It involves the law of privacy and what sort of personal information can and can’t be collected by businesses and other organizations about individuals. Related to this are the obligations that social networking sites such as Facebook have to keep certain personal information private.
6. It involves the management of our personal and corporate “reputations”; our “brands” if you will, and what others think of us.
Certainly large corporations such as Apple, Disney, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Microsoft, United Airlines, Exxon, and BP have brands and reputations to protect (and as we shall see, to damage as well).
Noncommercial entities also have brands and reputations to protect and foster, even though they’re not trying to sell you anything. Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, the United Nations, FBI, and RCMP are examples of organizations that should be just as conscious and vigilant as private companies in the protection of their brands and reputations, if not more so. Unfortunately, at least one of these organizations has had an online reputation disaster, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.
Celebrities and public figures such as Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, David Letterman, Martha Stewart, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Conrad Black, Senator John Edwards, and Sarah the Duchess of York, have brands and reputations to protect and cultivate. For some of them, their name is their brand, and lucrative endorsement contracts by cereal, automobile, watch, and athletic companies will be at risk if the person making the endorsement has a problem with his or her own reputation. The spokesperson’s damaged reputation could damage the brand and reputation of the product. However, a questionable reputation may simply add to the brand’s appeal in certain unique market segments where a bad-boy or bad-girl panache is actually cultivated. (Do Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson really care about those sex tapes? Have the tapes damaged or “enhanced” their reputations?)
We all have reputations and our own personal brands that can get damaged, perhaps irreparably, from our online conduct or from our conduct that is captured and distributed online. Just ask two Winnipeg, Manitoba teachers who were filmed on a cell phone at a pep rally performing mock sex acts. They were fired; leaving their careers in tatters. Reputation matters, even if we’re not celebrities. In this century, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas anymore. It can be on the Internet in seconds and seen by millions in a matter of days. It’s the era of the digital tattoo.
At the corporate or business level, brand management is a multibillion-dollar industry. Although some would say the overriding objective of branding and the management of corporate brands is to get consumers to purchase the products manufactured or distributed by those companies and drive up sales, part of brand management is also dealing with the crises that threaten the brand every so often. Something that comes to mind: the famous Tylenol murders of 1982 where someone laced capsules of Tylenol with potassium cyanide in the United States, leading to a worldwide recall of all Tylenol products and crisis management of epic proportions.
There have been similar branding crises, or you might say, “public relations crises” in Canada. Maple Leaf Foods had a serious outbreak of a disease called listeriosis in its meatpacking plant near Toronto in 2008. Consumers ate deli meat that was infected with the bacteria and became sick. At least 20 people died of the disease.
At the time of writing this book, Toyota’s brand was suffering badly due to an alleged faulty gas pedal that supposedly wouldn’t allow drivers to decelerate.
Also at the time of writing this book, millions of gallons of crude oil was spewing from a deep sea underwater well operated by BP, which BP did a disastrous job of containing (and perhaps an equally bad job of managing its reputation in the process).
Who could ignore the plight of “living brands” such as Martha Stewart, jailed for securities offenses; or Conrad Black, in jail for obstruction of justice; Senator John Edwards for having his assistant be the fall guy for his love child with another aide; or Tiger Woods, whose fondness for waitresses, hostesses, and at least one porn star resulted in the cancellation of numerous lucrative endorsement contracts. His name continues to give fodder to the tabloid newspapers and late-night tv monologues.
These are certainly brand crises, but as we’ll see, they aren’t so much online brand crises, or at least, crises directly caused by online activities. Online brand crises happen when a dissatisfied customer posts a song on YouTube about an airline breaking his guitar and the video gets millions of hits in a matter of weeks. Or when employees of a pizza restaurant film themselves doing disgusting things with the food they’re making and upload it to YouTube for millions of customers to see. Or when officers of a police force respected around the world repeatedly fire a Taser at a tired, confused, and unarmed Polish immigrant at an airport, and he dies; the entire event being captured on a video camera and eventually posted to YouTube.
A corporate reputation built up over decades can be tarnished by one disgruntled customer who posts a bad review about your business online to a site like TripAdvisor or an exposé to YouTube, or by a status update on Facebook that berates your business. Or if someone creates a Facebook page dedicated to how bad the page’s authors (who may in fact be employees of the manufacturer or distributer) think your product or service is. Or if someone tweets to thousands of followers (which can be re-tweeted to hundreds of thousands more) about a problem with a product or a service provided by a business like yours. Result? Immediate, instantaneous, and damaging consumer-led revolts.
Individuals like you and I have reputations to protect. We have to think of our personal reputations as “brands” as well. It’s not only Tiger Woods’ and the Duchess of York’s reputations that are at stake because they’re famous. Our own reputations are at stake by the things said about us online and especially by the things said by us online.
We all have brands and reputations to protect, don’t we? Even if we work in a bank, a law office, or if we’re students or teachers in a high school. Again, think of it like a tattoo; interesting and provocative when you have it done when you’re young, but painful and very expensive to remove when you get older — if you can remove it at all.
Our reputations can be harmed by the people around us, people in our online community, and more often than not, by ourselves. In that sense, we have to protect ourselves from others, but we also have to protect ourselves from ourselves.
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