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. Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Think social media doesn’t matter to you, your business or your reputation? Think again!  Socialnomics’ ‘Social Media Revolution’ clip on YouTube is doing an excellent job of showing how important social media is, and will continue to be, to all of us – both as consumers and product and service providers.

There are currently more than 200 million blogs with 54 percent bloggers posting content or tweeting daily.  Around 34 percent of these bloggers are posting opinions about products and brands online. What might they be saying about you?

It’s worth giving it some thought as around 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14 percent trust advertisements.  I wonder why?!

Now, you might think ‘all this web stuff’s not for me’ and you may be right. But celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres currently have more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Read the rest of this entry »

Two stories caught my eye this week regarding companies making claims they apparently haven’t been able to keep.

The first is Telecom who’s reached a settlement with the Commerce Commission following its admission it misled around 130,000 broadband customers regarding pricing plans. Apparently it overcharged customers more than $9.5 million between 1999 and 2006 when dial-up customers switched to broadband.

Although Telecom has refunded almost all these customers, since 2003 it has apparently received warnings, settlements or convictions relating to the Fair Trading Act at least eight times. Read the rest of this entry »

Philosopher Joseph Hall said “A reputation, once broken, may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep its eyes on the spot where the crack was”.

It’s a particularly relevant quote given the damage that’s been done to New Zealand author Witi Ihimaera’s reputation following his admission of plagiarism.

Quite why such a distinguished author as Ihimaera, who’s acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s undoubted literary elite, and a professor of literature at Auckland University, would plagiarise another author’s work is baffling. I say ‘undoubted’ but of course, Ihimaera’s admission of plagiarism raises massive doubts about his motives and character. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is it that ghost-writing of a book is deemed acceptable but ghost-blogging or ghost-twittering isn’t?

Maybe it’s to do with the fact that many people might accept that some level of skill is required to actually write a book, whereas composing a 150 word blog post or 140 character tweet can be done ‘off the cuff’, so to speak.

Whether this is true or not, many of us prefer not to be deliberately deceived. Being ‘time-poor’ is no excuse.

Far better to be up-front and open about who exactly is tweeting or blogging under a specific identity than try and hide behind ghost-bloggers or tweeters.

Head of marketing at the University of Otago, Associate Professor Ken Deans, noted in a recent New Zealand Herald article that he believed ghost-tweeting was unethical.

“It’s about trust and mistrust. If someone else is writing for the CEO, that’s unacceptable.”

One Tweeter who’s clear about their identity, and who’s tweeting on their behalf, is New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (johnkeypm). Tweets placed by staff are prefaced by ‘via staff:’

Does this make the information any less readable? No. It simply means the reader knows who’s placed it and ensures Key is not caught out by curly questions that might arise as a result.

So if you’re tempted to blog or tweet using a ghost-writer, be mindful that not being open and honest in your communications could back-fire big time, and instead of building trust and creating valuable conversations you could find yourself distrusted and branded a fake.