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With countless brand management firms popping up everywhere, and a host of free tools that help small businesses keep track of what customers are saying online, Internet reputation management is becoming easier and cheaper to do.
And subsequently, the potential to go way, way overboard is also growing.
Recent years are full of examples of brand management gone horribly wrong, and each one provides a case study in how not to undertake reputation management on the Web.
There are plenty of examples where overly aggressive brand protection can backfire. Earlier this month, the popular blog Boing Boing posted a letter it received from a law firm representing a company called Academic Advantage. The blog had previously published a post which contained the words "academic advantage" - in a context totally unrelated to the tutoring firm. Somewhere in the comments section of that post, a user had written the word "scam," again, in an unrelated context.
However, it appears the law firm had essentially set up a Google search for any instance of the words "Academic Advantage" and "Scam." Upon seeing the blog post - but perhaps without reading its content - the lawyers sent Boing Boing a letter claiming the post constituted libel and had cause Academic Advantage "significant and possibly irrevocable damage."
The editors at Boing Boing quickly made the letter public. A few days later, Academic Advantage fired the law firm.
Sometimes, attempting to silence legitimate criticism can often make a brand protection problem even bigger.
Intel found this out last year, when the company became the focal point of a campaign to end the mining of conflict minerals. A large number of activists, pushing for a bill that would significantly restrict the mining of minerals from war-torn regions in the Congo, took to Intel's Facebook page to demand the company support the bill and ensure its supply chain was free of conflict mines. The Facebook page quickly filled up with hundreds of posts, but it was only after Intel effectively purged the posts and temporarily brought comments to a halt that the company found itself the subject of much wider criticism, on websites such as Twitter, for stifling debate. The bad publicity quickly forced the company to re-post the deleted comments, open up its page for new comments, and apologize.
One of the most consistently successful forms of online brand protection is the personalized response, when the company makes an effort to reach out digitally to an unsatisfied customer and let them know a human being is dealing with their complaint. Airlines and cable companies - frequent subjects of customer criticism - have embraced this approach, setting up myriad Twitter and Facebook accounts, and actively looking for users who say something about the company, be it positive or negative. The more senior an employee who responds, the thinking goes, the more likely the company is to win over the customer. The CEO of ING Direct in Canada, for example, maintains a Twitter account in which he frequently retweets or responds to other users.
Unfortunately the personalized response can cause more problems than it solves. The classic example is the Steve Jobs response to a customer who e-mailed last summer to complain about the now-infamous iPhone antenna issues (the phone's signal reception used to drop significantly when held a certain way).
Mr. Jobs' response, which was obtained by the tech blog Engadget, was concise: "Just avoid holding it that way."
The response quickly became a viral sensation, with users posting various sarcastic variations on the company's iconic "Think Different" advertising campaign, simply titled: "Hold Different."