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 »

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. 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 »

2009 was the year the rules changed. The ‘who cares?’ attitude that seemed to dominate so many of our businesses, and personal interactions, up until then finally faced a reality check. Suddenly, large numbers of us started to care.

We cared about whether our life-savings and investments would still be around for us to draw on so we could enjoy a comfortable and happy retirement. We cared that our order books were shrinking and our debtors were taking longer to pay, or not paying at all. We cared that the jobs we were in, and the businesses we ran, would continue to generate income so we could keep paying the bills and live the life we’d become accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

When things go wrong, the importance on focusing on the overall experience, rather than just the problem, is beautifully highlighted in Sean D’Souza’s New Zealand Herald article ‘Fix the experience – not just the fish’.

Often, when a service provider is challenged for a failing in some way, they focus purely on fixing the problem. Whilst this is hugely important, it’s only one part of a two-part process that will create client or customer satisfaction. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never stopped to consider what people think of you, or your company, in a word, I strongly recommend you do. Why? Because it’s an ‘acid-test’ of reputation.

Many of us grow up thinking it’s up to us to create our own reputation; that we can control our reputation entirely. However, thinking we can control our reputation is a myth. The reality is we can’t.

We can’t control our reputation because we cannot control what other people think of us. And what people think of us, ‘in a word’ or two, is our reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

Each month, in my Reputationz newsletter, I highlight three ‘Reputation Winners’ and three ‘Reputation Losers’.

One of the reputation winners featured in the November 09 issue were the ‘musical stairs’ installed at a Swedish underground (subway) station. Click here to watch the YouTube footage.

The stairs were designed to encourage travellers to take the stairs, rather than the escalator, and have fun in the process. And it worked, with 66% more people than normal chose to use the stairs rather than the escalator. Judging by the smiles on the faces of many of those emerging from the subway, they certainly delivered on the fun quotient too. Read the rest of this entry »