Читать книгу Manage Your Online Reputation - Tony Wilson - Страница 5

This book is divided between reputation management for individuals and reputation management for businesses. Whether you’re a business person looking for advice on protecting a brand’s reputation or your company’s reputation, or you’re a parent or schoolteacher wanting to know more about protecting individual reputations, I can tell you this book is not for experts in web analytics, marketing theory, branding behavior, search engine optimization, online survey strategy, or for that matter, child psychologists studying the strange animal called the teenage brain. There are other books out there that will help you deal with those issues in more thorough, academic, and detailed ways if that’s what you want. This book is introductory in nature, written to give you a general understanding of online reputation management issues.

Although this book is meant to be educational, it’s not an academic textbook or a phd thesis either. I like to stay around the 5,000-foot level, so that readers aren’t burdened with too many details, yet they can come away with a good, basic understanding of what online reputation management is, why it’s important, and what happens when things go horribly wrong. I do that by relating stories; “war stories” if you like. That’s because people can relate to stories and learn from them.

I also discuss in general ways, without getting mired in technical detail, what tools you can use to manage your online reputation so that you, your company, your child, or your student isn’t on the front page of the newspaper because something he or she did is now posted on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Parents, teachers, and school counselors might find this book to be useful, not only for themselves, but for the children they raise and the ones they teach.

It’s written in such a way that you might actually finish reading it in a night or two, and be ready to read other books on the topic. Chapters are broken into distinct topic areas that you can read without necessarily having to have read other chapters beforehand. For example, if you’re a parent, teacher, or school counselor, you might not be interested in corporate branding issues, copyright, or trademark law, or what you should consider when drafting employee social media policies. Those chapters are targeted at people in business.

However, you might be interested in how to find the metadata in Word documents your students have emailed to you (so you can see if the essay has been written by someone else), or you might be very interested in Chapter 7 on sexting, cyberbullying, and online academic cheating, and the excellent research into those areas being undertaken by Pew Internet & American Life Project (a US-based think tank studying issues on the attitudes and trends shaping modern life in the United States and the world), and the Cyberbullying Research Center (CRC).

Parents, teachers and business people might be interested in Chapter 5, which deals with the importance of apologies when you’ve made a mistake that affects your brand or reputation, and the tools you can use to craft a better apology than no apology at all, (or one that has obviously been written for public relations or legal reasons). Good apologies can save reputations. Bad ones can ruin them.

Or you might just want to see the various online tools which I discuss in Chapter 9. This chapter will help you discover ways of finding out what is being said about you, your business, or your products online.

Chapter 11 includes interesting news, facts, and information that is illustrative of issues in online reputation management.

One big problem is that things change quickly. By way of example, Facebook’s privacy policy changed at least two times since October 2009 when I first started working on this book, and legal decisions from courts around the world continue to affect and change the online landscape regularly. By the time you read this book, some of the factual information may have changed. The practical advice I give you — the dos, don’ts, and other lessons about online reputation management as well as the sources where you can get further information — won’t change, so I assure you, this book is worth reading.

Finally, this is also not a law book. The law regarding reputation management is interdisciplinary, complex, full of nuances, and always changing. I try to cover the basic legal concepts in this area broadly, without getting mired in details or legal niceties, and even then, the legal discussion is general in nature. You should not presume that the legal issues that I discuss are meant to supplant or replace the advice of legal professionals who would review the law as it applies to your particular circumstances, or within your particular jurisdiction. If you think something you have posted or otherwise published might be defamatory or might injure another’s reputation, or if you think your own good reputation has been damaged by the comments of someone in an email, a blog post, a message board, a forum, on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, or something as mundane as in a newspaper, you should be talking to a lawyer who knows something about this area. If you don’t know where to find one, email me at twilson@boughton.ca or tonywilson1@gmail.com and I’ll try to point you in the right direction. Or just Google me. I have a fairly large digital footprint, but I always make sure everything (I’ll repeat — everything) that’s said by me or is written about me online is there because I want it there. That’s the first lesson, I suppose, in good reputation management. Take control of it. It’s yours.

In any event, I hope the book will, at the very least, instill a sense of urgency to monitor and manage, and perhaps even sculpt what is said about you, and indeed, what is said by you, online so that you can protect yourself not only from others, but from yourself too.