Wikipedia’s just announced plans to restrict the editing of some of its articles. Under the new system, any changes made to pages of still-living people will have to be approved by an “experienced volunteer” before going online.
The 15 biggest Wikipedia blunders is a must read for anybody interested in reputation management.
I started with a very interesting article about what you might find in a college newspaper that would be interesting to an investigator.
One thing leads to another and I also found an article about a study of how quickly social sites remove pictures. Some sites take up to 30 days to really get rid of the offending images. This is an important thing to understand if your are looking for derogatory pictures.
Once the cat is out of the bag, you probably won’t be able to catch her and stuff her back inside…
That (now) embarrassing article you wrote for your college newspaper three years ago? It’s still online. And when people Google you, they find it…
Apparently a lot of student newspapers are receiving requests from former student writers to remove or “hide” (from Google) articles of which they are now ashamed…
…requests by former students who were featured in articles in the student newspaper. Campus police arrests for drunkenness, that sort of thing. They would like those articles to be removed or “hidden.”…
Here’s a related story about someone trying to get an old newspaper story erased from the search engines. Article published in The Seattle Times on Aug. 15, 2008.
Cambridge researchers have shown that photos aren’t always deleted when users ask, causing a major ‘data remanence’ issue for cloud computing.
According to a study of 16 social networking, blogging and photo sharing sites…most of them failed to remove photos after users deleted them…
An excellent article at Knowledge Is Power about using a blog to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about competitors and manage the spin on news about its rivals while usually reporting positively about your own employer.
Another post about Black PR defines this as distinct from a disinformation campaign.
The US Government Accountability Office says that stolen sensitive military items have been purchased by undercover government officials on Craigslist and eBay. However, this is like the kettle calling the pot black. The same subcommittee determined that the Defense Department sold chemical protective suits and biological warfare laboratory equipment to the public.
While it is easy to see an element of fear mongering in this, it does remind us that private sector businesses should be checking eBay and Craigslist for their own product and counterfeits. Doing so may reveal a problem with theft, grey marketing, or counterfeiting.
An article about Online Reputation Monitoring for Competitive Intelligence has let the cat out of the bag — there are investigative tools to get more from the Internet than you will find with simple search strings.
There are tools for searching Google to uncover details about your company that you would never think of publishing freely, tools for searching social networks to locate competitive intelligence information from employees or ex-employees, tools for digging into content to locate copyright materials and tools for conducting linguistic scans for flagging up dirty words associated with your products or derogatory associations with your brand.
Jill Fenton reports on an article about how difficult it is to delete your Facebook profile.
I have been interested to read the pros and cons of social networking sites (the girl who’s been banned from having a house party for 10 years, for example!) and came across this recent article in the Sunday Times regarding how to delete your Facebook profile (rather than just ‘deactive’ it – the Facebook default).
“If you visit the account section of Facebook you are offered only the opportunity to “deactivate”. This merely hides your public profile until you next log in. It’s a useful option if you are likely to return. To delete your details permanently you must first unearth the anonymous-looking customer service form that is hidden away at tinyurl.com/2xv52v. When completing this form tell Facebook in both the subject and the message fields that you wish to have your account deleted. To check if this has been done properly either create a fake Facebook account or ask a friend to search for your details a few days later.”
A growing proportion of our research is directed at reputation management efforts. It is very easy for someone to put up a Web site or Blog that libels a company or person anonymously.
I found two excellent articles about companies that claim to erase, or at least push lower in the search engines results, negative comments about a company. The first, is on an MSNBC Blog called The Red Tape Chronicles and the second is on Forbes.
I have no idea about the effectiveness of these services, but they represent an interesting concept.
I’m a firm believer in letting other people do my research. Why should I do ‘original’ work that has already been done. When we do research to assist reputation management a lot of work has been done for us by rumourmonger and rumor debunking sites like Snopes. However, some malicious rumors originate with jealous competitors and radicals and require extensive research to identify the source, intent, and motive.
For instance, rumors that one company or other is owned by the KKK or one CEO or another donates money to the Church of Satan have circulated for decades. However, the Internet have given such rumors wings.
Companies can be destroyed by malicious rumors. A soft drink marketed to minorities in northeastern US cities, was almost bankrupted by a rumor that the drink contained a chemical that would make black men sterile.
Rumors can put lives at risk. In 2005 a rumor spread by cell phone text messages caused violent riots in Pakistan. The rumor was that men would loose their manhood if they shook hands with a foreigner.
In Rumor in the Marketplace: The Social Psychology of Commercial Hearsay (Auburn House Publishing, 1985), the authors suggest a public and forceful denial of the rumor as soon as possible by using solid evidence backed by experts. Sometimes the expert evidence is expert research that debunks the rumor.