An' I [kinda] give a damn ' bout [managing] my bad reputation

March 2, 2010 6:56 AM

I have some questions about online "reputation management" for businesses. Is it legit, or is it BS?

I'm doing some research into the concept of online reputation management, meaning the way by which companies (eg, hoteliers, small businesses, et. al) manage what people are saying about them on blogs, review sites, etc. I have the following questions about it:

1.) There are companies that offer reputation management services. Are there any that are recognized as leading the industry, and if they are, what precisely are they doing when they provide this service?

2.) There is also software that supposedly does the same thing. Again, how does this software work, and is there a particular brand that is industry standard?

3.) A few years ago, when I was in Los Angeles (I think it was in February, 2007) I heard a story on the radio about how hotels were hiring full time staffers whose sole responsibility was managing negative online reviews. I can't seem to find that story or any mention of it online. Can anyone help?

4.) Are there any online resources for companies on how to manage their online reputations that aren't just fronts for some software or consulting company?

Again, I know that there are companies that deal with personal reputation management, but I'm more interested in businesses and how they deal with it. Your help would be most appreciated.

posted by orville sash to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

As for #1: I couldn't tell you who the "leaders" are, but I've talked to a couple people in this space. Mainly what they do is two-pronged:

- SEO. Bad reviews and negative blog posts will quickly eat up the top search results for your company if you're not generating traffic to both your corporate site and "independent" (I use that term loosely, see below) content that refers your company and/or links back to it. I suspect that the software in this space largely exists to monitor your ranks across search engines. It probably also scans your site to make sure that your markup is SEO-friendly.

- Personal intervention. This can range from calling up sites and advocating for the removal of negative reviews (sounds crude, but it works, as to your #3) to seeking out bloggers to write about your company, to outright setting up link farms to game Google's algorithms.
posted by mkultra at 7:24 AM on March 2, 2010

Having worked for a web site that got a fair amount of requests from these organizations, I'd say they're BS. Depending on who the services are reaching out to (someone writing on his personal blog vs. someone leaving a bad rating on a site like Amazon or Yelp vs. someone editing a person's or company's wikipedia page), the tactics generally follow the path of polite request, offer of a gift card or other positive incentive for removal of post, scary-looking letter threatening defamation lawsuit. There's variety depending on the company and the situation they're trying to whitewash, but that's typically what we've gotten and read about from readers. Here's a sample.

We were not fans of these companies, and there is a possibility of a PR blow-up if it's discovered that a company has hired a reputation management service to cajole, bribe, coerce, or otherwise scrub away customers' bad experiences.

There's a difference between a company itself reaching out to a customer who said something bad about them, and offering a discount in the hopes that the customer will give them another chance, and a company paying another company to scour the web of any negative feedback. I would say that the company would be better served investing in the former.
posted by jalexc at 8:10 AM on March 2, 2010

In the game industry, particularly MMOs, most of those tasks would be handled by the community management team. That sort of review-scouring is not the bulk of our job, but identifying unhappy players and trying to address their concerns in general is, and I've certainly done my share of sending emails saying "I'm sorry you had a bad experience - can I do x or y to help?"
posted by restless_nomad at 8:54 AM on March 2, 2010

When I was at LFP, there was a staffer for whom half of his job was managing the online reputation of Hustler, etc. (entirely thankless job, in my humble). The only good part was that it was essentially all a vaporware responsibility. He had to spend so many hours per week "researching" LFP's internet reputation, then essentially astroturfing blogs with favorable assessments, especially of our editorial department ("The new article in Hustler is really great!") and filing frivolous complaints against blogs that gave us bad reviews. This is apparently nominally accepted in pornography, in that the boss got the idea by talking to some other pornographers who had their own in-house person doing the same thing. It was entirely unquantifiable and moronic, the best part was that the guy who did it was really cool and had plenty of unsupervised free time to essentially fuck around and no one could call him on his bullshit because he was "managing our reputation." The editorial director, the guy who hired him, was always afraid to call him on his bullshit because he had no idea how much power this guy had through his job (next to none in reality, but in order to justify spending money on it, the job was of inflated importance, so the boss couldn't fire him out of fear that our reputation would be trashed).

I have no idea if there are real, effective folks who do this, though I'd imagine that a decent online PR firm would be able to help a lot more than SEO blaggers, since a decent PR firm does, essentially, reputation managing on multiple platforms.
posted by klangklangston at 5:56 PM on March 4, 2010