Do’s and Don’ts When Managing Your Online Reputation

managing your online reputation

 

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

I recently had the opportunity to hear from Jon Goldberg of Reputation Architects on managing your online reputation. The occasion was the PRSA Western District Conference in Phoenix, April 11 and 12 where I spoke on a storytelling panel.

Goldberg is a seasoned public relations and reputation strategist advising Fortune 500 clients as Chief Reputation Architect with his firm, specialists in managing your online reputation and offline as well.

I learned about many different landmines lurking on the web. The risks run from websites that post damaging content and then charge fees to remove it to consultants who cut corners to suppress damaging search engine results.

Goldberg shared story after story of reputation management gone awry as well as best practices to follow for managing your online reputation.

If you find yourself the subject of an Internet nastygram, Goldberg advised that you have three options:

1. Ignore It

When emotions are running high, it’s hard for people to keep their cool and put things in perspective. However, ignoring damaging content online is often the best strategy. More on this below.

2. Hide It

Through the publication of a large volume of search-optimized content, you can seek to overwhelm the negative result in search engine rankings. Search algorithms are wise to these strategies so attempting to game the system can raise Google’s suspicion.

“The idea is to publish a steady stream of high-quality content, which over time will push negative search results off the first page. Attempting to game the system by pumping out low-quality content and questionable links, a technique used by many black-hat SEO companies, will just lead to a bigger and potentially more embarrassing mess in organic search,” said Goldberg.

3. Make it Disappear

If you want to make a negative search result vanish forever, you also have only three options: ask nicely, threaten the publisher or sue.

Threatening or suing both risk angering the outlet. For instance, if you’re a Fortune 1000 company targeting a small publisher or individual, the David-and-Goliath narrative will give your brand a black eye. Suing is risky because libel, slander, defamation and other such allegations are difficult to prove to the courts.

Avoid the Streisand Effect

Goldberg shared a few examples of online reputation management gone horribly wrong. One very interesting example is what has become known as the Streisand Effect. It refers to a situation where Barbra Streisand’s Malibu home was photographed in a public database of coastal lands. She sued the photographer to have her home removed from the database. From Wikipedia:

Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, “Image 3850” had been downloaded from Adelman’s website only six times; two of those downloads were by Streisand’s attorneys. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased greatly; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.

Sometimes confrontation attracts even more unwanted attention and ignoring the content is the best course.

So, how do you legitimately suppress an unfortunate online mention?

“Good content is the answer to bad content,” said Goldberg.

Publishing good content that attracts significant views and inbound links from other reputable sites with high domain authority is the answer.

Look to PR for Managing Your Online Reputation

Goldberg’s message perfectly echoed the sentiment presented by another of the conference’s speakers, Gini Dietrich. Dietrich is founder and CEO of marketing communications firm Arment Dietrich in Chicago. She is also lead blogger at the PR and marketing blog Spin Sucks. She urged public relations practitioners to lean into PR’s power for producing credible, high-ranking online content.

Working with media outlets to get that content published with an optimized inbound hyperlink are the key to raising search engine visibility for good content.

Both Dietrich and Goldberg warned that there are many underqualified and ill-equipped service providers who are encroaching on what should be PR’s domain (reputation management and story pitching and placement). These unscrupulous SEO consultants would have companies believe that reputations and rankings can be bought cheap.

However, the outcomes produced by these firms look cheap and cheapen your reputation. They’ll generate gibberish articles, plagiarized or generic content, and black hat SEO techniques that can get you blacklisted from review sites.

It reminds me of my advice to young PR practitioners: there are no PR shortcuts. The same is true for managing your online reputation, not to mention your offline reputation.

Reputation management is like a game of chutes and ladders. It takes a lot of work and many years to build up your reputation but only minutes and one mistake to tear it down.

Don’t be fooled into thinking your reputation online is any different.

Four Reasons Publicist is a Dirty Word

 

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

Has your mom ever used your childhood nickname in front of your adult friends? That’s how I feel when someone uses the term publicist or publicity to describe my work.

Generating positive media coverage is definitely among the many functions performed by a public relations professional. But the word “publicist” says nothing of the research, strategy, messaging and many other thoughtful, and even artful, activities that go into a successful public relations program. The word, in my opinion, minimizes my work.

For that reason, I would like to see “publicist” buried next to “flack” and “spin doctor.”

Public relations professionals are strategic communicators.

Two years ago, PRSA’s 2017 Chair, Jane Dvorak, addressed the PRSA Western District Conference in Riverside, Calif. urging attendees to see themselves as leaders, strategists and analysts. To my ear, “publicist” is a label that says none of those things. Two years later, I continue to hear this term applied to describe work that is only about 10-20 percent producing media coverage.

If you’re not convinced that “publicist” needs to go, give these four points careful consideration, and let me know if they help change your thinking. (If you already agree, these may help you convert or at least educate others.)

1. Publicists Produce Transactions. PR Pros Build Relationships.

We work in a very transactional environment today. Marketing and communications outcomes are boiled down to clicks, likes, links and conversions, but the stakeholders who need to receive your messages are not clicks and conversions—they’re real human beings who crave meaningful emotional connections with other real human beings.

This absolutely includes journalists.

Media databases like Cision and Meltwater make it much easier to build a big list than a targeted one. Journalists become email addresses and not people. Instead of building a relationship with the media, this transactional approach plays a numbers game. Ultimately, when the media gripes about getting a PR pitch addressed to the wrong name or that’s a country mile off the mark, it’s because they’re not being communicated to as human beings.

Public relations requires building understanding, changing perceptions and motivating behaviors and beliefs. Those kinds of outcomes need a relational versus transactional approach, which requires understanding your audiences and treating them as humans. This can be accomplished through surveys, interviews and focus groups and using that information to create personas.

Publicity is just too limiting a term to encompass these approaches.

2. Publicity is a Tactic. Public Relations Requires Strategy.

As public relations professionals, we can’t fulfill our role and responsibilities with a tactical mindset. We must think strategically.

From research to message development and testing to creative—strategy drives the choices we make, and those choices drive our campaign results. Did we communicate in a manner that earned our audience’s attention and resonated with them so that their perceptions, beliefs and behaviors were impacted?

I equate publicity with none of the above. Instead, I picture someone producing a bunch of press clippings which is useful if stroking your client’s ego is the only goal of your campaign.

3. A Publicist’s Communication is One-Way. PR Requires Listening.

There is far more pitching, posting and publishing than listening on social media and the web these days. I like the term coined by Mark Schaefer five years ago, Content Shock, to sum up the impact of content marketing run rampant. Schaefer pointed out then how the pace and volume of content being produced far exceeded the pace and volume of content being consumed.

Anyone today who is pushing content or a message without creating a way for the recipient to engage, respond and be heard is missing a huge opportunity to build relationships.

Communicators who create space for their stakeholders to be heard are the ones doing it right. When a crisis hits, they’ll be able to engage in conversations with their customers or investors rather than an avalanche of angry or outraged Tweets and Facebook posts.

The brands that weather crises more easily than others are those that have built relationships and goodwill with their stakeholders. And those are the brands being stewarded by strategic communicators and not publicists.

4. Publicity is About Earned Media. Public Relations Crosses All Media.

A decade ago, traditional media outlets underwent an implosion, while podcasts, online videos, blogs and social media storytelling platforms exploded. In the aftermath of these two trends, traditional media gatekeepers like the daily newspaper or evening newscast have lost their ability to influence public perception at scale.

Earned media was once the bread and butter of the public relations function, but today, it is just one of several communication platforms our profession employs to reach and engage with its stakeholders.

The contemporary integrated approach, sometimes referred to as the PESO Model, combines paid, earned, shared and owned media. Paid media can include social media ads and boosting or Google AdWords. Earned media includes press coverage but can include analyst relations, awards and speaking opportunities that imply and/or impart third-party validation. Shared media refers to social networks like Facebook but also review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Owned media describes all of the creative assets at your disposal to engage your audiences and to interact with them directly including print, digital and multimedia content.

Publicity is a component of only one of those four platforms, making it an inadequate label for describing what today’s strategic communicators do.

So, Let’s Retire the Term Publicist and Champion the Role of Strategic Communicator.

It’s time to toss this transactional, tactical, and out-of-touch term. It’s old school and perpetuates a narrow stereotype of what public relations today actually is. Publicity is about as apropos to what my team and I do every day at (W)right On Communications as my childhood nickname is to my adult identity. Now, if only I could get my mom to stop calling me Oobies.

How to Write Winning Award Nominations

By Chance Shay, Senior Communications Strategist

“You play to win the game.” As a sports enthusiast, this is one of my favorite quotes. When it comes to organized sports, if you’re not playing to win then what’s the point? The same thing goes for submitting award nominations. To make sure you’re helping your organization get the recognition (and buzz) it deserves, here are the four key elements to writing award nominations that win.

1. Focus on the category: There are a ton of award categories, which means your award nomination needs to emphasize how your product/service/organization is outstanding in that specific area. If the award category is about innovation, focus on how your widget solves a problem in a new way or how it created a new class of products. Many organizations make the mistake of writing award nominations that explain how fantastic their product is in a breadth of ways. Instead, focus on how fantastic the product is as it pertains to the one category. This will help reduce wordiness of a nomination, better hold judges’ attention and gives them everything they need to know to evaluate your product without having to dig through the nomination for it.

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2. Write for the criteria: All sound awards programs lay out criteria against which nominations will be judged. Use those criteria as an outline for your nomination. Make sure you clearly and succinctly address each aspect of the criteria within the context of the larger category. If pricing isn’t part of the criteria and your widget doesn’t have a price point benefit, don’t distract from what’s remarkable about the widget by mentioning its price. Also, don’t get lost talking about the widget’s features. Instead, discuss features in terms of the benefit they provide- feature A makes the product more reliable, feature B allows it to solve the problem faster, feature C relieves a pain point that’s a barrier to entry for a wider audience. Judges don’t care as much about what the widget is as they do about what it achieves.

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3. Use figures: Anyone can add superfluous adjectives to an award nomination to make it seem more impressive than it really is, but numbers don’t lie. Include data on how successful the product launch was, figures on the number of times it solves a problem, or show metrics that illustrate the benefit of the widget. If the figures included in your nomination are bigger and better than that of competing nominations, it doesn’t matter how much a competitor embellished on their nomination description. Use stats to your advantage.

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4. Make a good first impression: Set the tone for which your nomination will be judged with an opening statement that clearly conveys why your organization deserves to win the award. Assume the judge will only read the first sentence of your nomination. What MUST they know and understand about the widget? Build your opening statement around that and be sure to showcase the passion your organization has for what the widget achieves.

Write Winning Award Nominations
Bonus tip: Incorporate visuals! Depending on the award program size. Judges may have to sift through hundreds of nominations and can get cross-eyed looking at block of text after block of text. Use visuals- from infographics to product marketing photos- to show them how awesome the widget is, rather than just tell them. For nominations that don’t allow you to upload and send visual files, incorporate links to online-hosted visuals within the nomination text itself. Sure, not all judges are guaranteed to click the links to see the visuals, but it will give your nomination the edge for those that do.

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The point of submitting an award nomination isn’t to say you’ve nominated your organization for an award. The point is to win the award, tell your audience about why you won the award, differentiate your organization from competitors and boost sales or fundraising. By following these four (or five) tips, your nominations will be better positioned to help you win, and that’s what it’s all about.

Need a little help winning attention or awards for your organization? We are all about achieving wins for our clients. Let us know what a win looks like for you, and we’ll let you know how we can get you there. Email cshay@wrightoncomm.com to start the discussion today.

Meet the Team: Kat – Communications Strategist

We’re giving you the inside scoop on the entire WOC team with our “Meet the Team” series. This month, the spotlight is on our new Communications Strategist, Kat Beaulieu.

Kat Beaulieu has been creating communications for diverse audiences since 1996. She cut her teeth working in the communications department of North America’s #1 ski resort – Whistler Blackcomb. Since then she’s worked with a variety of organizations, from schools to governments to international corporations. Kat’s background includes work in the specialized field of Human Resources communications, where she crafted employer brands and programs to attract and engage talent. Kat has developed employer marketing campaigns for digital and traditional media and has influenced audiences through social media, reputation management and internal communications strategies. Kat has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. On weekends she enjoys pushing the limits of her communication abilities by practicing dog and horse whispering.

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What would you be doing if you weren’t at your current job?
Horseback riding.

What’s one word you would use to describe yourself?
Enthusiastive….I know that’s not really a word, but I wanted to say both enthusiastic and creative and was only allowed one word!

Fill in the blank. “If you really knew me, you’d know ____.”
I love to eat. A lot.

What super power would you like to have?
To make time stand still.

What would a “perfect” day look like to you?
Coffee. Horses. Lunch. Horses. Beer. Dinner. Sleep.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in the past year?
“Fake it ‘till you make it.” I probably should contextualize that by saying it’s something that comes from my horseback riding coach, but has been remarkably effective in non-horsey situations as well. Except work of course. Would never fake anything at work. Ever.

Best vacation you’ve had?
There have been many excellent vacations. All have their awesome moments, so it’s impossible to pick one as the best.

What’s your most embarrassing moment at work?
Back in college when I was a server I accidentally spilled prime rib au-jus on the train of a bride’s gown while I was serving her at the head table. Yup. That really happened. I was mortified.

Favorite quote?
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Mark Twain

If Hollywood made a movie about your life, who would be cast as you?
Uma Thurman, because I look just like her. JK, it would probably be a muppet with fine stringy hair and spindly arms and legs.

What’s your drink of choice?
A cold, hoppy IPA.

What’s one thing you can’t live without?
Animals.

Favorite line from a movie?
“Have fun storming the castle!”

What do you like to do in your free time?
Did I mention horses?

Hospitality PR Pros: Interview, Don’t Pitch, Travel Writers

By Julie Wright, President

Twitter: @juliewright

What happens when 25 travel media and an equal number of hospitality PR professionals are put in a room together for lunch? First, it gets really loud.

Second, if those 25 travel media are from Vancouver and the travel PR pros are from California (including destination marketing professionals from San Diego and Palm Springs), they’ll quickly find a lot in common.

For example, Vancouver media like sunshine: we have a ready supply! They like active outdoor fun: we make great hiking, surfing and cycling buddies. They’re into fresh, healthy and creative dining washed down with a delicious craft beer: all are abundant in San Diego and California.

A couple weeks ago was National Tourism and Travel Week in the U.S., and I spent Tuesday at a Visit California luncheon at the Vancouver Art Gallery talking with Canadian travel media about our client partner Visit Oceanside.

The format of the event was a progressive luncheon where the media stayed at one of five tables and the hospitality PR representatives rotated to a new table with each course. It was a fast, fun way to make sure everyone got a chance to connect and enjoy quality time.

I have attended similar events in Vancouver and the Bay Area about a year to a year and a half ago. At those events I was representing all of our hospitality PR clients – from Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to hotel and resort properties in Carlsbad, Del Mar, North Park, the Gaslamp, Coronado and Borrego Springs. Each has unique qualities (natural splendor, historic preservation, beach fun, desert serenity, hipster chic, family escapes, spas, wellness, fantastic dining and stargazing) and I felt such pressure to get each of their stories out and cram all of the information I could into every encounter I had. At the conclusion of those prior events, I felt like I hadn’t really made the connections or created the opportunities that I had set out to build.

With that in mind, I changed my approach for this luncheon. Instead of trying to get my story out, I focused first on the travel writer’s stories. I learned as much as I could in the time available–what do you write about, who do you write for, what drew you to travel writing, what have you written about most recently, what kinds of stories do you like to tell, what do you think of San Diego and California?

And a funny thing happened. I learned enough about each writer and TV producer to know which travel experiences and story angles would resonate with them. I now know who wants to cover skate parks and extreme sports spotlighting Oceanside’s active lifestyle opportunities. I know who wants to pursue the perfect fish taco. I know who might like to drive the Hops Highway (or at least sit shotgun for a North County beer tour). More than that, I also felt like I made some new friends and sincerely hope to welcome these folks to Oceanside over the coming year and share a future meal or drink with them.

All that is left to do now is ask them what time of year they’d like to make the trip, follow up and get it on everyone’s calendar.

At (W)right On Communications, we’re always evaluating and evolving our approach to getting our clients’ stories out. If you have a hospitality story you want promoted, we’ve got the perfect connection. Get in touch and we’ll match your story with the ideal storyteller.

How To Get More Done With Less Stress

Stress-at-work

By: President, Julie Wright

Twitter: @juliewright

Delays are expensive. B2B marketers know this! When a product launch is pushed back, potential revenue is lost. When a prospect’s purchasing decision drags on, that’s money your company isn’t putting in the bank. So, yes, time is money.

That’s why the team at (W)right On Communications prizes productivity—so much so that we wrote an e-book full of tips for being more productive to share what we know. It’s called “How to Get 30% More Productivity from your Team in 30 Days.”

Public relations and marketing agencies are environments where time is an extremely perishable commodity. Like many professional services companies and consultants, we charge for our expertise but bill by the unit of time. As our colleague’s coffee mug states, “You have as many hours in a day as Beyoncé.” And that is the truth. It is what you do with that time that sets you apart.

So, to achieve the highest public relations and marketing communications ROI for our clients, we’ve found ways to get more done in less time and make sure that time is never wasted—ours and our clients. (Internally, this is known as our GSD philosophy.)

Here’s some data on why productivity matters:

  • 28% of the average office worker’s day is spent focused on unnecessary distractions.
  • 27% of office workers feel disorganized. (And an equal number must be lying or in denial!)
  • Over 30 hours a month are spent in unproductive meetings.

I can think of several people in my professional network who are so busy attending meetings that they’re not available to advance their real work (that’s where consultants like us can come to the rescue to take ownership of key projects and keep them moving on time and on budget).

For this post, I am going to focus on prioritization because it is essential to productivity.

You will get a ton more done in your day if you don’t overthink prioritization and instead make it a simple, no-judgment habit. In other words, make prioritization a no brainer. It’s easier than you might think.

Start by creating categories of work. Come up with three to five buckets for your tasks. Now prioritize those. The highest ranked should be the task that is most aligned with revenue or profits. What part of your daily work most impacts your company’s bottom line or your team’s goals?

You’ll be torn between two types of activities: those that drive short-term rewards and are very deadline oriented and those that drive longer-term performance and are not deadline-driven. It’s this second group typically has a much larger impact on your performance, your team’s or your company’s but falls by the wayside when the urgent gets all of your attention.

This is the tension between the urgent and the important that is a fact of business life.

But business is all about creating efficient systems. So set a policy for yourself to make handling these conflicting priorities a no-brainer. For example, plan to always prioritize 2 or 3 daily tasks from the urgent bucket and 1 to 2 from the important bucket every day. And if you’re not getting to the important task after three days, move it to the top of your list.

This blog post is a perfect example of that. Writing it is not urgent to my business today, but long-term it is very important to my business. Because of that I have prioritized it ahead of some client and other agency management tasks.

If a client called me right now with a crisis or urgent request that would become my immediate priority – prioritization needs to be somewhat fluid. What I like about this approach is that it brings a sense of order to the chaos which makes me feel better about my crazed work life and more in control of it.

Once you have prioritized the type of work you do every day and determine a policy for managing the urgent and the important, schedule five to 10 minutes at the start and end of every day to update and categorize your work.

The beauty of this is that each morning you can look at the day’s demands in a relaxed state of mind no matter how much work greets you. Give each task a category, rank your categories and then rank your tasks. Voila. There’s your list. You might choose to do this at the end of the day only so that your list is there for you each morning and you get the satisfaction of hitting the ground running—whatever makes prioritization easier for you.

I also like this morning ritual because it allows me to start the day feeling a sense of immediate accomplishment. (See our tip for Day 1 in “How to Get 30% More Productivity from your Team in 30 Days.”)

Do this prioritization process first thing before you even look at your email. You can look at your email later and make adjustments as needed. (See Day 2 for ways to minimize email distractions.)

 

A tool that I’ve been using is Todoist. I can easily move tasks around, assign or change due dates or create and schedule recurring tasks. Plus I can color code my priorities. The Todoist mobile app is especially handy for capturing action items during client meetings.

Despite all of my best efforts, there are too many days where I don’t even get to my to-do list. While we have identified and adopted many methods at (W)right On Communications for increasing our productivity, we’re always open to new and better ideas. Please feel free to comment and share ways you tackle your to do list!