Is it a trend or is it a ‘megatrend’?

In the media we are always speaking about ‘trends’. Twitter was/is a trend; Google Wave is a trend; apps that drive core business revenue also seem to be an increasing trend (just take a look at the Pizza Hut app )…but what’s a ‘megatrend’? Well, according to Adam Kleinberg , CEO of a Traction, a creative agency out in San Fran, it’s something that transforms society as we know it; “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” and all that malarkey. Read the rest of this entry »

The ’socialisation’ of the internet

SEO and SEM specialist First Rate recently pointed out how data from Hitwise (the online data monitor) shows that Facebook has overtaken TradeMe as New Zealand’s second most popular website (after Google, of course).

With the rising popularity of other social media such as Twitter and Flickr and the further news that Facebook has just signed a deal with market research company Nielsen to boost its credentials as a genuine advertising platform, businesses in NZ need to be aware of how these events are changing the way they need to work. This ’socialisation’ of the internet is not simply a way for people to stay in touch; it’s bigger than that. The use of social media tools to speak to potential and existing customers has broken down the traditional barriers between businesses and the man on the street.

Read the rest of this entry »

United Airlines and online reputation - responding to Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’

Check out this YouTube effort by Canadian band Sons of Maxwell who have been fighting United Airlines since March 2008 over compensation for damaged guitars while touring. Clearly, the band felt they weren’t getting a satisfactory response from the airline, so after a frustrating 12 months or so, they finally took matters into their own hands. The  video was loaded onto the Sons of Maxwell YouTube channel on Monday, and after only three days it’s already had 640,000 views!! It’s certainly not doing any harm to the band’s reputation at the moment, with loads of coverage both online and offline. Read the rest of this entry »

When not to communicate by email - lessons in reputation management

Here in New Zealand, an unfortunate public squabble has erupted in the last week between the surviving children of the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest and national hero, and the Auckland Museum, to which Hillary bequeathed his documents.  I won’t delve into the complex details of the dispute  - there seems to be more to this issue than currently meets the eye.

Both sides have certainly made strong cases to the media over the last few days. Today, however, according to this story in the New Zealand Herald, a poorly worded communique from the Museum suggests that that institution may have given up on the communications task at hand and, dare I say it, abrogated its responsibility.

The Museum is a major public and cultural asset belonging to the city. So, it is poor form at the very least, Read the rest of this entry »

Online reputation checks; Pope recognises power of search!

This article in today’s New York Times caught my attention. In a relatively frank letter, Pope Benedict has admitted that checking online reputations might be useful prior to making any HR appointments or, in this case, revoking an excommunication!

Yes, I am referring to the recent furore surrounding the so-called ‘Bishop’,  Richard Williamson, and his disgraceful Holocaust denials, which you won’t find on his blog.

In citing the Pope’s letter, NY Times reporter Rachel Donadio noted in particular: Read the rest of this entry »

Avoiding identity hijacking online

The latest Aladdin Annual Threat Report warns that the boom in online social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace etc could very easily turn into an “online nightmare” with the rise of identity hijacking rather than identity theft damaging both personal and corporate reputations. Read the rest of this entry »

PR and social media observations on the demise of Ferrit

The news that Telecom is folding its online retail outlet Ferrit has come as little surprise to most commentators. In the pick of the blogosphere’s musings on the story, Lance Wiggs lays out the reasons he believes Ferrit has failed. I agree in particular with his third point about Ferrit’s poor business case. From a consumer’s point of view, it was always a somewhat confusing proposition, while to retailers it will have seemed a rather questionable channel to opt for - a commissioned intermediary over direct trade with the customer. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Twitter for business

Kipp Bodnar of the excellent Digital Capitalism blog posts about the value of Twitter for corporates. He lists 6 ways in which companies can utilise the microblogging tool. The immediacy of communication via a Tweet makes it a potentially highly effective relationship management channel, one that is more direct and inclusive than a blog. The only caveat would be that Twitter is probably not quite popular enough yet, in New Zealand at least, for its potential to truly be maximised.

Search Engines, Transparency, and Online Reputation; Five year old plagiarism comes back to haunt the author

As Canada heads to a federal election this month, the opposition Liberal party has dropped a timely bombshell concerning incumbent Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. It turns out he delivered a speech to Parliament when he was Opposition Leader in 2003 which appears to largely plagiarise a speech delivered in another part of the world, two days earlier, by then Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. The speech writer in question has resigned this week, acknowledging that he was “overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech”. Canada’s Globe and Mail has the full story as well as the two videos side by side.

Read the rest of this entry »

How NOT to manage a crisis: ‘when all else fails, try bribing search engines!’

There are many recommendations Bullet PR would make regarding online reputation management, especially during a time of crisis. These would not include however, a recommendation to bribe search engines to exclude negative content! Read the rest of this entry »

Judge Harvey bows to the inevitable

An update to my previous post on the Judge Harvey online name suppression order: the judge has lifted the ban in the face of submissions from lawyers representing APN, Fairfax, TVNZ, TV3’s owner MediaWorks, Radio New Zealand and NZPA. This would have been an expensive process. Access to the accused’s names online was possible regardless of the ban, so it begs the question; what was the point in the first place?

Judge Harvey’s attempt to thwart the internet is doomed to fail

There’s a lot of debate out there in the blogosphere over yesterday’s decision by New Zealand District Court Judge David Harvey to prevent the online publication of the names and images of two men charged with the murder of teen John Hapeta.

It’s a curious one. As the likes of Bernard Hickey point out, this guy is no internet ignoramus; he’s actually one of our foremost authorities on cyber-law in New Zealand. If that’s the case, then he must surely recognise the impracticalities of his ruling. Name suppression orders are imposed on a regular basis in New Zealand, which makes this particular half-measure all the more curious. If it is Judge Harvey’s intention to restrict access to this information in order to prevent potential jurors being influenced during a future trial, why allow their names to be released in the first place at this stage in proceedings?

The judge states that he is “concerned with the viral effects of digital publication” - is he not similarly concerned with the viral effects of conversation around the water-cooler, in the pub, on the phone? Surely Judge Harvey is not so na?ve as to perceive the Internet as some sort of conduit for disrupting and influencing the judicial process? One can see what he is driving at, in wanting to restrict future access to the information, but the idea is just too full of holes to be practical.

At the end of the day, it’s a moot argument - the names are already out there should you care to google them. Even if they weren’t, the information is now public record, and can be accessed in future by anyone who can be bothered to track it down. While news websites may adhere to the ruling for fear of the legal ramifications, information online has a life of its own, and is no respecter of the law. As of 4.40pm on 26 August, there are 133 hits for the two names, and that will only grow exponentially. So what exactly was the point? It will be interesting to see where this precedent leads, as there is already interest internationally in Judge Harvey’s landmark ruling.

How NOT to use social media part 2

I blogged a few weeks ago on National Australia Bank’s dodgy use of comment spam to promote its services on Aussie Rules-related blogs. If you thought that was shoddy behaviour, have a look at this example from the US.

As with the NAB case, the consultancy’s social media practice here is astoundingly unethical. Have a read of the excruciating way 5WPR VP Juda Engelmayer attempts to wangle his way out of it. Amusing, and extremely embarrassing for a consultancy that supposedly prides itself on its online PR savvy.

Bank spams blogs: how NOT to communicate via social media

Here’s a great example of why, if you’re a large corporate, you should leave social media well alone if you don’t understand it. Last week National Australia Bank had the audacity to spam a number of AFL-related blogs to promote a new service. Now, comment spam is a sneaky little practice at the best of times, as I’ve discussed previously. But when a corporate behemoth that made an A$4.6 billion profit last year decides to intrude on a blogger’s patch and use it as a free marketing tool, that’s taking the proverbial.

There are a couple of things that are particularly galling about this episode:

1. The bank’s PR consultancy showing a worrying lack of awareness about basic blogging etiquette. If consultancies are going to recommend dodgy practice like this to clients, it impacts negatively on the companies that do use social media transparently as a valid communications channel
2. The complete lack of remorse shown by the bank. Ok, you’ve been rumbled, and the bloggers whose blogs you’ve hijacked are obviously peeved. Now, good ORM practice would recognise the need to post a genuine comment on those blogs admitting fault, apologising and perhaps offer some form of recompense (free AFL tickets, for example). But all the bank has done is prodded the hornet’s nest by denying any wrongdoing, which has, of course, encouraged bloggers to decry their behaviour, and thus spread negative comment about National Australia Bank online. Well done guys

Hat-tip to Simon Young over at ijump for the link.

Online Reputation Management ? Free Tools

With many companies offering paid Reputation Management tools that deliver less than ideal results it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some tools that are not only effective in managing reputations; they are also 100% free.

• Google Alerts
• Google News RSS Feed
• Google Blog Search RSS Feed
• Yahoo Pipes

Google Alerts
The most basic online reputation tool, Google Alerts informs you whenever your chosen word or phrase shows up in Google. Although quite handy, be warned alerts can take some time to come through, and therefore reducing the ability to respond in a timely fashion should it be necessary.

Google News RSS Feeds
The RSS feeds on the Google News search page are a great way to keep up on any news relating to your search term. Every time your feed updates you get the latest news based on your search term, you can also keep an eye on any coverage you competition gets.

Google Blog Search RSS Feeds
Much like the Google News feed except the search is across the blogosphere.

Yahoo Pipes
I?ve blogged about the benefits of Yahoo Pipes before, but only because Yahoo Pipes is possibly one of the best free tools available for monitoring your online reputation. The compelling benefit of Yahoo Pipes is that it aggregates content from multiple sources based on your search term then publishes it into one RSS feed. Every time you update your feed you get the latest content from the various sources. Here is a Yahoo Pipe that I setup to get you going, feel free to clone this tool and develop your own version.

Using Yahoo Pipes in your Online Reputation Management

Keeping track of your online reputation is time consuming enough without having to decide which of the myriad tools you use to get the job done.

However, whichever combination you decide on, whether Google Alerts, Google News Feeds, IceRocket Search Feeds, Technorati Watchlists, etc, make sure you aggregate them through Yahoo Pipes, an essential tool for today’s communications professional.

Yahoo Pipes helps you keep track of your Online Reputation without having to search in 20 different places. You can aggregate content feeds from a number of different sources, and present them in RSS, email or even SMS, without needing the skillset of a programmer.

Here is a Yahoo Pipe I created from an existing News Aggregator Pipe (Yahoo Pipes allows you to easily ?clone? existing pipes & modify them.)

How to use this Pipe:

1. Enter your search term in the search box and click ?Run Pipe?, which will return a list of results.

2. You can then subscribe to the updates through RSS, etc.

As with any Online Reputation Management tool there is a certain amount of manual reading involved to determine which results are relevant. But Yahoo Pipes certainly goes a long way toward simplifying the task in hand.