According to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ video from Socialnomics, 96% of Generation Y or Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000 or thereabouts) are part of an online social network and yet the fastest growing segment of Facebook is females aged 55-65 years old.

Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama, and half the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old and email is considered old technology by a significant number of them.

We are connecting, communicating and revealing personal and professional details about ourselves more openly than ever before. In the time it takes to read this post around 50 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine.

We tap out information about ourselves at the stroke of a key and yet rarely think about the damage that can be caused to our reputation, both online and off, by posting careless remarks and images.

Even if we don’t write the words ourselves, others are writing about us, and in this digital age of instant upload it’s worth remembering that the camera is always rolling, the microphone is always on, and there’s no such thing as ‘off-the-record’.

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When a company decides to have an official presence on Facebook, or other online social media network, they open themselves up to two huge opportunities:

• They can connect and communicate with potential and existing clients and customers keen to engage in a dialogue with that company and build trust in the process.

• They also run the risk of getting offside with ‘fans’, friends’ and ‘followers’ big-time if they fail to understand the ‘rules of engagement’ and try and use what are perceived as ‘big-brother’ tactics in the process.

The fall-out that’s occurred, which is neatly summarised in Bernard Warner’s blog post at SocialMediaToday.com, demonstrates how the internet can become a bitter battlefield where wars are won or lost based not on words, but on behaviour.

No matter how much a company or organisation may want to control their image and reputation online, it’s almost impossible to do – especially via Social Networking sites such as Facebook.

Attacking its commentators is unlikely to have endeared Nestle to the 90,000 or so ‘friends’ it has (had?) on Facebook as Rick Broida points out at bnet.com.

I’d hazard a guess it would have earned more respect, and perhaps even enhanced its reputation, if it had responded in a way that said ‘we hear you, we welcome your feedback, and we’re actually quite pleased you’re taking the time to let us know how you feel’.

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Should you ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’?  From a reputation perspective, if not an eco-perspective, the answer, in my opinion, is yes.

You might think people may have had enough of whatever it is you provide, but what’s more important is not that that they’ve tried, or heard, it before, but that it remains relevant to them.

For us as service providers, too, the temptation to develop or provide ‘new’ stuff can be extremely tempting. We think clients and customers may tire of our offerings and want something that’s ‘new’ and ‘improved’.

And we may grow tired ourselves of offering the same things day in and day out. However, clients don’t necessarily want ‘new’ stuff. What they want is relevant stuff.

As a product or service provider, your job is to remind your clients and customers just how relevant whatever it is you provide continues to be them. The core of your key messages probably won’t change. Nor will the benefits, or uses, of whatever you provide. What will change is how you frame your offering to make it relevant to them right now.

So if you’re trying to think up ‘new’ ways of doing things, think too about how you can re-frame, re-package and re-communicate what you already provide so that it remains relevant and valuable to your clients and customers. It’s a reputation-winning strategy.

Whatever you offer may need tweaking, but it probably won’t need abandoning altogether.

Think creatively and remind yourself, and your clients, of what’s great about your offering by linking it to current trends and positioning it as a ‘must have now’. After all, an anagram of ‘Relevance Rules’ is ‘Revenues Recall’.

Over-promising and under-delivering is one of the biggest reputation-damagers there is.

If the breach of promise is relatively minor, most of us will forgive an organisation and give it a second, or even third, chance to deliver and meet our expectations.

However, when promises continue to be broken, and serious doubts are raised about a company’s ability to deliver – in any way – our willingness to trust that company plummets.

New Zealand’s largest telco company, Telecom, is in serious trouble in terms of reputation branding.

Its much-vaunted ‘available (almost) anywhere’ television ads used to launch the XT Network has come back to haunt them with significant network outages that have affected hundreds of thousands of customers.

This isn’t a minor blip. The fourth major outage this week has resulted in the resignation of Telecom’s most senior executive responsible for the network’s design and implementation. (more…)

Do you worry about your online reputation? It seems many of us don’t – but we should.

Research carried out by Microsoft recently highlighted just how powerful the internet can be in terms of affecting how job-seekers, companies and consumers are perceived.

Stark findings from the study of 2,500 consumers, HR managers and recruitment professionals in the US, UK, Germany and France include:

• 63% of consumers surveyed are concerned that online reputation might affect their personal and/or professional life, yet less than half even consider their reputations when they post online content.
• Fewer than 15% of consumers in any of the countries surveyed believe that information found online would have an impact on their getting a job and yet
• 70% of surveyed HR professionals in US, and 41% in the UK, have rejected a candidate based on online reputation information, however, on the up-side:
• 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the UK and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent with almost half stating that it does so to a great extent.

The take-out of all this? Reputation rules. It opens doors or slams them shut. If you’re concerned about an online reputation that may be less than flattering Microsoft’s ‘Protect your online reputation’ guidelines provide sound advice, including: (more…)

Much like the Kryptonite bike lock debacle back in 2005, the Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’ video  continues to be picked up on the web and damage United’s reputation.

When the airline damaged a $3,500 Taylor guitar and refused to accept liability, or provide any kind of compensation, Dave Carroll hit back where it hurt – right at their reputation.

According to a Mashable blog post written just after the video was posted in August last year, the video accrued around 3.2 million views and 14,000 comments less than 10 days after it was uploaded.

Today the clip’s been viewed more than 7.5 million times and continues to circulate on the internet in a practical demonstration of word-of-mouth becoming word-of-mouse.

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New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. (more…)

Tiger Woods’ admitted ‘indiscretions’ have tee’d off more than a few people recently, including his wife, Elin, his corporate sponsors, and bigwigs in the golfing world.

Sponsors Accenture, Gillette, Tag Heuer and AT&T are publicly distancing themselves from sports’ first billionaire and no doubt ruing the fact that their names are likely to be associated with the scandal for years to come. (Perhaps the so-called ‘Curse of Gillette’ works both ways?)

Woods’ family and his sponsors have a right to feel aggrieved, and seriously let down, by his actions. It’s a breach of trust on a spectacular scale. (more…)