communicate with groups of friends or sympathizers without having to worry about internet restrictions or, in the case of Snapchat, about being monitored or intercepted, meaning Hong Kong’s student leaders can immediately and securely mobilize thousands of people at a moment’s notice. Firechat was downloaded over 500,000 times in Hong Kong in the first 10 days of the protests.

Until recently, technologies of this nature would have been the preserve of governments and deep pocketed companies wanting to secure their communications. That they are now available to students is indicative of the degree to which the communications landscape has transformed. But this transformation is less about technology than about expectations and behavior, both of which are evident in five major shifts: the extraordinary speed with which information moves, widespread skepticism about big institutions and the media, the ease with which anyone can damage even the most reputable institution, the increasingly tribal and polarized nature of online communities, and the fickleness of opinion.

Information travels at warp speed

In November 2010, rumors of a crash of a Qantas A380 swept across the Internet. In fact, the plane’s engine had only caught fire and it made a successful emergency landing in Singapore. Yet rumor became hard news as people shared eyewitness accounts online, especially on Twitter, which were quickly picked up by leading newswires and mainstream media outlets. Normally, the airline would have rushed to issue a holding statement to the media in order to buy it sufficient breathing space to get the actual facts. But in this case, the story had already gone viral, disseminated not by professional journalists but by ordinary people fascinated by the events and unbound by the need to check their facts and double-check their sources.

In 1710, Jonathan Swift quipped “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” If only he were alive today. With every move and false move reported and scrutinized, it should come as little surprise that many organizations feel permanently under the gun and spend much of their time looking warily over their shoulders and scrabbling for a response. How fast information moves depends on many factors, from a firm’s physical footprint to the strength of its reputation. Local online culture is also important. Online word-of-mouth in China, for example, travels at speeds that leave even the most experienced international executives slack-jawed, partly because of the sheer numbers of people involved, partly because much information in China is not commented upon, but cut and pasted immediately to weibo or WeChat, China’s Twitter and WhatsApp equivalents.

Speed is also symptomatic of how exposed organizations are to online opinion. The more visible a company and the more widespread and entrenched its online detractors, the faster bad news about it circulates. When technology journalist Ryan Block called Comcast customer care to cancel his contract, his experience at the hands of one of its customer care representatives was so nightmarish he decided to record the experience half-way through the conversation. The recording, which he later posted online, shows the customer rep repeatedly demanding why Block was canceling the service and finding any way to stall him from doing so. The recording instantly went viral and has since been listened to almost 6 million times, covered extensively by the mainstream media and was even immortalized in a New Yorker cartoon. The fact that the discussion was recorded and could be accessed instantly by anyone certainly helped it go viral. But much of its visibility can be attributed to the fact that Comcast is widely disliked and has a reputation for lousy customer service, meaning it has to deal not just with an army of angry customers and bloggers regularly sounding off online, but also with an array of anti-Comcast online communities, websites, and blogs. News aggregator Reddit has a special section (aka “subreddit”) with over 1,800 members “dedicated to venting about your shitty experiences with Comcast. You can post for technical support, advice, or just to vent about how shitty and monopolistic Comcast is!”¹

Skepticism abounds

On July 23, 2011, lightening hit one of China’s latest high-speed trains on a viaduct outside the south-eastern city of Wenzhou, causing it to collide with another train and killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200 others. The incident quickly caught the attention of the local and national media, which rushed to the scene only to discover eight mechanical diggers burying two of the carriages into freshly dug trenches. Their attempts were recorded on video and posted online, infuriating locals who promptly took to the Internet in droves to complain that the authorities were trying to cover up the accident. Subsequent attempts by Beijing to downplay the incident only made matters worse, with over 90% of people in an informal poll on Sina Weibo opting to describe the government’s response as “terrible – it doesn’t treat us as humans.”

It is tempting for foreigners to believe Beijing reaps what it sows, but doubts about the degree to which governments and companies are acting in the best interests of their constituents are not limited to the Middle Kingdom. According to the Pew Research Center, trust in the US government dropped from 77% in 1964 to 24% in 2014.² Public relations firm Edelman’s 2014 Trust Barometer revealed trust in government in many parts of the world had fallen to record low levels.³ Business and the media also have their work cut out. Edelman’s study also found that only a quarter of people say they trust CEOs to be honest and even fewer trust them to make decisions based on ethical and moral considerations.

This is not to say that skepticism or cynicism pervade every corner of the web; organizations with strong reputations are more than likely to be given the benefit of the doubt where a problem is seen as unusual and isolated. Yet those seen as behaving systematically poorly or inappropriately can expect to be lambasted online. Despite apologizing to Ryan Block and his girlfriend in person and via a statement posted to its website assuring that “The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives,” Comcast continued to receive an online lashing, a lashing that turned into a full thrashing once Block had uncovered a thread on Reddit posted by a former Comcast employee stating that the firm employed dedicated “Retention Specialists” compensated by the number of customers they manage to keep on board.

Even the most highly regarded firms can be ridiculed mercilessly if they are seen to be deliberately misleading their audiences. In 2012, General Mills was named the “Most Reputable Company in America” by the Reputation Institute. But when the cereal maker updated its legal terms two years later so that its customers could no longer sue the firm, and tried to do so under the radar by merely updating the relevant pages on its website, a public outcry ensued. It reversed course two days later. But by claiming its terms – and the company’s intentions – had been “widely misread,”⁴ even its reverse caused significant friction.

The mainstream media fares little better. Until recently, reputable newspapers such as The New York Times, The Times of India, and Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan and the world’s biggest selling newspaper with over 10 million daily readers) or broadcasters like the BBC played a vital role in determining what people read about and, by extension, what they did not read about. But with classifieds disappearing to free listing sites like Craigslist and with news commoditized, publishers are under huge pressure to publish faster, cut costs and be more opinionated. And this has led to a rash of fictitious, inaccurate and skewed articles, giving readers additional reasons to migrate to the likes of Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and Vox. This migration may prove permanent: Business Insider now boasts more readers than The Wall Street Journal.⁵

Worryingly, these new players can bring very different editorial standards, mixing hard news and “native advertising” (branded company content dressed up as semi-independent feature stories), analysis and publisher-owned consultancy services, animated gifs and kitten photos in a manner reminiscent of the bawdy Yellow and Penny Presses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Ryan Holiday sets out in his coruscating book Trust Me, I’m Lying (for a precis, see Twelve Useful Books on Online Reputation at the end of this book), the fact that bloggers working for Buzzfeed and other tabloid-esque outlets are paid by the number of page views their stories generate means facts are routinely ignored in the race to break a story or secure a new angle. And once Buzzfeed runs a story, it is far more likely that it is going to be picked up by CNN or the Daily Mail Online. The end result is a vicious circle in which half-truths, partial truths, and outright falsities are peddled by all levels of the media and are consumed by a public disinterested in the facts and willing to believe the worst. No wonder people are skeptical.

Anyone can wield a lightsaber

If you have seen Star Wars you will remember the lightsaber, the sword-like weapon used in close combat by the Jedi Knights and the Sith. Made from plasma and suspended in a force containment field lightsabers were heavy and awkward to use, but a weapon to be feared in the hands of an expert. “Anyone can use a blaster or fusioncutter,” noted Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode IV, “but to use a lightsaber well was a mark of someone a cut above the ordinary.” A few months ago, having received a check for some work I had completed in Singapore, I went to my local HSBC Business Bank branch in Hong Kong expecting to deposit the funds quickly and easily, only to be told the transaction would be subject to an unexpectedly large charge and take three weeks to clear. Surprised and irritated, I took to Twitter to express my displeasure. To its credit, the bank publicly responded in a couple of hours, even if it was just to suggest I contact its UK call center. Clocking into my Internet banking account a few days later, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the check had already cleared and the charges had been reduced. With Twitter at my disposal, I figure I have a much better chance of making my case if I use a blaster to escalate a complaint than if I take the conventional route of filling out a form and hoping for the best, or even writing to my bank manager.

When Hasan Syed’s parents lost their luggage traveling from Chicago to Paris in August 2013, he unsheathed a lightsaber. Fed up with the way British Airways was handling the issue, Mr Syed took to Twitter. But instead of simply tweeting his complaint, he bought USD 1,000 of “promoted tweets” via Twitter’s self-service ad-buying platform to warn people that the airline’s customer service was “horrendous” and that they “can’t keep track of your baggage.” And he threatened to keep running the ads until BA found his parents’ belongings.

Compared to traditional advertising, promoted tweets are cheap, highly focused (they can be targeted geographically, by language, gender, interest and a host of other options.), and can be tracked and improved in real-time. In this case, Syed aimed his ad at followers of BA’s Twitter profiles in the US and UK. But this being the first time an individual had bought advertising on Twitter to attack a big, global company, it also attracted the interest of the media. Within six hours, the high-profile US-based technology blog Mashable had picked up and run his story, resulting in a wave of re-tweets, blog posts, and media coverage from the BBC, Mail Online, Huffington Post, NBC News and hundreds of other news outlets and blogs around the world.

Of course, Hasan Syed is far from alone in recognizing the power of social media; nowadays anyone with Internet access can take to Twitter or Facebook to get something off their chest. For example, employees now have a powerful weapon to use against their employers (a fact not lost on US government whistleblower Edward Snowden). It is also far easier for businesses or jilted lovers to spread rumors about their competitors – all that is needed is a fake name and an email address unconnected with the company.

The geographical playing-field has also been flattened. A blogger in one country can now say something completely untrue about an individual or company and be reasonably confident that he is not going to get dragged into a legal dispute thanks to the inconsistency of legal regimes. Data hacks are routinely orchestrated from other countries, as Sony Pictures discovered in late 2014, when it suffered a huge leak of internal emails, documents, and personal details of employees that was purportedly planned and executed in North Korea.

The ability to damage a firm, then, is no longer limited to those with the right connections. Threats can now be made by just about anyone, at any time, from any place and in ways that are expressly designed to cause maximum disruption and reputational damage.

Tribalism fuels animosity

One of my earlier experiences building and managing online communities was to help a group of business people, economists, and politicians devise and run a website on Europe’s single currency. It was the late 1990s, against a background of high fever in the UK about the prospect of European monetary union and whether or not Britain would join, and the idea was to provide useful, factual information for British businesses faced with having to deal with a massive trading block operating in a powerful new and foreign currency on its doorstop, and a neutral place where they could discuss the latest issues and ask for advice.

Unsurprisingly the task of keeping the community focused on the matter at hand – the practicalities of the single currency for British business, as opposed to the vexed political question of Britain’s role – proved challenging. Most users of the site visited to gain a better understanding of the issues and, even if they were anti-single currency or flat out anti-European, they appreciated its neutral stance and stuck to its clearly stated rules of engagement. Yet a small and vocal minority persistently tried to disrupt matters and turn the community into an extension of the brawling going on in Parliament. On a couple of occasions it was hacked.

Fortunately, the vocal minority never got to dominate the majority, partly as we rigorously ensured that the content published and the discussions taking place on the site did not overstep the mark. People who did were warned and if they transgressed again were banned. But managing online communities and discussions in those days was relatively straightforward. Fewer people were online, and they were less sophisticated in how they used technology to make their point. More pertinently, there was no Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube to speak of, meaning that there were far fewer places for people to congregate and talk about their interests, and the sites that did exist were relatively difficult to use and provided no way for people to follow one another as individuals or as groups. Backlashes were largely confined to the community where discussions were taking place or to email ca...