reputation management

This page looks at online reputation management, in particular the growth of 'attack', 'sucks' or gripe sites that criticise businesses, government agencies, other organisations and individuals.

It covers -

• issues
• practice
• protest sites
• monitoring - tracking personal and corporate reputations online
• legislation - local and overseas legal frameworks
• studies
• other perspectives

It is supplemented by pages on defamation and cyberstalking.

     the issues

Entrepreneur Seymour Schulich is supposed to have quipped that "reputation is character minus what you can get away with." As noted in the consumers guide elsewhere on this site, although the web is a marvellous channel to promote goods and services or to build a community of interest, it also presents the unscrupulous or merely disgruntled with a powerful mechanism to damage the promoter's image online and offline.

That reflects the speed with which email can spread and the low cost of building a website that is globally accessible. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the web is "a bully pulpit".

It reflects perceptions that defamation does not occur in cyberspace or that remedies are unenforceable, although as noted in our Governance guide, Australian and overseas courts clearly consider otherwise. 

And it reflects the slowness of some audiences to critically evaluate what appears online, a lag that has led Bruce Schneier - author of the perceptive Secrets & Lies: Digital Security In A Networked World (New York: Wiley 2000) - to warn that the major web security problem may be 'semantic attacks' rather than traditional denial of service activity or site defacement.

Most discussion of that lag is anecdotal and detailed studies are just starting to appear; some are highlighted in the discussion of 'trust' within the Security and Consumers guides elsewhere on this site.

     practice

Online mechanisms for the expression of unjustified spleen or of legitimate criticism vary widely.

The disgruntled customer who formerly wrote a personal letter to an organisation's chief executive can now include that letter on an discussion list, from which it's likely to be excerpted or redistributed 'as is'. 

The canny complainant can choose a list that is viewed by journalists; examples in Australia during 2000 and 2001 demonstrate that malicious or merely misunderstood information has been picked up by the mainstream press. As the defamation action noted above proves, information published online can be persistent. Many discussion lists are archived and picked up by search engines: unlike the letter to the editor they don't end up as wrappers for leftover cat food.

Responses to the scope for commercial disinformation (driving down the price of a company's shares) or personal malice have varied. Russell Weaver's cogent paper Defamation Law in Turmoil: The Challenges Presented by the Internet examines particular issues from a traditional legal perspective. There is a more radical - and to us less convincing - proposition in Brian Martin's analysis that if you are defamed online the remedy is to use the net to alert people to the truth. If only it was that simple. We have explored issues, particular cases and the academic literature in a more detailed profile.

For site owners/operators (and for intermediaries such as service providers) some conclusions can be drawn. The nature of the 'new media' means that it can be harder to bury a complaint or to hide consumer-unfriendly policies. Communities of interest can develop online and access online tools such as NetAction's Virtual Activist kit. There is thus some value in responding quickly to feedback and monitoring what is said about your business, government or agency online.

     protest sites

Australia is several years behind the US in establishing 'protest' sites, some featuring the word 'sucks'.

A recent survey revealed a US corporate who's who - AOL, American Express, Citibank, Ameritech, Ford, General Motors, Allstate, Microsoft, Monsanto, Nike, Chase, Prudential, WalMart, USWest and United Airlines - with particular corporate demons being shadowed by several sites. Ford for example is criticised by a specialist anti-Ford Web Ring, including the Association of Flaming Ford Owners (AFFO) alleging vehicles tend to self-combust.

Some activists have even urged ICANN to establish a global 'sucks' domain space to reflect the 'official' sites; the Nader-inspired Consumer Project on Technology for example proposed a sucks gTLD that would be administered by a Dot Sucks Foundation.

Estimates on the proliferation of such sites are problematical, particularly as many are shortlived, but the "anti-attack site" business (keeping pace with the protests) estimates that there were over 5,000 sites as of 2005. They are often highly visible, appearing prominently in search engine listings.

Some are little more than a repository for juvenile humour: graffiti, comments that x is the devil, animations of creatures urinating on the corporate logo. Others feature detailed and sometimes persuasive critiques, including 'insider' documentation, and are associated with newsgroups. Some are established by advocacy groups or disgruntled consumers. Others have been set up by unions and aggrieved shareholders.

The effect of such action is contentious. Financial analysts have attributed falling share prices to particular campaigns, noting that some domains claim a regular audience of 20 to 50 thousand visitors and that information on those sites has been accepted and echoed by the mainstream media. Others appear to have been ineffective. 

Some of the major airlines and financial corporations have successfully litigated for sites to be edited or removed altogether. In discussing domain disputes we've noted examples such as Dunkin Donuts abandoning the struggle after a year and buying a protest site initially established by a consumer disgruntled over the lack of skim milk and asdasucks.co.uk (which featured "scandously and disgustingly abusive" comment about the UK retailer) being transferred under a UDRP ruling. 

The McSpotlight site featured in McDonalds pyrrhic victory over a small group of UK activists who had accused the fast-food giant exploiting staff and the rainforest. A site critical of pest eradicators Terminix was initially threatened with litigation over the use of the company's trademark but has gained significant media coverage by publishing complaints from unhappy customers and employees, and detailing the company's history of litigation. 

All in all, not good advertising.

     monitoring

Major businesses and some individuals have traditionally tracked their reputations through clipping services that covered newspaper/magazine items and broadcasts and through letters from fans or foes. The early history of the public relations industry in the US largely involved corporate publicists such as Ivy Lee inserting positive comment into publications (whether for free or on the basis of payment) and theatrical agents trying to keep news of their clients' misdemeanours out of print.

That task was possible when the US had under 2,000 daily newspapers (most of which relied on syndicated content) and a slightly larger number of journals. (The number of publications in the UK, Germany, France and Australia was roughly proportionate).

The challenge is somewhat different in this century, where fact and fiction about an organisation or individual can be distributed globally through the traditional media and through mechanisms such as blogs, chatrooms, email, newsgroups and sites operated by figures such as Matt Drudge. Such information distribution poses challenges regarding privacy, surveillance (particularly of celebrities) and defamation.

It has led to the emergence of online monitoring services that attempt to identify what is being said in mainstream online publications, on attack sites, in some chatrooms and in other public fora such as newsgroups. The success of that tracking and responses (eg claims that particular corporations or political groups have 'planted' information) is uncertain.

In Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, Australia, New Zealand and the EU there have been successful prosecutions by private sector bodies/individuals and government agencies over statements on the net that damage reputations.

In Asia, for example, there have been interventions about misleading statements made in business chatrooms (eg the Ice-Red case). In Australia the 1994 Rindos case stands as a landmark in online defamation of an individual. In Canada, the UK and US there has been action against anonymous smears and against attempts to hype the price of particular companies.

Arguably that action involves organisations that are well-resourced (or can purchase expertise) and individuals of particular determination. An emerging issue is identity theft for small-scale vilification of the formerly nearest & dearest, highlighted in a 2003 Boston Globe article that ironically suggests

Looking for revenge on that rotten former boyfriend? Make a homepage in his name where he brags about being a liar and ex-con with scabies. Let Google do the rest ...

Such suggestions have resulted in emergence of 'online identity managers' that claim to act as "agents, lawyers, enablers - and enforcers".

ClaimID for example supposedly consolidates online information about an individual for ready identification "rather than letting a search engine decide what comes up when someone types in" the individual's name. One proponent claimed that "My ClaimID changes with me. Google doesn't change with me". That may be beside the point if most people encounter the proponent through Google and the search engine does not place ClaimID at the top of its search results.

Naymz will supposedly promote the individual online; the Boston Globe reported that ReputationDefender (RD) "will try to clean up after you".

if you don't like the information that exists about yourself online, [it] can search for it and try to destroy it. For a monthly fee (starting at $10), ReputationDefender scours the Web for content about a client and presents a report. For an extra fee, the client can request that some of the information be removed. ... ReputationDefender won't help felons erase their records, but it will help clients if they've been criticized on a blog, even if that criticism is valid (being tagged as an unreliable online seller, for instance). Legal action against sites that refuse to remove information is a last resort - and an extra charge.

     legislation

Corporate reputation management online is situated within the same legal frameworks as management offline. There is no global law concerned with free speech or criticism of organisations, public figures and private individuals. A provocative 2000 article by Braun, Drobny & Gessner argues that although legitimate criticism is an integral part of the web, online incitement to sabotage commercial sites is a form of information warfare that requires special legislation.

The authors claim that the web

resembles the lawless 'Wild West' ... open to governance by human instincts, including those of greed, deception, and hate.

Out there in the digital badlands "inflammatory web sites promoting commercial terrorism have targeted corporations" such as McDonalds, 7-Eleven, Kinko's, Disney, Blockbuster and Mattel. Protest sites -

foster animosity towards the corporation and urge readers to take affirmative steps to tarnish the corporation's image and to sabotage its operations. Indeed, such web sites threaten acts of destruction that may cause substantial financial damages to a targeted company.

They claim that the operators of those sites have little reason to fear prosecution because jurisdictional problems, competing priorities and low resources in law enforcement agencies and a failure to recognise challenges posed by "infocrime" (since most legislation criminalizes threats to people, not property).

In response they propose new national legislation, reflected in international agreements, that would make anti-corporate "vigilantes" liable for damages and criminalise activity such as agitprop in fast-food venues (swapping the toy-of-the-month with a mutant cow figure, spiking the cappuccino and donuts).

In practice most regimes appear likely to retain existing defamation law and torts such as "injurious falsehood", with businesses and other corporate entities having scope to recover economic loss attributable to a false statement disparaging the plaintiff's goods/service (whether or not that is defamatory to the plaintiff) published maliciously.

     studies

The literature about online reputation management primarily concerns questions of trust and authority regarding C2C electronic commerce (eg can you trust a vendor in an online auction) and publishing (rewards accrue to the most cited author). Two examples are the 2001 paper by Paul Resnick & Richard Zeckhauser on Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay's Reputation System and Phil Agre's 2000 comment The Market in Marketplaces: Some Notes on the Dubious Case of eBay; other works are highlighted in our Consumers guide and the profile on auction systems.

There is surprisingly little writing about organisations managing their online profiles; much of the literature is anecdotal, triumphalist and concentrates on crisis management for major organisations.

Gerry Griffin's Reputation Management (Oxford: Capstone 2002) and Corporate Image Management - A Marketing Discipline for the 21st Century (London: Butterworth) by Steven Howard offer a succinct introduction to broader questions of corporate reputation management. Crisis Communication: A Casebook Approach (Hillsdale: Erlbaum 1995) by Kathleen Fearn-Banks, Communicating When Your Company Is Under Siege: Surviving Public Crisis (New York: Free Press 1986) by Marion Pinsdorf and the spritzy Crisis Marketing: When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies (Chicago: Probus 1986) by Joe Marconi are three examples of the pre-internet genre. Nail 'Em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities & Businesses (New York: Prometheus 1999) by Eric Dezenhall is a similar work by a prominent publicist.

There is a view from the humanities in Culture Wars on the Net: Trademarks, Consumer Politics & Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web (PDF) by Rosemary Coombe & Andrew Herman, disfigured by infelicities such as "the symbolic processes of corporate branding of, and in, cyberspace territorializes the Web as a striated space of corporate sovereignty and consumer desire". For a somewhat self-indulgent view of public relations see PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books 1996) by Stewart Ewen.

A 2001 paper by Julie Katz & Aron Carnahan on Battling the "CompanyNameSucks.com" cyberactivists is one of several works highlighted in our more detailed discusion of domain name disputes and registration rules. Deborah Ezer's 2000 paper Celebrity Names As Web Site Addresses: Extending the Domain of Publicity Rights to the Internet notes particular issues regarding the 'right of publicity', discussed in more detail in our Intellectual Property Guide here.

     other perspectives

There are two perspectives in our Security guide. The cybervandalism page looks at site defacement. The identity theft page explores instances where an individual's identity online is appropriated.

Perspectives elsewhere on the site include discussion of domain name disputes and trademarks.



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