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April 2001

This article explains what can be done proactively, by way of the Internet to monitor, enhance, and protect corporate reputations. By systematically listening and responding to the cyberbuzz, you can open up new opportunities to create meaningful dialogue with key stakeholders.

by Jeanne Finegan, APR
The Garden City Group, Inc.

Cyberbuzz about your company can be a threat, but savvy risk managers can turn this potential threat into an invaluable sounding board to preserve and enhance corporate reputation. First of all, what is corporate reputation? It is the collective perception about a company’s integrity, compassion, and responsibility. Corporate reputation is based on a set of values that employees, customers and clients, shareholders and stakeholders share about your company. Think of it as pennies in the “goodwill” piggy bank.

This article will discuss online strategies to protect and defend corporate reputation. An article published in the September/October 1999 issue of Reputation Management provides an excellent example of how to turn a potentially negative threat into an intelligence-gathering opportunity.

What Happens When Corporate Messages and Actions Are in Opposition?

In a corporate advertising campaign, Dunkin’Donuts indicated that customers could have “coffee their way with four kinds of milk.” But when one customer visited the local store and asked for skim milk, employees advised him that he could not get skim milk. It wasn’t that they were out, he simply couldn’t get it. The corporate action was in opposition to its message, and this angered the customer. He wanted to vent and couldn’t find an easy way to do it. The company didn’t have a Web site, so there was no opportunity for him to vent his frustration to customer service. He then opted for the next best solution. He added “Dunkin’ Donuts Sucks” to his personal Web site. The site was viewed by only a handful of visitors each day, that is, until it was listed on Yahoo’s consumer opinion section. Soon traffic blossomed to over 1,000 visitors a day.

Usually, this is the time legal counsel may become involved. However, it is important to note that the Internet is a pulpit of “Free Speech” and is protected in many ways by the First Amendment. Cyber speech that expresses an opinion is strictly protected. Only when a statement of fact is made that is intentionally or recklessly false and damages corporate reputation is the line crossed between free speech and actionable defamation.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives Internet Service Providers (ISPs) immunity from defamation suits for content they provide. Here are some cases that interpret the Act.

• Zeran v America Online, Inc., 958 F Supp 114 (1997), concerned a bogus posting to a bulletin board advertising t-shirts making fun of the bombing in Oklahoma City. The anonymous posting contained Zeran’s name and phone number, and he was getting angry calls and death threats in response. He sued AOL. AOL said the Telecommunications Act gave them immunity. The court agreed, saying the Act, “creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service.” The court went on to say [the Act], “precludes courts from entertaining claims that would place a computer service provider in a publisher’s role. Lawsuits seeking to hold a service provider liable for its exercise of a publisher’s traditional editorial functions are barred.” Case dismissed.
• Blumenthal v Drudge, 992 F Supp 44 (D DC 1998), concerned a posting on Matt Drudge’s “Drudge Report” suggesting that White House Aide Sydney Blumenthal was a wife beater. Blumenthal sued Drudge and AOL. AOL again sought to have the case against them dismissed. The court again agreed “Whether wisely or not, it (Congress) made the legislative judgment to effectively immunize providers of interactive computer service from civil liability in tort with respect to material disseminated by them but created by others.” Concerning the potential for the Internet to quickly spread false info, the court said, “Congress has made a different policy choice by providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others. The court added, “None of this means, that the original culpable party who posts defamatory messages would escape culpability.”

Listening to the Opposition Can Give You Valuable Intelligence

In the alternative to litigation, the savvy risk manager might marshal key customer service staff to use these sites to their advantage as intelligence gathering tools. The understanding is that these sites are akin to a focus group composed mainly of one kind of consumer unhappy. But there is a great deal to be learned from unhappy sources. One can seize the opportunity to listen, learn, and, most importantly, quickly respond to threats.

The negative discussion on these sites could be an indicator of corporate message and action misalignment. To test possible problems, conduct a reputation audit with the help of public relations staff. The audit will help to identify the message action misalignments.

Risk managers can quantify the level of misalignment by developing a questionnaire that rates and ranks on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 low, 5 high) the level of concern. Most definitely, you’ll want to expand this list, but here are some of the questions you might want to ask:

Are our corporate messages and actions consistent? 1 2 3 4 5
Do we fix problems in a timely manner? 1 2 3 4 5
Do we identify the source of future problems? 1 2 3 4 5
Do we believe that customer comes first, etc.? 1 2 3 4 5

Misalignments in any of these areas can open the door to cyberbashing and possible litigation.

Next, work with senior staff to establish reputation goals. How does the company want to be perceived versus how is it perceived? It is important to note that corporate actions have to be accepted and directed from senior officers all the way down the chain of command. Senior management must take an active role in merging actions and messages.

By identifying issues that are of critical importance to customers, employees, shareholders, and competitors, risk managers can gather important information on possible risk and opportunity. Once critical issues have been identified, the company needs to play an active role in the issue. This may take the form of raising consumer or media awareness about advantages or disadvantages of an issue. Through its positive actions, it is being positioned with key stakeholder groups as a good and responsible corporate citizen with a positive reputation.

Positive reputation is a strong ally to protect market position, post bashing, and litigation. Companies can guard against potential litigation by establishing a history of actions that match messages. A strong reputation could potentially make outlandish claims more difficult for key stakeholders to believe.

Listen to Employees, Customers, and Stakeholders

Monitor what is being said, both good and bad, on the Internet. This allows a company to establish a proactive two-way dialogue with customers, employees, and key stakeholders. Absent this proactive approach, a company could be exposed to many types of unplanned visibility that includes a decline in market position, litigation, customer service and sales misrepresentations, and poor employee moral.

Here are some strategies that can help risk managers identify, monitor, and preserve online reputation:

1. Start with some of the well-known complaint sites:

• Consumeraffairs.com. This site reviews not only products, but services of various companies. It is very thorough, featuring “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” profiles; it provides links to various class-action litigations; news on scams, alerts, and recalls. In addition, it provides current news releases on consumer-related products. This site also provides a monthly newsletter where visitors can register for updates.
• complaints.com. A very well laid out site, easy to navigate, easy to see at a glance which companies and products are being targeted. There is an alpha listing for companies and products where complaints have been lodged. It provides links to corporate Web sites, along with contact information, including addresses, phone numbers, and principals’ names and personal e-mail addresses, where available. The primary focus of this site is consumer-related products.
• Fedupwiththis.com. Similar to Complaints.com; however, this site actually composes a complaint letter for visitors in a fill-in-the-blank format.
• Bitchaboutit.com. This site covers the gambit of consumer products, customer service, governmental affairs, and provides a net polling feature for topics of contention.

2. Subscribe to one of the new monitoring systems, such as Cyveillance, E-Watch, CyberAlert, WebClipping, or NetCurrent. Using several in combination will return a number of references. Remember that each of the monitoring companies have various capabilities. Several have strengths in newsgroups and others are stronger in online news organizations. These references will provide threads of discussion, which will lead visitors to specific complaint sites. Visit these sites and review what is being said.

3. Don’t just monitor standard news outlets. Important employee, shareholder, customer, and activist information can be obtained from newsgroups, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. Identify the activists. The search software will allow visitors to see individual names with contact information.

4. Summarize this information in the form of a matrix that identifies the date, the individual posting the information, the origin of the posting and whether it was positive, neutral, or negative. Weigh this information into an executive summary that assigns a value to a threat or opportunity.

5. Evaluate the matrix against your scale for inconsistencies and message action misalignments.

Conclusion

Everyday corporate teams worry and sweat, reacting to situations where they have to marshal corporate reputation damage control. However, much can be done proactively, by way of the Internet to monitor, enhance and protect corporate reputation. A systematic program for listening and responding to the cyberbuzz can test your assumptions about your corporation’s reputation, and open up new opportunities to create meaningful dialogue with key stakeholders.