Louis Halpern's View

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that allowing players to engage with fans online in the right way can have for the Manchester United brand, especially in light of their current financial challenges. People respond most passionately to other people online, and Twitter provides such a huge opportunity for teams to really tap into their fan-base support. A more progressive approach would have aimed to educate players about Twitter and other social media platforms and put in place common sense guidelines for their usage, harnessing the positive opportunities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We are ‘living’ more and more in the online world. Businesses are now aware that for them to truly interact with their target audiences they must build and maintain an online presence through social media, rather than just via online advertising. This applies to large, blue chip multinationals and ‘local’ SMEs alike, and has been addressed by many companies with varying degrees of success.

With a massive upside for businesses that successfully use social media, it is perhaps surprising that many employers are wary of getting involved. This may be attributable to a lack of appreciation of that potential or due to the fact that these employers do not fully understand how to use the social media tools available.

Ignorance is not longer an excuse. In the Internet Age, businesses cannot hide behind indifference or an unmanned customer services phone-line; no brand is off-limits, all are open to potentially hostile discussion. Even if your company isn’t engaging with online communities, it is very likely that someone else out there is talking about you online and this could be damaging to your reputation, especially if you are not in a position to respond.

Using social media involves engaging with potential customers, businesses and stakeholders online as well as with anyone else who has an opinion on your company.

It is important to remember that successful social media is an on-going process: reputations are created, established, and need to be maintained. It is also a two-way process. Businesses are expected to have interactive conversations with members of the online public; a brand which simply exists online as a faceless and uncommunicative ‘presence’ will not succeed in reducing the threats to its reputation.

The positives and negatives of employees online

The danger for businesses attempting to build an online presence is that employees may harm the project by using the Internet to post their feelings or worse, vent their frustrations. What an employee posts online, even via a personal account, can have direct implications for the reputation of their employer. Time and time again, the national media has published stories in which employees have damaged their employer’s brand: the policeman sacked by The Met for posting naked photos on a dating website, retail staff in Currys / PC World insulting customers online, and NHS works sacked because of a Facebook game are all salient examples.

There are now also legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Facebook and Wikipedia which, as an employer, it is vital that you make your employees aware of.

Businesses are not investing enough resources in educating their staff on online reputation management and the consequences of their online actions for the company that they work for. Businesses must take a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy or they risk causing irreparable damage to their brand.

Don’t let this put you off building an online presence however; a company’s employee can be its most effective advocate, and can directly sway the opinion of customers and stakeholders. Customers buy a product or use a service if they feel good about the company that they’re buying from, which can be directly impacted by staff actively posting positive sentiment online.

How to educate employees to use the internet appropriately and effectively

Having a more digitally literate employee base will help your company be better equipped to protect its online reputation.  To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement, so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct, whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Make sure all employees are aware of privacy setting options available to them on their online profiles
• Ask colleagues to take down any unprofessional pictures, videos or content of themselves, you or other employees in the company
• Empower employees to use social media to help the company
• Train key members of staff as social media tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff

Social media is about being responsible for and engaging with a network. By being proactive, educating your employees, and taking charge of your company’s online presence, you can effectively manage your reputation online for the better.

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated to participate and engage with digital platforms. Unlike adults however, they’re not streetwise, they don’t understand the threats.

In order to get a picture of how UK parents’ perceptions to their children’s online activity, we commissioned the first ever Digital Literacy Report, launched today.

In the poll with research specialists YouGov, we were pleased to find that the majority of parents see a need to teach their children about how to conduct themselves online, and have demanded the Government introduce lessons to improve young people’s understanding of online privacy and the value of their personal reputation with 69 per cent of parents calling for compulsory lessons to be introduced as part of the national curriculum.

This in part is born of the fact that almost half (48%) of adults asked admitted they were worried that their children’s online actions will potentially harm their future chances of getting into a chosen university or landing a first job. Parents recognise that online comment or mistakes made by young people on sites such as Facebook, Bebo and YouTube will go on to impact their adult lives.

Unfortunately the report also showed there is a lack of control among parents over what exactly children are doing when they log onto the web. With more children accessing sites like Facebook through their mobile phones instead of family PCs, parents are struggling to stay on top of what their children do online, with 44 per cent conceding they don’t ever check the content their kids are accessing or what they are posting online.

If we do not proactively teach young people about the impact of their online activity how can they better protect and promote themselves? There needs to dialogue between parents and their children, as well as at school, where online socialising is recognised as a social and technical skill for contemporary society. Schools as well should be looking to ways to encourage children to use the online tools at their disposal in a positive way, such as setting homework that is based around hosting and reporting a group discussion online.

If we want to see a generation of digitally ‘literate’ adults emerge in years to come, it is our responsibility to ensure it.

Each email an organisation sends to its’ customers forms part of that brand’s reputation; not just those thought of as email marketing. What does the customer think about the email confirming a purchase? How about the emails answering questions post purchase? Do organisations even think of these as part of their brand building?

Organisations know their email marketing is operationally important, particularly to drive sales in this difficult economic climate. Yet only 23% of the respondents could calculate the value of an email address to an organisation. How do they make a return on investment argument within their company for email marketing?

They report on the Open and Click rates. These are the most common measures of success rather than being able to calculate the value of an email address.

Their emphasis should be on integrating email campaigns with other channels. Those marketers who have tried this approach showed improvements across all channels. These can range from customer acquisition channels, like search engine marketing, to encouraging advocacy with loyalty. Add some good use of metrics and segmentation techniques to the mix then marketing performance can go through the roof.

The integrated approach would also improve a brand’s reputation just by bringing a consistent message into the mix. The better a brand’s reputation the higher the open and click through rate from email marketing. So it’s amazing that only just over a third of marketers rate sender reputation as the most important factor in deliverability.

Other interesting conclusions of the report are:

1. 70% of marketers expect expenditure on email to increase over the next 12 months coming at the expense of other channels, notably direct mail and print/press advertising

2. The most popular email tactic is the regular e-newsletter (used by 78% of marketers)

3. There is still much room for improvement, though, the use of: welcome messages, win-back campaigns and advanced trigger emails

4. Less than half of marketers have a strategy concerning maximum email contact frequencies

5. 12% do not know how many emails an address could potentially receive each month. Given that people regard “too many emails” as a reason for reporting messages as spam, this is a weakness that needs addressing

6. Amazingly only 27% of marketers segment their lists into six or more different audiences.

7. Marketers are removing inactive addresses from their lists without first conducting a dedicated reactivation campaign.

8. Almost 40% of marketers do not offer website traffic a way of signing up for emails, representing a huge missed opportunity.

Data from UK DMA’s 2009 Client Email marketing survey results (dmcommission.com) thanks to Samantha Binns for sending me the report.

Have a beef with someone? Why it’s time to wise up on Wikipedia

Wiki-bullying is at the top of the news agenda following the revelation that the Tower of London has suspended two beefeaters as part of a harassment investigation of its first female Yeoman Moira Cameron, with resulting implications for the legal system that will directly affect cases brought to court.

Wiki-bullying could result in criminal convictions that see the bullies responsible put behind bars. With direct legal consequences as a result of an individual’s online actions, internet users need to think before they edit what the ramifications of their conduct may be.

There are now legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Wikipedia, as Scotland Yard yesterday demonstrated when they confirmed that a “56-year-old man received a caution under the Communications Act 2003 on Tuesday October 20 following an investigation by officers from Tower Hamlets. It related to inappropriate use of the internet.” We can expect to see this trend continue and the internet remain at the heart of future harassment, slander and other criminal cases that affect personal reputation.

I happen to agree that bullies should be properly punished for their actions, regardless of whether its online or offline. However, this story just goes to show the increasing importance of online reputation, and why we all must be more proactive in monitoring our online presence.

If internet users are more literate digitally they will be better equipped to protect themselves online. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In an internet age, personal brands are never off limits and are always available to see.”

Employers and government alike need to be doing more to improve people’s understanding as to the implications of the internet and they can be profiled on it, helping them to take control of their reputation online. The most important considerations for individuals remain:

• Be proactive – Check your profiles online regularly and ensure the content on it is positioning you in a way you want to be positioned
• Have an online base – Create a personal home page (blog or even a basic website) and set up official social media accounts across the major platforms that link into that base, making sure the content across all of them is accurate and true
• Report inaccuracy – If someone has posted untrue or slanderous comment about you to an online site, contact the service’s administrators and encourage your circle of influence to post comment supporting your position