It's early on a rainy Tuesday morning here in London as I settle down to write the post I should have written yesterday...
What with it being Labor day in the US yesterday, it should have fallen on the trusty global associates to put together something for the SEOmoz blog. Unfortunately we were working instead. I was hoping to hold the fort while the Americans slept before returning to work after the long weekend, but it turns out Rand never sleeps.
Waiting for the bus in the rain this morning was a fairly miserable start to the day, but what if it had started worse? What if I had woken up this morning to find bad things written about me or my company on the internet?
Years ago, we only really had to worry about what was printed in the newspaper and what people said to each other (you know, person to person – in real life – which doesn't scale all that far). These days, the power of the great world wide web means that people whining to one another can become a search result for your name for ever more. At the expert seminar a couple of weeks ago, Duncan and I talked about two things that have been taking up a lot of our time here at Distilled HQ – international SEO and online reputation management.
This morning, I wanted to talk about a particularly pernicious reputational challenge that we have seen recently and which is very very hard to combat. It is something we talked about at the expert seminar, where we called it 'wiki-circularity'. While it isn't necessarily limited to Wikipedia, it's one of the easiest examples. Here's the scenario:
You keep your nose clean, behave well, have a wiki page ranking for your name with nothing untoward on it (we'd generally class this as a 'neutral' result in a reputation audit).
- Someone (malicious or misguided) writes something untrue (or even libelous) on the Wikipedia page
- Mainstream media pick up the story (“checking their facts” on the internet)
- Fictitious story appears on powerful newspaper website (of course, they don't reference Wikipedia –they want to look like they researched the story)
So far, so reputation 2.0. The kicker comes in the final step:
- Wikipedia gets updated to reference the mainstream media story
- Your SERPS now contain a negative result (the wiki page – even if the news story doesn't rank), and unlike in many situations, you have done nothing to deserve it
It is now almost impossible to convince a wiki editor to remove the reference as they tend to assume the sanctity of “real” media – an assumption that breaks spectacularly when “real” media is getting their stories from Wikipedia.
What can you do about it?
Unfortunately, as outlined above, once the circle is complete, it's hard to do very much about it (try some high-powered legal advice – you probably want the page removed from the newspaper website rather than just a retraction elsewhere on their site). This makes it all a powerful argument for monitoring your reputation and that of your business online so that you get a chance to do something about it early. If you don't have the information, you are dead in the water. For most people and businesses it takes hardly any time to skim everything written about you every day – and for higher profile brands it is definitely worth investing in.
Of course, we at Distilled have an online reputation monitoring tool, but I'm also going to give a shout out to other ways of doing your monitoring, such as Andy Beal's Trackur. Or, if you want to put more work in but do it for free, you can follow Andy's advice and monitor it all yourself.
If you are monitoring then these kinds of untrue stories can often be quashed early on without recourse to legal action before everything explodes. If the situation does get worse and you have the circular issue happening to you, then this real-world example of a similar thing happening to Sacha Baron Cohen (in a relatively harmless way) shows how with a lot of detective work, the circularity can be broken.
The real world
It's easy to classify this all as a theoretical problem, but we have seen it in real life (those at the expert seminar got the story with names removed) in a situation where the story was completely untrue.
High profile people are gradually becoming aware of these kinds of issue – I found it interesting to read that the new Republican VP candidate had some wiki-cleaning done the day before the announcement. I'd call that reputation 1.5. They have understood the importance but not the social nature of web 2.0 and the likelihood of getting called out. It seems that the edits were approached in a pretty upfront way – with high-quality changes referencing published sources, but simply the volume and proximity to major news were destined to risk red flags. Rand always steers people away from political discussion in the comments, so remember to discuss online tactics, not policy...
Breaking celebrity reputation news
On a different note, this morning I read a story about Soulja Boy having his online identity hijacked. I love his response to it. For a (expletive-laden, R-rated) lesson in how to respond to a reputation attack rapper-style, check out this story.
I know someone who needs a little reputation tweaking in the SERPs. You've inspired me to do a little charity SEO to help push down some of the negative pages. Thanks for the great post!
Love the way the Sydney Morning Herald show their horror that this rapper's e-mail address was published for all to see, then publish it themselves. Presumably they'll get found now when fans/stalkers of this guy search "Souja Boy email address".
On this topic though, for a rapper, I doubt any publicity is bad. Controversy is the name of the game for rappers, and he'll doubtless sell a few more CD's & MP's off the back of the media coverage.
it is when his myspace gets hacked... lol..
ouch, I just made a comment above about publishing emails without reading yours. I guess that answers my question :)
Deep breathe: must read all comments before replying :)
That was an awesome response from Soulja Boy. Maybe if more SEOs started copping attitudes like that we could get more done? ... Or maybe not!
Great post, as you know I'm particularly interested in all things Wikipedia at the moment. Thanks for the contribution.
Awesome is the word.
Reading through the article I got all peeved because the newspaper publishes his email in the article (it's actually amailto link). Is it only me or this is rather ignorant?
Thanks for the informative post. Although I am certainly not a celebrity and my company is not high profile this post got me to check out what our reputation currently is. While I did find some interesting things there was nothing that was damaging or drastically in error. There is out dated information out there but it was correct at one time. In general is it OK to let old information float around out there if it doesn't cause any issues? An example is listing some of our customers, some of which are no longer going concerns.
Some of the things I found were at first alarming but then reassuring. I found one site that offered login information for our site but all the information was for test accounts that were never activated so our procedures are working. I didn't know that such a site existed and that we would be on it.
Thanks for the reminder to pay attention to the world out there.
It could be worse.You could have faced an online attack and decided to create a Wikipedia profile for yourself. I see that happen all the time--people sometimes don't get that you can't control the info that gets posted to Wikipedia.
If you're high profile enough, that you have a Wikipedia entry, you can use monitoring tools. At the very least, each Wikipedia entry has an RSS feed, so you can subscribe and be notified of any updates.
Good post Will, and thanks for the Trackur.com shout! :-)
This has not been a problem for us yet (obviously not working with the same level of clientele yet) But valid none the less.
I think rand said it first but I really believe that the Next presidential election will be waged online.
So remember to "Vote early and often."
After all you never know when it could be your last. ;P
Amazing that in 2008--Christ, it's almost 2009--people still don't understand that Wikipedia should be considered 100% unreliable when it comes to citing hard facts. My college professors knew this six years ago, so why are journalists still repeating things they find on a website that includes an "edit" button next to all its entries?
Good post, Will. Your example at the seminar was a good one and it's nice to have this on the blog too. I don't think many of us had thought of wiki-circularity before.
Because, for the most part, journalists provide info to publishers who don't seem to care whether the facts are true if the story makes an entertaining read / viewing. I absolutely loathe the media. The industry that I have been a part of in Australia for the past 8 years with my site, has been at the blunt end of multiple media fabrications. Wikipedia is fantastic for them, people get huffy and add something to wikipedia and suddenly the media have a fantastic story to write about and can fallback on that entry on wikipedia if the facts are ever questioned.
Grrrr.
*deep breaths*
That response from Soulja Boy is awesome - I hope that sonmeone targets Oasis next so that we get to see Liam sneering into a camera:
On a side note I'm still amazed at the number of large brands who talk about Wikipedia as if it's the most natural thing in the world to blaze in there and start making wholesale changes;
Well, steaming in and editing it all isn't going to suddenly make them think that you're telling the truth.
At my last company we talked of having Wikipedia evangelists, who would work to build relationships with influential editors at Wikipedia - not so that they could change things themselves, but so that they might at least be believed when they pointed out fallacies - I wonder whether this isn't something that all seriously major brands shouldn't consider.
That's a pretty crazy Catch-22 situation there. What's even worse is that the Distilled folks have seen it actually happen. Great post, Will.
This is really interesting post. I won't be surprised if online reputation managers become as in demand as the SEO and SEMs. Big companies would need ORMs to ensure positive Web 2.0 image.
Thanks for an informative post. Looking forward to more articles on online PR.
You really, really good about me. Thank you for sharing and I'm waiting for more posts ..good shares
Some years old postd but still useful. More recent update with more tools info would be nice!
Online reputation management or trashing someone’s reputation online has been around since the day the Internet went mainstream.
Back in 1997, I was in the real estate space (new home construction) I got a call from one of our clients in total panic that when you did a search for the builder's brand name in Google this site came up. It was from a pissed off buyer that documented everything wrong with the new home including photos. What do they do?
Simple. get the good press up to push the bad down. SEO in its basic form. Of course now that social media is mainstream it makes it much different. More to overcome, more to monitor, more to fight after but really is it anything more than that? Don’t get me wrong, it’s good work and adds much needed value to SEO's especially after SERPS are becoming less relevant but really I see it as just SEO on the brand side.
Eventhough people know Wikipedia is unreliable it's one of the first places they go to find out information-it's easy and quick....so it can still do damage.
I never looked at it like that. I guess it cause you a big problem. I often look stuff up on Widipedia but I always check other sources. It's an interesting site but like you say, totally unreliable. When anybody can post anything - nobody should refer to it with authority. Particularly not a newspaper!
Never thought of web 2.0 that way…on the other hand I think it’s worth all these risks to read about consumers reactions to your product or service.
The real problem is the CDA. It needs repealing so people citing all this false information can be held accountable for their actions!
I'm not a lawyer, so we'd need Sarah here, but my understanding is that the CDA doesn't protect people who write untrue things - it just protects wikipedia for the fact that someone wrote something untrue on their site...
The point is Wikipedia should not be protected. I just read a federal judges ruling in which he cited Wikipedia. So, some people may know its unreliable but for a great number of people out there if its on the internet the first thought is that it must be true!
But far far worst is that even when you prove it to be false the CDA allows sites to tell you to buzz off while they leave it online for the world to see.
I know that these stories about hijacked identities can be very armful nefarious to a company or a person reputation. But sometimes a very popular say comes to my mind: there's no bad or good publicity, just publicity!
I agree with AMMO up there ... the golden rule of PR is that all publicity is good publicity ... especially in this golden age of "radical transparency" (which WIRED Magazine wrote a sweet article about ... by the way).
On a separate note: Microsoft tried paying people to write Wiki entries for them and apparently that blew up in their face. It's a tough game to play sometimes ...
Thanks for the advice. Really useful stuff.