Using your reputation.com, .info, .net to work for you

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There are many different ways to enhance the way you are perceived online, whether your have great commentary floating around or negative critics trying to attack you.

The first step in creating your digital identity is to HAVE an identity, a brand, a mission, a public face.

Your online reputation revolves around your decision to have a specific digital identity.

Think of it like this: if you are sitting on the beach with a truck load of sand, imagine that every grain says something different about you.

No one has a reasonable chance of understand how each grain really represents you, but you can make it easier by forming the grains of sand into a sand castle, sculpture, or statement about you. Read more

Online Reputation, articles from our founder

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In addition to some of the exclusive content here @ Social Media Reputation, our founder’s blog has a variety of informational articles covering the crossroads of online privacy, reputation management, and corporate risk. He deals with a variety of elements that touch within these three spheres, while also looking at the benefit points within each.

If you would like us to review a specific reputation management item or dive deeper into one of these issues, simply contact us and we’ll take a look at it! You can also follow our tweets @ceoreputation

  • Online Privacy and our Digital Crisis – there is so much data created, shared, collected, and sold about us as individuals that we all need to take more responsibility for.
  • Corporate Reputation on Complaint Sites – businesses spend a huge amount of effort creating on-going reputations, but new ‘net savvy’ businesses are using complaint sites to steal brand traffic and cause significant damages.
  • Reputation Management and Work Life Balance – tired of having a split personality online? this article talks about the details and reasoning behind a personal and professional online presence.
  • Avvo Ratings, why lawyers and doctors should be scared – attorneys and doctors are low-hanging “SEO Fruit” to own online. Find out how different professional niches are being targeted by new online business models to steal online brand traffic that includes prospects, clients, employees, and more.

If you have any questions about digital brand or reputation management, please feel free to use the comments below or share some questions via e-mail.

HP CEO Mark Hurd fired, HP brand in the bullseye

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On Friday August , HP CEO Mark Hurd was ousted from the top of the monolithic electronics giant. While Wall Street may be treating HP with an optimistic outlook – the small shift is only a sign that HP has released a critical brand target that resonates through-out the corporate ecosystem.

“Investors are clearly nervous. Shares of HP plunged 7% on Monday despite the fact that the company also issued bullish guidance Friday after the bell. Of course, nobody cared because that’s when HP also announced the Hurd mess.”
~ Paul R. La Monica (CNN MONEY)

Mark Hurd has been upheld as a thought-leader and effective business man, but his reason for leaving the throne of HP revolves around indiscretion with a female HP contractor. Read more

Corporate Reputation Management top stories

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While there are many ways of looking at corporate reputation management, our team is constantly reading industry peers and like-minded professionals across a variety of organizational levels.

As we often see first hand: the main problem with corporate reputation resides from the fact that it has hundreds of different touch points ranging across the company. This includes top level CEO reputation, executives, managers, employees, product issues, marketplace concerns, and industry shifts.

This gives corporate communicators a huge task in the digital world: attempt to maneuver through hundreds of thousands of interconnected personal webs without becoming helplessly caught in the chaos.

To help broaden your perspective on how reputation affects larger organizations, we have to really think outside the standard box and consider these additional touch points. Without giving yourself some breadth to your perspective on corporate reputation management, you mistakenly apply tactical solutions instead of holistic strategy. With a strong education, you can detail your corporate reputation value (click to see a quick example of United Airlines reputation value.) Read more

Forbes Publishes Reputation Institutes 2010 Most Reputable Companies

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Based on 24,977 online interviews and asking people about their perceptions of the nation’s largest companies, the Reputation Institute reviewed services, innovation, workplace, governance, citizenship, financial performance and leadership.With all those numbers… it came out with a score of 0 to 100. Read more

How can a CEO improve a company’s reputation?

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This is a complex question with an easy answer. This is a concept that feels soft and fluffy, but in reality the core answer is be a leader and create change.

In almost every instance of poor reputation, the realm of social media and online conversation magnifies the risk enterprise businesses face. CEOs and companies with bad results become simple victims of inaction. This is a thought that I detailed in my article CEO reputation, how to lead or fail online.

If we step back for a moment and simply look at the method of communication used at the executive level, many large companies are preaching about how transparent and real they are… but secretly hiding dozens of clients that they expect to keep hidden.

While some privacy is deserved, the larger an organization becomes the more gossip and conversation occurs. Interacting with thousands of employees or hundreds of thousands of consumers creates an almost infinite number of holes within the concept of a corporate walled garden. The solution to this problem is to understand the conversation and not be blindsided by its presence.

Moving into the realm of management and as a coordinator of storytelling, the job becomes difficult in adhering to the truthful and factual nature of business.

We need to accept this basic truth:

  • Leaders create change. They explore options. The make hard decisions.
  • CEOs take paychecks. Maintain the status qou. Excel in mediocrity.

So the fundamental answer to the question “How can a CEO improve a company’s reputation?” is simply=-

“A CEO cannot improve a company’s reputation, only a leader can.”

Corporate Reputation and Recruiting

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As founder of Social Media Reputation, I am always interacting with multiple professional groups and coordinating dozens of projects. As such, I maintain a “personal blog” that connects several of our partner services and serves as a home for articles that fit into several categories. In that facet, I wanted to point you over to my personal blog where you can find several items regarding how online reputation and corporate brand affects the recruiting silo.

The first article is for job seekers: How to Write a Resume, Interactive Personal Branding 101. – This includes several tips on maximizing your digital presence as a professional. It is really helpful even if you are “safe and happy” in your current position. The steps I review are valuable assets that gain over time and get better with age.

The second and third items are two webinars that I have the privilege to recently present for the Wall Street Journal.

Webinar #1 – Corporate Reputation and Online Recruiting. Confused about how Twitter, Facebook, and Local search interact with job hunting? This twenty-five minute presentation discusses some interesting points on how candidates in the digital world interact with business brands during the recruiting process. As an employer or a job candidate, both type of professional gain some great insight to how different cogs interact during the job process.

Webinar #2– Social Media Recruiting – this covers some useful tools for gathering information about candidates and potential employers. When trying to present a company as an “employer of choice” or trying to stand out as an “amazing candidate”, online information and your ability to find useful data creates dozens of exceptional opportunities that less savvy professionals don’t have access to.

Google loves your network, so should you.

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You have spent years developing a strong personal network… yet over the past few years you’ve been letting someone care for it more than you do.

Who? Google.

As an professional you could be looking at CEO reputation or how different online reputation types work. Depending on your roll in life, your personal and professional brand can drive between five to five hundred searches per month on your “personal name” as a keyword. For any professional with an interest in how other people perceive them, this is a critical point to understand.

If you are part of a team of professionals, these personal and professional name searches quickly escalate into hundreds or thousands of searches every month. An example management team with 15 to 20 members generates anywhere from 400 to 5000 searches a month. If this is a public facing group (I.E. executive or business development channel) then this search traffic is being entirely left unattended. Read more

CEO Reputation, how to lead or fail online

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Many top executives experience both love and hate of the promotional affect of the web, however CEO reputation in the digital space interacts with dozens of new elements including investor relations, customer service, stock prices, perception of liability, and more.

Depending on what report you look at, business analysts attribute somewhere between 23% and 52% of a companies reputation based on the reputation of the CEO. This percentage of ownership in the digital space is directly related to CEO names and executive staff members being in the spotlight when it comes to news coverage. Ask any journalist, the CEO of a company is usually the top choice for interviews and industry coverage.

Read more

2010 Online Reputation Survey

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The staff here at Social Media Reputation (SMR) is always doing our best to understand the metrics driving our clients and our marketplace. To help clarify some of the critical issues facing companies today, we have been collecting survey information from hundreds of individuals relating to digital reputation.

If you would like to be included in the survey and receive a final copy of the report when it is finalized, please visit the survey form by clicking here.