Manage Your Online Reputation. Tony Wilson

Research Center (CRC).

      Parents, teachers and business people might be interested in Chapter 5, which deals with the importance of apologies when you’ve made a mistake that affects your brand or reputation, and the tools you can use to craft a better apology than no apology at all, (or one that has obviously been written for public relations or legal reasons). Good apologies can save reputations. Bad ones can ruin them.

      Or you might just want to see the various online tools which I discuss in Chapter 9. This chapter will help you discover ways of finding out what is being said about you, your business, or your products online.

      Chapter 11 includes interesting news, facts, and information that is illustrative of issues in online reputation management.

      One big problem is that things change quickly. By way of example, Facebook’s privacy policy changed at least two times since October 2009 when I first started working on this book, and legal decisions from courts around the world continue to affect and change the online landscape regularly. By the time you read this book, some of the factual information may have changed. The practical advice I give you — the dos, don’ts, and other lessons about online reputation management as well as the sources where you can get further information — won’t change, so I assure you, this book is worth reading.

      Finally, this is also not a law book. The law regarding reputation management is interdisciplinary, complex, full of nuances, and always changing. I try to cover the basic legal concepts in this area broadly, without getting mired in details or legal niceties, and even then, the legal discussion is general in nature. You should not presume that the legal issues that I discuss are meant to supplant or replace the advice of legal professionals who would review the law as it applies to your particular circumstances, or within your particular jurisdiction. If you think something you have posted or otherwise published might be defamatory or might injure another’s reputation, or if you think your own good reputation has been damaged by the comments of someone in an email, a blog post, a message board, a forum, on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, or something as mundane as in a newspaper, you should be talking to a lawyer who knows something about this area. If you don’t know where to find one, email me at [email protected] or [email protected] and I’ll try to point you in the right direction. Or just Google me. I have a fairly large digital footprint, but I always make sure everything (I’ll repeat — everything) that’s said by me or is written about me online is there because I want it there. That’s the first lesson, I suppose, in good reputation management. Take control of it. It’s yours.

      In any event, I hope the book will, at the very least, instill a sense of urgency to monitor and manage, and perhaps even sculpt what is said about you, and indeed, what is said by you, online so that you can protect yourself not only from others, but from yourself too.

      1

      An Overview of Social Media

      Like the telephone in the early twentieth century; the fax machine in the ’70s; voice mail in the ’80s; email and online forums in the ’90s; and blogs, instant messaging, and text messaging on smartphones in the ’00s; in this decade, online communication through social networking and other social media is the way many people relate to each other now.

      The online environment we live in today, when compared with the environment in 1990 or even 2000, is quite unlike any in which we have ever lived. It’s a different world than the one I grew up in. This world has its own customs, protocols, conventions, inside jokes, and taboos.

      The Internet wasn’t invented by former US Vice President Al Gore. It really started in 1969 as a US Department of Defense project called Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and connected four US universities to exchange information across a network of computers. The web browser only came into existence with the development of Mosaic in 1993. In the mid-’90s, commercial services such as AOL and CompuServe started offering access to the Internet through subscribed services.

      A survey done in December 2009, performed by Pew Internet & American Life Project, revealed that —

      • 74 percent of all American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet;

      • 60 percent of American adults use broadband connections at home; and

      • 55 percent of American adults connect to the Internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or related connection on their laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone, or other wireless device.

      As for email, The Radicati Group, a technology market research company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, estimates that 247 billion emails per day were sent in 2009 (of which 81 percent were estimated to be spam, leaving perhaps 47 billion legitimate emails per day). The Radicati Group also estimated that the average corporate user sends and receives approximately 110 messages daily, and around 18 percent of those emails are spam, which includes actual spam and what is termed graymail (i.e., unwanted newsletters, alerts). As of May 2010, there were 2.9 billion email user accounts, and this is expected to grow to 3.8 billion by 2014.

      In The Radicati Group’s “Email Statistics Report, 2010” (available at Radicati.com), in 2010, 75 percent of all email accounts were owned by consumers, and 25 percent were owned by businesses. This 75/25 ratio is expected to stay constant until 2014. Of all the email users, 47 percent are located in Asia and the Pacific (i.e., China, India, Japan, Oceania), while 23 percent of email accounts are in Europe, and 14 percent in North America.

      1. Networking Sites

      In July 2010, Facebook reported that it had more than 500 million registered users; if it were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world after China and India. (By 2015, it may surpass both!) Facebook states that the average user has 130 friends, and that people spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Its users share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. The average user is connected to 80 pages, groups, and events, and creates 90 pieces of content monthly. Fifty percent of Facebook’s active users log on every day. Interestingly enough, only 30 percent of Facebook’s users are in the United States. There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through mobile devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other mobile telephones. Facebook’s own statistics show that people who use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook as laptop or desktop users. You wonder why television is dying? Everyone’s eyes seem to be on their computers accessing Facebook and other social networking sites.

      Whereas Facebook is for friends connecting with other friends, LinkedIn is for businesspeople connecting with other businesspeople, whether for jobs, business opportunities, profile upgrading, or other networking where one knows that other businesspeople will be looking. It had 75 million registered users in 2010.

      Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t the only social networking sites that people belong to and use. What social networking site you use depends on where you are in the world, and what you’re looking for in a social networking site (i.e., business, pleasure, music, dating, shopping), your age, your occupation, your first language, the “market niche” of the site, and what network your other friends and contacts are using. There’s Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, hi5, orkut, PerfSpot, Yahoo! 360°, Zorpia, Netlog, Sales Spider, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Classmates, Xanga and many more (especially if you include all the dating sites). In fact, Apple launched Ping, a music social networking site the day I wrote this paragraph. However, in this book, I’m going to concentrate on Facebook because it seems to be the one site where everyone “is” and where everyone makes the most mistakes. At least until something else comes along to replace it.

      2. Video Sharing

      YouTube, the online video-sharing platform, announced in 2010 that 2 billion YouTube videos were viewed per day. In 2010, it celebrated five years of existence. The company was created by three employees of PayPal: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. They developed what would