Reputation Management

The idea of reputation management is getting a great deal of attention, and in what I've read on the subject, I notice that something is completely lacking: that the best way to ensure you have a good reputation is to earn it.

The majority of interest seems to be focused on cleaning up the public image of a firm that have egregiously mistreated their customers or their employees. Not only have they treated people poorly, but they intend to keep treating them poorly. They are motivated merely to suppress any evidence of their behavior so they can carry on with business as usual.

Firms claim to be the innocent party, wrongfully attacked by individuals who seek to do them harm, or victims of a smear campaign. Such claims lack credibility: while there are people who delight in being malicious, and others in the traditional media who profit well by doing so, they must be handed an opportunity to do so - people don't look for things to complain about, but delight in complaining about the things that actually happen to them - to vent their frustration, and to (justly) provide a warning to others.

In instances where a firm accepts responsibility for its actions, it gains credibility. There is no firm, and no person, that has never made a misstep - but many that have never admitted or acknowledged the errors they have made. Customers, by and large, are willing to overlook a single negative review in a queue of positive ones in forming their overall impression - in fact, a string of reviews that are universally positive lacks credibility at all and has about it the stink of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.

However, a firm that has an occasional misstep isn't concerned about reputation management - though it may monitor negative comments, it is more in the nature of identifying a problem that needs to be corrected. This requires not public response on the part of the firm, only introspection as to whether the comment reflects a need for change.

Moreover, any negative comment is seen in the context of many more positive ones, and a firm that treats customers or employees well can expect them to come to its defense when it is "attacked" by a person whose experience was negative, and these rebuttals hold more weight than any comment the firm or its paid spokesmen might make in response. In that way, the reputation of a good firm will mend itself, without any action on its own part.

The firm that takes a great deal of interest in reputation management is the one who has a poor reputation - which is to say the one that has earned a poor reputation - and is primarily interested in suppressing the comment rather than addressing the problem. These are the firms that delete comments that reflect poorly upon them, or feel the need to post an immediate reaction on their own, fearing (or perhaps knowing) that no-one will come to their defense.

In all, I think that specializing in reputation management is a career option I'd prefer to avoid: while there is increasing interest in the topic, and a correspondingly increasing demand for individuals who are skilled at it, I don't think it's a line of work I'd care to be in: it would lead me to work for a string of ill-reputed firms that merely want to do damage control rather than address the problem and restore the reputation of their firms in the proper way.