Wikipedia can be a useful online branding tool.  From my experience problems can arise when competitors or others with malicious intent change or add to the listing material.  If this happens there are steps you can take.

Those who feel they have been the victim of malicious vandalism aren’t helpless, there are numerous ways to go about fixing the problem. The obvious answer is edit the entry yourself, but that can be, potentially, problematic, as it can get you flamed by users or land you in an edit war.

This article gives you 7 steps to manage your Wikipedia reputation.

Further to our original post on the Whole Foods reputation management problem it is now reported that the CEO of Whole Foods has issued an apology for his anonymous bashing of rivals Wild Oats.

The chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. apologized to shareholders on Tuesday for anonymously posting comments about his company on the Internet as the organic and natural foods grocer said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had launched a probe into the matter.

Excuse the pun but…your reap what you sow….(ouch!) Read more

For an in-depth analysis go to Force of Good.

This article entitled ‘Whole Foods CEO Attacked Rival Online‘ highlights why there is a growing need for online reputation monitoring and management.  The internet makes it easy for anonymous individuals to attack your brand.

The chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. wrote anonymous online attacks against a smaller rival and questioned why anyone would buy its stock, before Whole Foods announced an offer to buy the other company this year.

The postings on Internet financial forums, made under the name “rahodeb,” said Wild Oats Markets Inc. stock was overpriced. The statements predicted the company would fall into bankruptcy and then be sold after its stock fell below $5 per share.

This is an interesting article about using search for PR and reputation management.

Although we may credit our college professors or our first marketing job, we should thank our parents for our very first public relations lessons. We were taught at a young age the importance of reputation management. Each time we were forced to return the gum we accidentally shoplifted from the convenience store, or to ring a neighbor’s doorbell and apologize for breaking their front window with our baseball, our parents were teaching us the value of managing public opinion and steps to restoring trust.

Protecting the trust that you have labored hard to build is what reputation management is all about.  More and more companies are developing plans to protect their reputation.  What are you doing about it?

The USA Today has an online reputation management article posted today entitled ‘Your Internet Image is Everything.’

The article concludes:

The bottom line: Businesses and individuals need to be proactive when it comes to their reputations. And it’s more important the smaller the business. It doesn’t take much more than a dissatisfied customer with some Web savvy to wreck a company online — and it doesn’t take much negative material online to wreck a brick and mortar operation.

I believe that any business, regardless of size, should have as a core activity online reputation management.

All-Blogs.net directory

Online reputation management helps you to develop and protect your online brand.  It also gives you the opportunity to influence consumer perception of the brand.

Visibility and high rankings of favorable brand related information is the ultimate goal.  This is what the vast majority of consumers come across while undertaking searches for your brand. The byproduct of getting favorable information ranked is that any negative information is pushed down or removed from the top end of search engine listings.  This is the type of information that may be damaging to the reputation of your brand.

Organizations produce a large amount of content on many different platforms and websites. It is often the case that this information is not promoted for the web or is not indexed by the search engines.

The goal is to analyze your current situation and build a plan aimed at developing brand related information that can be indexed and ranked by the search engines. Your organization should also be geared to participate in the online conversation relating to your brand.

Here are three steps to build your online reputation management strategy around:

1. Monitoring what is being said online
2. Analyzing how the visible information affects your brand and your reputation
3. Influencing the results by promoting company controlled information

Your online brand reputation is the result of years of hard work; therefore you should have total control over how it is presented in the search results. Your reputation means everything in the real world, and that is no different in the cyber world.

A nice piece on the need for reputation management when handling your online brand.

A few months ago, I had a series of conversations with managers who reflected on the increasing difficulty of managing the perception of their brand. They told stories of customer complaints spreading like wildfire through the Web before they had a chance to deal with them, and opinions expressed in blogs and forwarded e-mails by some of their detractors that appeared to be magically reprocessed into fact.

You don’t have to search hard to find examples of such challenges. An international fast-food chain is sideswiped by images available on YouTube of rats roaming freely in one of their outlets. A global apparel maker contends with allegations, published online, of operating sweatshops.  Read more