Manage Your Online Reputation - Tony Wilson Law/Computer & Internet

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plain dull), their photographs, and their videos. It’s never been so easy to “publish” something, and have it read by dozens, hundreds, or even millions of people, almost instantaneously. It could be about a particular product or service offered by a business, a meal at a restaurant, the quality of rooms in a hotel, or a high school teacher or university professor. It could be about a particular person. And yes, you can read a death announcement before anyone else in the family hears about it.

      A survey released by Pew Internet & American Life Project on July 2, 2010, posed a question (which was framed as two questions in the positive and the negative) that respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed:

      “In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage, and other relationships, I see that the Internet has mostly been a positive/negative force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future.”

      Eighty-five percent of respondents agreed with the positive statement and 14 percent agreed with the negative statement.

      Said the Pew Internet report: “Humans’” use of the Internet’s capabilities for communication for creating, cultivating, and continuing social relationships is undeniable. Many enthusiastically cited their personal experiences as examples and several noted that they had met their spouses through “Internet-borne interaction.”

      Many of the respondents agreed that “time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the Internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; [using] the Internet to engage in social connection exposes private information; the Internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the Internet is being used to engender intolerance.”

      Respondents also noted that “geography is no longer an obstacle to making and maintaining connections.” However, others observed that there will be “variations of depression caused by the lack of meaningful quality relationships.”

      There may also be new ways of how users define friendship and privacy that are different than how we might define those concepts or use those words in the future.

      Some of the respondents commented on how they met their spouse online, reconnected with old school friends, and stayed in touch with family and friends overseas. These will all be normal things for those born of the Internet age.

      So let’s look now at why it is important to manage your online reputation, and some strategies to do it.

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      Managing Your Reputation

      Being a regular reader of The New Yorker, I recall a cartoon by Barbara Smaller in 1999, where two preschool children were talking in front of a locker about what they wanted to be when they grew up. One said to the other, quite prophetically, “Actually, I’m hoping what I’m going to be when I grow up hasn’t been invented yet.”

      Online reputation management falls right into that category. In 2000, you might have known that emails could be forwarded everywhere and to anyone, so you should be careful what you said in an email. Once you hit the send button, you can never get it back, and whatever you said, good or bad, could be read (and re-sent) by millions.

      In 2005, before Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, smartphones, flash mobs, and rampant SMS texting, trying to tell someone that what he or she posted online could damage his or her “reputation” might have sounded prudish, like one’s mother, warning her daughter of the perils of low-cut dresses, too much makeup, or tight jeans.

      Online reputation management is an area of law and public relations that, although “invented,” is still in its infancy. It straddles a number of legal and nonlegal disciplines:

      1. It involves the communications that people have online and this involves computer and Internet law. Emails, text messages, digital photographs, and videos from cell phones can be sent instantaneously to anyone in the world; even newspapers eager to expose the story of an Olympic gold medalist smoking marijuana from a bong at a party!

      2. Online reputation management involves the laws of slander, libel, and defamation on the one hand, and freedom of speech on the other. Can you exercise your right to free speech online, or must you be concerned whether the comments made over the Internet can be freely made without regard to the legal rules of slander, libel, and defamation? If you yell fire in a crowded movie theater and there is no fire, or you defame someone in the newspaper, serious legal consequences will follow. But what about the things you say online?

      3. It involves the “rules” (more accurately, the legal terms and conditions enforceable by judges in courts under the law of contract), that websites, Internet service providers, and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube require you to contractually agree to before you can participate in any online activity. In order to participate, you must agree to their terms of use, and this binds you to those contractual provisions, including the ownership of the photographs and other material you post. That’s why you always have to “click here” if you agree. This is your contractual signature.

      4. It involves intellectual property law such as trademark law, in respect of the use of someone’s brand. If images, videos, or artistic or written works are circulated digitally, it involves copyright law and who owns the rights to those works.

      5. It involves the law of privacy and what sort of personal information can and can’t be collected by businesses and other organizations about individuals. Related to this are the obligations that social networking sites such as Facebook have to keep certain personal information private.

      6. It involves the management of our personal and corporate “reputations”; our “brands” if you will, and what others think of us.

      Certainly large corporations such as Apple, Disney, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Microsoft, United Airlines, Exxon, and BP have brands and reputations to protect (and as we shall see, to damage as well).

      Noncommercial entities also have brands and reputations to protect and foster, even though they’re not trying to sell you anything. Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, the United Nations, FBI, and RCMP are examples of organizations that should be just as conscious and vigilant as private companies in the protection of their brands and reputations, if not more so. Unfortunately, at least one of these organizations has had an online reputation disaster, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.

      Celebrities and public figures such as Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, David Letterman, Martha Stewart, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Conrad Black, Senator John Edwards, and Sarah the Duchess of York, have brands and reputations to protect and cultivate. For some of them, their name is their brand, and lucrative endorsement contracts by cereal, automobile, watch, and athletic companies will be at risk if the person making the endorsement has a problem with his or her own reputation. The spokesperson’s damaged reputation could damage the brand and reputation of the product. However, a questionable reputation may simply add to the brand’s appeal in certain unique market segments where a bad-boy or bad-girl panache is actually cultivated. (Do Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson really care about those sex tapes? Have the tapes damaged or “enhanced” their reputations?)

      We all have reputations and our own personal brands that can get damaged, perhaps irreparably, from our online conduct or from our conduct that is captured and distributed online. Just ask two Winnipeg, Manitoba teachers who were filmed on a cell phone at a pep rally performing mock sex acts. They were fired; leaving their careers in tatters. Reputation matters, even if we’re not celebrities. In this century, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas anymore. It can be on the Internet in seconds and seen by millions in a matter of days. It’s the era of the digital tattoo.

      At the corporate or business level, brand management is a multibillion-dollar industry. Although some would say the overriding objective of branding and the management of corporate brands is to get consumers to purchase the products manufactured or distributed by those companies and drive up sales, part of brand management is also

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