e-reputation : the next big thing for public relations professionals

A few years ago, personalities and companies were fighting to be properly referenced on the Internet. Today, some of them begin to fight to be dereferenced from the result pages of major search engines. Or more precisely, the negative, defamatory, anything that does not comply with the public image that one wishes to project has to be erased or at least pushed deep into the hierarchy of results.

Since the beginning of the year, I am often asked about this issue and I find it fascinating.

The result of a a lack of culture about the web
Individuals or companies that are now facing this problem are often people or organizations who have done nothing over the internet. They have never managed their reputation proactively.

For years, most of what was happening on the Internet was described as something weird, not worth the attention. To manage reputation, people and organizations made more use of public relations agencies, asking them to operate only media relations.

But nature has a holy horror of vacuum. Internet too. If you refuse to manage your reputation on the Internet, users will do the job for you. And at doing it, and they leave image attributes everywhere on the web that you have to consider.

The Internet has become of considerable importance in reputation management (I would say crucial), but very many people did not anticipate it..

Communication directors have been exceeded
In many organizations, the management of communication is held by persons who are not of the Internet generation. They have failed to give attention to the conversations on the Internet. Either because they did not have time or because it was difficult to measure the effectiveness of investments made over the Internet, simply because it was not in their genes, they have been exceeded by the phenomenon.

And only when confronted to some bad noise, they realize they have a sudden interest in the network. This is the case of a company that contacted me recently. It has never done anything on the Internet and all its communications budget (a big budget) had been invested on traditional media. But they discovered lately that when people typed the name of the company in any search engine, the first or second result on the first page was the testimony of a unhappy customer who pretends to be victim of a scam.

The communication director did not how to manage this. He asked the IT manager to find a solution and the IT manager called me. At our first meeting, the president of the company told me that he regularly lost contract because of the negative effect of this.

The solution: promote the creation of a new profession
Hard to imagine a company without sales division. It is also difficult to imagine without "customer service". Well, the same way, the reputation management must proactively be organized, in close coordination with all operational departments.

Some call it the "community management". I do not like that because I feel that the word community refers to other concepts, which seems quite inappropriate to describe what happens on the Internet: The internet users are not a community. I prefer to call it brand or reputation director and I do not see how companies or personalities will be able to go without creating this kind of position..

To properly do the job, reputation managers will have to organize these activities together into three: intelligence, content creation and assistance.

Intelligence to identify what is being said, to understand conversations and detect weak signals on time. Creation of content to broadcast "official" messages, contribute to the conversation. Assitance finally to understand the views of stakeholders and their answers before they spread to complain about an "autism" of the organization or personality.

It is a vast task where public relations professionals can play a key role. Anyway, it's a fascinating evolution, probably one of the most exciting since I'm in this business.