I
blogged briefly about this last week, but one of my areas of passion (and
simultaneous astonishment) is the degree to which companies, associations and
other organizations that depend upon the general public for their societal
license to operate pay so little attention to what is said about them in the
online environment.  The seeds of
discontent – for brands or issues – are sown online – and harvested in the
online environment.  Ask Procter and
Gamble.

I read a recent article in Business Week entitled “Do
Reputation Management Services Work? A new approach promises to help
counter negative search results on the Web. Hiring one of these fixers may make
nasty comments go away.”  I listed
the whole title because it is telling about what is wrong with their approach -
and what the reality of the situation is that companies face.

The second article in this
paragraph presents online issues and reputational management overly
simplistically:

“Most
reputation services work by tracking what’s written about a client on the Web,
then doing search engine, promoting positive pages, and creating other sites
that will push damaging references off the first pages of search results. The
services are pitched as another tool companies can use in their PR and
marketing efforts.”

 This assumption is faulty.  It postulates that if a company is having
reputational issues, it is a “Google problem.” 
In my eleven years on the agency side of things, I can’t tell you how
many times I have met with clients who talk about their “Google problem.”  It lost me a couple of accounts, but whenever
I heard this explanation, after some research to discover the underlying
problems, I usually countered with “Mr.//Mrs. Client, you don’t have a ‘Google
problem,’ you have a ‘business problem.’” 
If you mess up your customer service – a business problem – you are
guaranteed to find a manifestation in the online environment.

One of the more sophisticated approaches
is used by www.Untied.com — a United
Airlines attack site.  With the clever
use of a URL that must bring them thousands of visits from people – like myself
- who are poor typists, you see a site that looks a lot like the United
Airlines site, but leads with headlines like:

·   
“How Does UAL Stay in Business?”

·   
“Legal Action Time”

·   
“A Harrowing Story of UAL Mistreatment”

 And on, and on.  I think that you get the point.  A WHOIS search helps me discover that this
domain was grabbed in 1997 – eleven years ago.

While there was not a robust
Google search in 1997 like there is today, somewhere, somehow, through Alta
Vista, Northern Lights, or one of the search engines left on the ash heap of
history, someone could and should have found this.  The how, why and chronology of the
site is here, but it’s apparent that United had a customer service and
business problem that lead to an online problem.  That online problem, has, in turn, become an
offline problem that spilled over into the mainstream media.  This article, written in 2000, Frustrated
Airline Travelers Vent Anger on Web Sites, is just one of more than 100
article I found that mentioned Untied.com.

So what does this have to do
with Business Week?

First, as I have said, most
“Google problems” are really business problems that need to be addressed first
by rectifying customer service complaints. Second, online reputation management
(which I will cover in subsequent articles), takes a lot of time, patience and
attention from senior management.  You
need to a) be aware of what is being said about you, b) determine if – or when
- to respond, and c) calibrate your level of response to the threat and have
complete transparency in doing so (see “Working Families for Wal*Mart”).  To do it right, it’s more than a Google
keyword alert – it takes a lot of time, and more often than not, if a response
is involved, a lot of money.  

So here’s the part of the
article that made my blood run cold: 

“But altering search results isn’t cheap. Several companies
said the typical cost for a small business client starts at $1,000 a month…
ReputationDefender, a two-year-old Menlo Park (Calif.) company that
mainly markets to individuals, plans to introduce a service for companies that
would cost a one-time fee of a few hundred dollars, according to founder
Michael Fertik.  Fertik and others are
establishing a trade group, the Online Reputation Management Assn., to certify
members and promote best practices, because no clear standards exist for what
is and is not acceptable.

If a
trade association is being founded my someone who thinks that you can justify
an organization’s societal license to operate thinks that it will cost a “one
time fee of a few hundred dollars,” those of us in the online reputation space
should be very worried.

Mark Story is a part-time, adjunct professor at Georgetown
University and a full-time communications professional at a government
agency in Washington, D.C. Prior to the government, Mark worked for 11
years in some of the largest online public relations shops in the world.