LastPass is a high-quality online password manager for all popular web browsers. It lets you toggle between multiple online identities and brands (personal, business, client #1, client #2) at the click of a button – and it remembers all the passwords without getting any of the details mixed up:

The most complex and crucial part of an ORM campaign is online identity management (i.e., tracking the Gmail, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. logins and information continuity – for each of your brands and clients). If you don’t have a solid tool like LastPass (basic version free, $12 per year for premium) – you’ll be tempted to use the same password for all the accounts – and chances are you’ll forget some of them or keep them in an insecure place. I just switched to LastPass from 1Password and it is one of the very best online idenitty management tools. It does a lot more than just remember passwords, so explore it and find out.

(Note: I have no absolutely affiliation with the makers of this software, I just dig it.)

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Recently, the Iran arms smuggler for Hamas (a Palestinian Arab terrorist group) was assassinated in a Dubai hotel room. The suspects used forged passports bearing the names and photos of real people in Israel and other countries. These innocent people woke up one morning to find out they had been framed as killers: their name and reputation was “assassinated,” ruined in the international press.

These people were framed, most likely by an Arab or Israeli intelligence operative. Photo: AP

Even if you think that using someone else’s name or picture won’t be a big deal, it can have serious and international-scale repercussions. It can also backfire and mess up your online reputation. Here’s how:

Using Someone’s Name or Likeness Without Permission

My friend Sitka in Oregon woke up to find out a picture of her face was featured in a Korean national newspaper. Her friend, who was teaching English in Seoul, saw her face in a column on improving English skills. She had no idea how the Korean paper possibly got her picture. What did she do? She blogged about it. This can easily create negative publicity for the organization that used the person’s image.

The Law: The person who takes the photograph, or who makes the art or diagram owns the copyright to it. It is legal to use a photo featuring a person’s image on the Web as long as you took it yourself, or else have permission from the photographer or copyright holder.

The Safe Bet: Regardless of the law, many people are very sensitive and may get angry if a (subjectively) “unflattering” or unexpected photo of them appears on your site. Use a cartoon avatar of someone instead of their head shot. If you must use someone’s likeness in an ad or website without permission, blur their face out with Photoshop or crop them out of the picture. If you must use someone’s name as an example, do what the Weekly World News tabloid does… and use an extremely common name like, “John Smith“.

Using Other People’s Photos & Diagrams Without Permission

If you copy and paste a photo from someone else’s personal website or Flickr stream – and add it to your own website – they may well find out. And they might get mad. Then, they might blog about it and “call you out” in public, creating a worse reputation for yourself.

The Law: These days, almost everything online is copyrighted, whether you see a copyright notice or not. Unless you are explicitly and reliably assured the image is public domain, you should assume it is forbidden to use. You’re not allowed to upload the photo to your own webserver and use it on your own site. Courts have ruled that “hotlinking” – or linking directly to the image on someone else’s website and using their bandwidth – does not directly violate US copyright law… but it makes some webmasters quite mad.

The Safest Bet: E-mail or call people first, before using their photos. If they don’t respond to you, you can always say you asked first but didn’t hear back. If you are determined to use someone’s photo without her express permission, offering them credit with their name and a link to their site may help soften any animosity that could develop. If someone “busts” you for using an image you don’t have permission for, apoligize profusely and offer to remove it ASAP don’t argue. Don’t hotlink if possible. If you want to use someone’s diagram, create one with similar information yourself… don’t just swipe theirs entirely.

Dangers With Scraping People’s Text or Web Content

I have had some of my best blog articles and headlines blatantly “ripped off” by competitors. I got a little mad, and I either wrote to the offender in private or left a tactful public comment noticing the similarity. Other people seem to get a lot more angry than I do. They will sometimes engage in a nasty defamation or extortion campaign to get “revenge” for stealing their intellectual property.

The Law: Web scraping is illegal in the US, although it is extremely common. You cannot legally take paragraphs of text content published on someone’s private web site and copy it onto your own. You may be allowed to use short excerpts or quotes for commentary and discussion purposes, according to US courts.

The Safe Bet: Don’t publish text from anywhere else on the internet, including a private e-mail sent to you, on your website. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, plus… the original author will likely find out and get mad… and it can easily backfire on you. You have to make sure your own writing is 100% original, but you also need to check the originality of articles that your employees and guest contributors submit to you. Check out Plagiarism Today for more detailed info.

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There are major, fundamental differences in how traditional media and search engines serve up news and information. The public also consumes, evaluates and remembers info they see in search engines differently from what they see in print.

PR pros who are getting deeper into online reputation strategy should consider these fundamental differences:

Traditional Media Is Temporal & Fleeting

Traditional media is cyclical. News is refreshed each day. Bad publicity lasts only as long as the paper is on the newsstand, and after that it lingers faintly in most people’s memory. That negative memory can be effectively offset by putting a “positive spin” on things. So… the PR firm orchestrates a disabled children’s charity drive and fires off a dozen press releases to announce it. If this is done skillfully, the public’s negative perceptions are slowly massaged out of the collective memory and replaced by positive perceptions, one media mention at a time. There’s nothing to compare side-by-side. The negative information is no longer in sight. Just warm fuzzies brightening up yesterday’s dark thundercloud.

Search Engines Are Permanent

Search engines index information “permanently.” As long a page is live on a webserver somewhere (and the domain does nothing shady to get penalized or banned) – the search engine will probably keep “listing” it somewhere in the search results. It will usually remain in the index until the website goes out of business or gets taken down by the webmaster. Even if you manage to get some “positive buzz” right on the front page, the negative information will probably still be there – right in front their faces.

(“Wash all the negative stuff out by flooding it with positive information” is mostly the mantra of hucksters and ORM novices. It can sometimes work in mild cases of reputation damage, but it rarely works for severe reputation problems that are impacting established businesses.)

Search Engines Directly Invite Scrutiny and Comparison

Search engines naturally encourage people to compare a variety of contrasting web pages, side by side. There’s a ton of junk on the web, and people have adapted and become very discerning about the credibility of content they’re consuming. Many people can spot fake reviews and PR puffery a mile away. Heartfelt negative sentiment mixed with phony, manufactured positivity and praise looks worse than just negative sentiment alone. It is my firm belief that creating neutral, natural pages is usually far more credible than stuffing “positive” pages into search engines.

That’s the way of the web. Adding a “positive spin” on things doesn’t work in the same way it does with temporal, cyclical traditional media. The negative information will still remain there – perhaps for a long time to come – and adding too much positive stuff just seems to accentuate and validate it.

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When people find negative publicity about themselves online, the first reflex is often to “bury” negative search results by making lots of new profiles and pages on other domains. This occasionally works well… but it’s usually an incredibly slow process — and it often fails completely.

Here’s why: Google likes and trusts the domain that is showing the negative result. That’s why it shows up on the first page. It’s sometimes a lot easier to create a new page on the same domain, than it is to try and create dozens of new pages on other domains and build trust for them. Try to leverage the trust of the domain that Google already loves!

How to Bury Google Search Results

Google likes to show pages from multiple different domains on the first page. Usually it will pick a single listing from 10 different domains to fill up the first 10 results. If a domain is trusted and it has closely matching content, Google will sometimes show one or two additional pages “indented” below the first listing from the main domain.

But many times, if you can create a newer, far more link-rich and “better” page on the exact same domain – it will just throw the bad search result onto page 2 or 3!

How to Bury Bad Blog Posts

If you are mentioned negatively in a Huffington Post article that wasn’t a big hit, then register for the site with your full name and get your own social profile page – and participate heavily to build internal linkjuice. You could also become one of the guest bloggers for the Huffington Post local metropolitan areas and cover some local events. You’ll get another “author” page with your name in the URL… Point some external links to these new pages and see if you can get Google to see those pages as more linked-to and more relevant page on the Huffington Post. If you’re successful, your “bad” article may drop out of the search results for your name.

If you can’t become a guest blogger or make a profile on the blog, you might be able to comment strategically and point links at a specific blog comment URL (if the content management system creates them).

How to Bury Bad Newspaper Stories or “Police Blotter” Listings

If your arrest was written up in a newspaper’s police blotter, and the editors refuse to change or delete it, then your best bet is to make a more flattering page on the same domain and get Google to notice it. Write top-notch letters to the editor until one of them is published with your full name and placed online. If the site accepts blog-style comments, then comment, using your full name, on other articles on the site. Hang out at local events where reporters are certain to be present and hound them with quotes until they take down your name and age. Do some serious PR and do whatever it takes to get mentioned in that publication in a positive or neutral light. As a last resort – take out an online classified at a yearly rate or write up a fake obituary for someone with the same name as yours (born in 1911).

Then point links at this new & neutral page mentioning your name, using proper anchor text, and wait for Google to love it even more.

How to Edit Negative Wikipedia Articles Out of Google

You can make your own user page (example) on Wikipedia and build internal and external links. You can sneak your name into the footnotes of neglected, unwatched articles… and chatter away on vacant talk pages. You can create articles and stubs about your organization and pray they won’t be deleted – snipe away the deletion flags in the middle of the night – sometimes it works!

How to Remove Negative Forum Posts

If there’s a bad post about you on a forum that’s showing up in the search results, join the forum and surreptitiously post your own neutral thread. Point links to it.

How to Remove Negative Digg, Reddit, Mixx or Propeller Stories

If someone submitted a story about you to a social news site and it didn’t get many votes, you might be able to remove it by submitting a neutral story with your name in the headline. Point links to your new story’s URL on the same social news site. Create your own tag page on Propeller or Delicious. Make your own subdomain on StumbleUpon or Ning. Then pray.

How to Bury Negative BlogCatalog Result Pages

There’s a blog directory site called BlogCatalog which has a lot of trust and authority (PageRank 7, 16 million inlinks) in Google. BlogCatalog that indexes blog posts on a number of given topics. If you are mentioned or tagged in a negative blog post on a two-bit, unknown domain… that blog post might not show up on the front page of Google but the negative info can show up on Blog Catalog’s category pages- which are likely to show up in the search results. (Because the BlogCatalog domain is stronger and more trusted than the small blog who first wrote about you.)

So submit your own blog to BlogCatalog and tag yourself in some posts. Or hire other bloggers who are members of the network to mention you in tags or in the headline. The bad listings will wash off the first page of the BlogCatalog topic pages, and eventually when the BlogCatalog topic page gets crawled by Google again… you’ll have a clean online reputation.

Stealthy, Strategic ORM vs. the “Caveman” Approach

Try these techniques first… before you engage in the “caveman” approach of trying to create new pages on 10-to-20 different domains and rank all of them. If making a new, neutral page on the same domain and ranking it proves impossible… then should you try to bury negative content through more brute force.

Do you have any personal experience (or ideas) on how to bury negative publicity in the search engines without trying to outrank it using other domains?

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A knowledgeable online reputation management company or consultant can be invaluable for those with online reputation questions or problems. But buyer beware: there are hundreds of “boiler room” ORM firms run by money guys and their poorly-trained salespeople and third world “technicians.” Hiring the wrong type of company can be catastrophic for your online reputation by making it look irreparably worse than it did before. It also wastes time and money that could have been used to improve your reputation.

It pays to ask yourself (and any prospective reputation management company) lots of hard questions before making any kind of contract. Here are some questions that go through my mind when I am evaluating services that are offered:

• Does the company operate “anonymously” or are there “real people” involved? Performing work on your online reputation is complex process that requires a very personalized and delicate touch. You should look for a really smart, honest and reliable people – human beings – who can help you. You don’t want an anonymous chop-shop with a 1-800 number and 4 different people are handling the keys to your digital identity… and then not communicating clearly with you about what’s happening.
• Do they show any proof of their knowledge or skill? Is there anything on the site (articles, blogs, videos) that demonstrate a certain level of technical knowledge and communication skill – or is it just a sales brochure that’s skimpy on anything of substance? Do they rank in the organic Google search results for their own business terms like “online reputation management” – or do they rely on spammy domains and paid ads?
• Does the company have any reputation in the SEO, PR or social media worlds? Online reputation is a new industry without a well-defined sense of professional standards or certification – but it takes up-to-date and “black-belt” knowledge of SEO, PR and social media marketing. Do they have any “social proof” of their reputation in these areas – like substantial interviews, guest articles, blog comments, trackbacks and retweets? Can you find anything online that attests to their history, skill and involvement in online marketing – to show they are not unknown, unskilled or “fly-by-night”?
• Do they make any kind of “money back guarantee”? The world’s most elite SEO and ORM experts are just as unlikely guarantee specific outcomes as the world’s best surgeons or attorneys. The nature of the work is unpredictable, their own reputation is paramount, and they are not desperate to take your money. “Boiler room” ORM shops that do high-volume sales frequently offer bogus guarantees to get people to overlook what seems “too good to be true.” They know most online defamation victims will be too weary & exhausted to fight for a refund after months of deception and disappointment.

These are the questions I find myself asking as I look at sites of the online reputation companies that seem to pop up each month.

I have personally seen some devastating reputation damage that was done by incompetent or unscrupulous ORM firms, where a person’s identity was botched and looked far, far worse than before the company got involvde. I get a lot of calls from people needing help and, unfortunately, I don’t know a lot of solid online reputation companies or consultants that have time to take them on. Hiring an online reputation company is a huge decision that should never to be made impulsively: ask a lot of question and shop around!

Online impersonation is one of the most dangerous kinds of online reputation problems. It happens when someone else assumes your identity and communicates using your real name, photograph or avatar.

Communicating under someone’s else name and identity is online impersonation. It is a crime in most places.

Sometimes they’ll hack into your real accounts, other times they’ll just create fake profiles or comments purporting to be “you.” They may be motivated by revenge, sadism, extortion, or playing some kind of twisted prank.

The reputation damage caused by impersonating someone online can be substantial and hard to clean up. Here are some things you should know:

The Law & Impersonating Someone Online

• Online impersonation is (arguably) illegal in most jurisdictions. First Amendment “free speech” protects people’s right to share their unflattering opinions, but it usually does not protect unauthorized speaking or writing under someone else’s name or identity. Some states, like Texas, have specifically outlawed online impersonation on social media sites. Most other states have more general laws about “criminal harassment” or “identity theft” that can apply to certain online impersonation scenarios.
• Many police and sheriff’s departments now have “cyber crime” divisions. The computer crime units are often obligated to help out in cases of libelous online impersonation – but the detectives’ caseload and level of technical expertise varies among jurisdictions. It’s usually best to try and resolve the issue yourself before getting police involved, but if you reach a dead end, they will often help with researching and negotiating on your behalf.
• Online impersonating may be grounds for a successful civil court case. If negotiation, law enforcement help and/or online reputation building are unable to undo the damage – you may have grounds to threaten or file a lawsuit to mandate content removal or a cash settlement. Lawsuits often create additional animosity, so only do this is a last resort.

Identifying and Tracking Your Online Impostor

If you know who did it, you might be able to explain the legal ramifications and quickly get the online impostor to remove the false information. If you aren’t sure who is responsible, you’ll have to do some internet detective work:

• Find Their IP Address. An IP address is a unique “serial number” that identifies a specific computer or device (like a shared wireless router). Most blogs and social sites capture the IP address of visitors and commenters. This information can usually only be viewed by the owner or administrator of the site. If you contact them with a friendly letter explaining you are being impersonated online, they’ll often give it to you. If they won’t give it to you, sometimes they’ll give it to a detective or an attorney. If your impersonator used a proxy server to obscure their IP address, most proxy owners will give information to police detectives or upon being served a legal subpoena. This tool can help you find the internet service provider who owns the IP address, and they may have give it to you or the police in a serious incident.
• Making a List of All the Damage. Carefully search for your name and e-mail address — in quotes (“John Smith”) — in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Dig deep… far back page one and two of the search results… and use a tool like NameChk.com to see if your username is registered on social sites. Save every URL that contains evidence of impersonation in a spreadsheet so you can managed and remove it.
• Completely Change Your Passwords. If your password was compromised — or even if it wasn’t and using the same password across all your sites and accounts — now would be a great time to change all of them. Use a simple password algorithm or tool to help you remember all of them.
• Monitor Against Ongoing Impersonation. Make your own reputation monitoring dashboard, or use a commercial reputation monitoring service to track your name in case any new incidents pop up.

Removing the Damage & Clearing Your Name

Use a combination of tact and tech savvy to get the mess cleaned up once and for all:

• Examine the Terms of Service on Sites Where You Were Impersonated. Most social media sites, ISPs and blogs have a terms-of-service (ToS) that is designed to legally cover their tracks. It explicitly spells out what kind of behavior and content is allowed and not allowed on their site. Many social sites’ ToS explicitly ban impersonating someone online – for example, here under section 4d. Many blog hosting sites, like Blogger.com, forbid it also. Citing their own policy is good ammunition to help get it removed ASAP.
• Contact the Webmaster or Blogger and Ask for Removal. Write to the administrators of the sites and blogs you were impersonated on, tactfully explain the situation and how it’s impacting your life – and kindly ask (not demand) they remove it. Be pleasant but persistent until you get some kind of response. You may have to hunt for their e-mail address. Note: many big sites have a “legal@example.com address for these kinds of issues.
• Tell Search Engines to Remove the Deleted Content from Their Index. Once you have successfully had the impersonating remarks removed from the blogs and pages, you should let Google know it is gone by using the Webpage Removal Request Tool. Check the box that says “the information has been deleted by the webmaster.” In my experience, the listing’s description and cache should disappear within a couple of days, but the blue title link may take longer to officially fade away. Yahoo has a Report Abuse” form and Bing has a feedback form with options to report spam. Try it!
• As a Last Resort, Contact the ISP. The ISP (internet service provider) may be required to take down defamatory information or forgeries (in certain jurisdictions), so if all else fails you should inquire about their policy. This can get expensive, contentious and complex, according to this history of online takedown notices.
• Don’t Get Revenge by Counter-impersonating or Doing Anything Illegal. If someone has committed a crime against you, don’t do anything illegal or morally questionable (impersonating someone online as revenge) that is likely to get yourself in trouble also!
• Optional: Blog About the Incident to Publicly Clear Your Name. If you have the courage and transparency to say what happened in your real voice, people are very likely to believe the truth – far more than anything that seems suspiciously out of character. If you don’t have a personal blog of your own, find a high-ranking site (like a university or company website) to post the truth and clear you name. Get your friends and family to link to the article so it will be more visible.

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When people get emotional and publish defamatory attacks on the internet, they probably think “I’m gonna show him!” They rarely think about what other people are going to read — between the lines — into their diatribe.

We are all interconnected. Attacking others can easily stain your own reputation. image: sahaja meditation

What you say about others online, and how you say it, is more a snapshot of your own character than it is about the person your speaking about.

Quick story: I know two guys who run advertising agencies. One of them won a contract with a big-name brand. The other one had bid on the contract, was dismissed in the early stages, and he became full of sour grapes.

A few months later, the losing owner wrote a public piece with a scathing criticism of how his competitor’s agency was handling the Big Company’s ad campaign.

Did it make the agency he was attacking look bad? Not one bit. Did it make him, the critic, look like a petty & poor loser? Did it raise a huge red flag about his own character, professionalism and truth worthiness? Yup. Big time.

Before reading his nasty review, I had a positive impression of the critic. The moment I read it, I became immediately and permanently mistrustful of the him. He showed himself as a hostile, insecure and unprofessional.

The digital threads of interconnectedness permanently and visibly tie us all together. We all live in fragile glass houses. Throw stones at a neighbor and you may well crack your own – for everyone to see.

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Watch out! People are registering domains that match the full names of high-profile executives, building them up and ranking them, and using the public visibility to financially scalp them. This could only sound like a “good business plan” to a morally and creatively bankrupt person with no ability to create anything valuable of their own. But, unfortunately, such people exist and they’re doing it.

A mock-up of a existing personal name squatter / extortion site.

If someone registers a name and quietly holds onto it outside of the public eye, that’s opportunistic capitalism or “squatting.” But when someone swipes a person’s name online and uses SEO techniques to make your stolen identity situation blatantly obvious to the world.. in order to pressure you into paying them money… then that’s full blown reputation extortion.

Using a meta description tag to call attention to the executives’ stolen identity

Denver SEO Zach Katz published an interesting account of how he got his domain name back from cybersquatters. Zach wrote the domain company who was holding his .com site, citing section 4b. of ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy:

b. Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith. For the purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(iii), the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be present, shall be evidence of the registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:

(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name…

While writing a letter didn’t directly get Zack’s domain back, his knowledge of the domain trademark dispute process helped him get his request taken seriously. There are a set of rules that all professional domainers are aware of.

ICANN, the international domain authority, has designated the National Arbitration Form as the third party to handle the domain name dispute process.

The arbitration process looks quite messy and complicated – and it seems to favor trademark holders without making specific references to personal names. But it is possible to file a complaint and go through a detailed bureaucratic process if you are willing to pay fees. However… it would be far simpler to just register your own business or personal domains today – even if you don’t plan on using them now or in the forseeable future. Just do it!

Hat tip: to Everett Sizemore for bringing this activity to my attention.

If you have any personal experience dealing with executive domain name squatters / extortionists, or with arbitration.. please leave your comments below!

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Most people are fairly lazy and don’t like to write that much. The act of publishing web content – even in casual forms like tweets or blog comments, is usually a pre-meditated, conscious decision rather than a spur-of-the-moment reaction. By the time most people get to writing something up online, they’ve usually done a bit of research and thinking. Understanding psychology can help you know how to handle negative online reviews and prevent new ones from appearing:

Here are 8 of the most common emotions that lead to negative online reviews and personal defamation:

1. Sadism

Some people enjoy hurting others. The feel so small and weak that lashing out at someone else gives them a sense of God-like power and satisfaction. They don’t have the skills to try and make anything for themselves, so the excitement from “tearing someone down” is about as much as they have to live for.

How to handle / prevent it: If someone is gets great pleasure out of writing negative opinions, most rational approaches won’t work. Some people have declared war and attacked them back until they relented, but be careful!

2. Revenge

Some people believe that two wrongs make a right. They believe that they have suffered some kind of injustice, and that the appropriate thing is strike back at you.

How to handle / prevent it: Don’t do things to make people mad at you — even at great cost. Balance every business, marketing and custom service decision you make with “Is this going to get people mad at us?” and “What will be the potential cost of getting these people mad at us and having them publish their experience online?” Make your decisions generously and accordingly.

3. Sabotage

Some people will attack you to make themselves (or their own product) look better. Lies are the weapons of the weak, and some people will lie to help make themselves look better.

How to handle / prevent it: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you are in a cut-throat field or competitive business, you especially need to invest in online reputation building before any problems arise.

4. Extortion

Some sites like RipOffReport.com have a crooked business model of encouraging people to complain or defame businesses, and then they collect “retainers” or payments to make the information less visible or to give the owners more control. Other people will threaten negative reviews to try and milk you for free stuff.

How to handle / prevent it: There’s no easy or inexpensive way to handle extortion. You’re faced with two difficult choices… 1.) Pay the company to make the information go away, 2.) Try to engage in reputation repair. Next time you start a brand or business venture, plan ahead and build a strong reputation that is more impervious to external attacks.

5. Altruism / Compassion for Fellow Customers

Some people aren’t mean-spirited, but they have this honest, conscientious desire to prevent people from ever going through the same kind of discomfort they had.

How to handle / prevent it: Monitor your reputation online, and immediately respond to any complaints. Directly contact the people who complain and offer them incentives to take it off. If you can respond directly to the review or comment, make it seem like their dissatisfaction is a radical exception or freak occurrence.

6. Chiming In

Some people aren’t initially motivated to write anything bad, but when they encounter a negative blog or review, they feel compelled to leave their own experience. This causes the content on the page to expand, and having more words and phrases on it will cause it to rank for more search terms. Then more people see it and link to it, and the stronger and more permanent it becomes.

How to handle / prevent it: Build your reputation before problems arise. Then monitor your reputation and handle negative comments properly and promptly.

7. Confusion

Some people bought your product or service, don’t understand how to use it, and therefore they proclaim it “sucks.”

How to handle / prevent it: Invest in ultra-user-friendly FAQs, technical support documentation and videos. Be honest-to-a-fault when selling your product, and explicitly state what it can do and what it cannot. Prominently display a number that people can call if they need help or have questions. Join a external customer-service site like GetSatisfaction.com and promptly address & clarify misconceptions.

8. Frustration & Desperation

If you have a customer service system but it is slow, poorly trained or inefficient… people will get intensely frustrated. And they may express their frustration online. Andy Beal says it best:

“The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.”

How to handle / prevent it: Invest in prominent, unmistakable “official channels” for people to communicate with your company. Make sure all responses are promptly responded to and customer satisfaction is a core value of your company. Having a “broken” complaint box or hotline that isn’t answered is far worse than having no official channels at all.

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Keeping track of your various social media accounts and identities can be tricky. Fortunately there is a new web application, NameChk.com that will let you check where your username is registered.

While I don’t recommend overloading on social media profiles as a primary online reputation management strategy, it is definitely good to secure your personal or company name for future use and brand control purposes.

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