Perhaps the best-known example of reputation management in Corporate America occurred almost 100 years ago when oil titan John D. Rockefeller hired a public relations manager named Ivy Lee to burnish his image. It was Lee who conceived the idea of having Rockefeller hand out dimes to the public and made sure that only positive pictures of the magnate were released to the public.
Today, with the advent of the Internet, managing public opinion is a lot more complicated, intransigent and global. The result being, that a separate discipline called “reputation management “ or “executive reputation management” has been carved out of the public relations basket of options.
Obviously, corporate mavens have always tried to manage their public personae, but the pervasiveness of the Internet has made the task much harder because negative comments and verbal portrayals have a life beyond the local community. Anyone with a computer anywhere in the world can find out anything about you as a public person, and those same people can create statements online, in a personal blog that can cloud other’s opinions of you.
If one little thing that is disparaging about you or your company gets tossed into the information infrastructure, “you have to imagine that it is floating into every single household,” says Michael Bayer, the chief client officer and senior managing director with FD, a New York-based business and financial communications consultant. “It’s hard to get your head around that concept as it has never been the case in the history of mankind. Reputation management has never been more intense and more critical.”
Today, almost all research begins with an online search engine.
“Everybody is just turning to Google as their first point of reference on just about anything,” observes Nino Kader, who in 2006 created International Reputation Management, based in Washington, D.C., a unique public relations firm that solely focuses on ensuring clients are well represented on the Internet. Business, he says, is booming.
There are a number of search engines on the Internet, but Google is the market leader and as such creates the biggest online impact. “Google has taken such a dominant position in the market that who Google says you are very quickly becomes the reality of how the market perceives you,” adds Mike Myatt, managing director and chief strategy officer for N2Growth, a Portland, Ore.-company that provides reputation management services.
Not only do scandals and debacles quickly become the fodder of Internet entries, but if bloggers get a hold of some idea about you and start running it around the Web, immediately thousands of negative pieces of information about you can be circulating around the Internet—none of it may even be true.
