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QUICK TIPS FOR "KEEPING COOL"
SOMETIMES IT'S BEST TO JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!
Remember when the Internet was in its infancy and we all heard the promises about how this would lead to a simpler, paperless society? HA! It surely has transformed the way we work in many ways. Some are good and helpful. But others have made the world a much more scary place in many ways. In the arena of reputation management, the Internet has given organizations a lot more things to be concerned about. The bigger your organization is and the more visibility it has, the more it has to be alert to the many ways it can be attacked electronically.
BLOGS AND CHAT ROOMS AND ROGUE WEB SITES ABOUND
Maybe you are tired of hearing about it, but have you DONE anything about being better prepared to counter bad things being said about you here? I hope you are at least monitoring them. This can be done with a paid service that thoroughly scans all the places on the Internet where someone (and it COULD be only one person stirring things up!) is saying bad things about you -- true, partially true, or false. Or, if your visibility/vulnerability is lower, you might be able to get away with assigning someone on your staff to Google your organization's name periodically to see what's being said. You cannot successfully combat rumors or attacks on the Internet if you don't even know what is being said.
BUT YOU DON'T ALWAYS NEED TO REACT
Once you know something negative is being said about you, you must decide what, if any, action you should take. It requires some serious strategic thinking. There are many ways to respond -- posting things on your own website, trying to find out who the person is who is posting the bad stuff and attempting to reason with them, threatening legal action, etc. Each possible response must be carefully thought through. One thing you should always consider is that it is not always necessary to react. In some well documented cases, doing so just attracts more attention to the allegations and can raise the level of the controversy until it reaches many more people and is often picked up by the mainstream media.
The most recent example of this comes from the presidential campaign of former NC Senator John Edwards. A student journalist at UNC - Chapel Hill put together a piece for the campus news program about the fact that the Edwards campaign sited their office in a rather upscale area of Chapel Hill. The journalist noted that this did not seem to be the best spot for someone who claims to champion the poor. As often occurs these days, the campus news station posted the piece on YouTube where it had a viewership of about 2,000 people. When a member of the Edwards campaign staff found out about it, the reporter was asked to take it down as it did not show Mr. Edwards in a favorable light. The reporter referred the issue to her faculty advisor who refused to do it and was not intimidated when the staffer threatened to withhold all UNC-Chapel Hill access to the campaign. Upon hearing this, a blogger started writing about how outrageous this whole thing was. Simply by blogging about it, the viewership of the YouTube piece rose to over 53,000 people very quickly. This is a perfect example of making a mountain out of a mole hill. It wasn't the initial piece that did the damage -- it was the overreaction to it. You can't expect every news mention of you to be positive. It's not your Public Relations staff that is writing it. You must use good judgment in how you react to it.
A NEW ENTITY TO BE AWARE OF -- "WIKILEAKS"
If you haven't yet heard of "Wikileaks," you should learn more about this new website. Over 1.2 million confidential documents have already been leaked to it, even though it is still in development! It is billed as a forum for disclosure where the one who is posting the information can remain anonymous. It is touted as a way that journalists, dissidents and refugees from authoritarian states can safely report wrongdoing. In fact, it has exposed gross wrongdoing, like the fact that the leader of Kenya stole over $2 billion of state finances through a web of shell companies, secret trusts and frontmen.
The danger comes from the fact that Wikileaks is an extremely secretive organization. It protects the identities of those who dispense the information, so it leaves open to question what the motives might be of those who are publishing information on it. In the beginning, it focused on the actions of governments, saying on its website that they believe that "transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government, and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people." Sounds good, but...
The folks who are running Wikileaks make little if any effort to ascertain the veracity of the documents that are posted there, saying, "(We) believe that the best way to determine if a document is authentic is to open it up for analysis to the broader community -- and particularly the community of interest around the document." So they pretty much will post it and see what happens!
It is hardly a leap to the conclusion that corporations and other organizations should be equally as transparent for the good of their own employees, shareholders, etc. It is obvious that anyone with a grudge against an organization can use it to damage their reputation under the guise of whistleblowing. Something negative is posted, read by many. It is probably believed by a majority of those people because, after all, it came from someone "on the inside." The damage is done, whether what was written is true or not.
Again, organizations need to be aware that this website is out there. Then, if they find themselves a target, they need to make some quick decisions about what, if anything, to do about it. Jonathan Bernstein, a colleague and fellow crisis communications consultant with years of experience, is in the midst of putting together a document on this very subject of how to combat reputation attacks on the Internet. If you would like to know more about how to access this valuable information, please contact me.
Until next month...KEEP COOL! If I can help or you want to talk about scheduling a workshop or a conference presentation/speech for an organization, contact me at 1-800-848-3907 PIN 2145 or jchent@earthlink.net
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