Architects Aren’t Just for Buildings: Reputation Management in a Digital World

Adrian McIntyre: 00:04

We've all heard it's not what you know, but who you know. Or perhaps more poignantly in the world of business and communication, who knows you, and what they know about you. Reputation. It's our currency, it's the source of trust, it's the way we build our careers, our professions. It's an essential aspect of our everyday lives. We've all got a reputation, some aspects of it we may not like, or even know about, but this is a conversation worth having for executives and business leaders, really thinking about both their personal reputation and that of their organization. Joining me to talk about this Abbie Fink and a special guest. Abbie, what's on your mind?

Abbie Fink: 00:44

Hey Adrian. So, it's interesting, the word reputation I can remember as a, that was one of the first things my folks told me when I was getting out into the world and going to have my first job and such that, that was really the only thing you had was your reputation and you had to protect it and you had to preserve it. Now, that was long before social media and the way that we can build and demonstrate our reputation, but have a good reputation, show up to work on time, be the person that people can rely on and count on. And it just became ingrained in me. And it's something that I regularly talk about with my team. But now reputation is something that becomes, it's things that you can control and can manage, but because of technology and access to information and so much happening out there, oftentimes our reputation is something that we may not have as much control over as we'd like, but there are certainly some ways to own it and control it a little bit more. And I'm really excited to have my friend Jon Goldberg on here with us today. Jon is with a company, owns a company that I've connected with, through my work in public relations and through the Public Relations Society of America called Reputation Architects. He and I have some really great conversations when we get to be face to face when we attend conferences together. So I'm thrilled that he's here with us in the face to screen environment of our recording studio. So Jon, thank you so much for joining us and I'll give you just a minute to share a little bit more about reputation architects and your background. And we can dive into this idea of online reputation management. It's a great conclusion to a series of podcasts that we've done on building your brand and establishing trust online. And I think this is a great way to conclude that series of podcasts. So welcome to Copper State of Mind.

Jon Goldberg: 02:53

Thank you, Abbie and Adrian. Thank you for inviting me. Glad to do it. Reputation Architects is a firm I founded about 13 years ago. I had spent the previous, I'd hate to say the number, but close to 30 years, 25 years at big PR agencies working around the world. I started my career for about a week as a print journalist. I thought I would cure the ills of society through my writing, then I discovered my personal aversion to poverty, my own, and wound up working in the financial services industry in PR. It was the early days of the AIDS crisis. And for insurance companies, AIDS was a genuine crisis. So that's really where I cut my teeth on helping organizations deal with difficult situations that are at the intersection of reputation, trust, and business. Reputation Architects, we say we build, protect and restore reputations in a world of evaporated trust and unprecedented stakeholder engagement. And when we talk about online reputation, that's where that unprecedented stakeholder engagement has popped up, has cropped up over the last, however many years since the Internet came on the scene.

Adrian McIntyre: 04:25

It's a really provocative phrase for, I think, what's colloquially known as Twitter mobs. But the idea is, "unprecedented engagement," the audience is not just listening. They're talking back. And this can get out of hand very, very quickly.

Jon Goldberg: 04:40

And they can talk back and they feel they have license to talk back. And unfortunately, because they're hiding behind a screen name or an avatar or an email address, in some cases, they say things in ways they might not ordinarily do if they were on the evening news, or if they were sitting face-to-face with the CEO explaining why they were not happy with their company's performance. So, that adds another layer of complexity. And over the last 10, 12 years, civility in our society has corroded significantly. And that also plays into all of the complexity and the challenges that people and organizations face today in explaining who they are, why they matter, what they do, and when bad things happen, explaining what they're doing about it.

Abbie Fink: 05:32

Well, and I think that's what's interesting in this, we've touched on crisis communications and issues management, and these are all oftentimes in a more reactive way, something has happened and we have to put out information to respond to something, but there's a lot built in, at least my thinking about it is that there's so much that we should be doing and could be doing to give ourselves a baseline of who we are, what we stand for, so that in the event that something happens, using our reputation precedes us. We've been a good corporate citizen. We've done X, Y, and Z appropriately before. And this is a circumstance that we have to manage and determine next steps. So there's got to be some value in the discussion and the pre-planning and advising that comes long before you need to start worrying about a particular incident that allows a business or an individual to build and protect that reputation. What are some of the things that you are advising in those early conversations? Oftentimes they're coming to us, of course, with an issue, but what do we need to be doing before that issue hits the fan as it were.

Jon Goldberg: 06:54

I like to talk about it as immunizing an organization and its reputation against crisis. That is proactive. Every once in a while, I go to Google and run some searches. And if I search for why my company should have a crisis plan, last time I checked there was something like 542 million pieces of content on Google saying the best way to manage a crisis is to have a plan. I think that's the second best way. The best way to manage a crisis is not to have one.

Abbie Fink: 07:26

Sure.

Jon Goldberg: 07:27

And there are things you can do to prevent crisis. Having plan is still essential. It's very important. But to me, waiting until a crisis has already erupted and is already causing disruption and gaining attention, so you can wheel out your crisis plan and alert your crisis team and circle the wagons and start managing things, it's already too late. You're already incurring huge hard and reputational costs. So, I like to talk about it with companies as preventive care, to use the healthcare metaphor. Just as you hopefully go to the doctor once a year, you feel perfectly well, but you want to be able to identify any problems under the surface, go through battery of tests, and head off anything that might be going wrong while it's easy to do so before it becomes a health crisis. Could do the same thing with reputation. Starting off with that baseline you mentioned, Abbie, with a risk assessment, really understanding what are the risks the organization faces, and what can you do about them to neutralize them before they become problems?

Adrian McIntyre: 08:42

I'm glad you mentioned risk assessment, because it was the question that was percolating in my mind as I was listening to you, Jon. So the idea of "architects" is interesting because at least in some abstract, ideal-type way, architects are those experts with a blend of knowledge in both creativity and materials and execution, project management, that can really pull off a project. They can work with a client to get the right piece of land, get it prepared in the right way, design the right structure, execute the right building, et cetera, et cetera. Reputation is a much slipperier thing. First of all, you never start with a clear piece of land. There's always something there in the reputation space, in the conversation space, beforehand, and you don't always control the outcomes. So there's a lot of questions that I want to get to here. But the first one is, well, where do you start? And I think you began to address, I'd love to hear more about that, but what that's going to lead to is my follow up question, which I'll tell you upfront: who actually owns and controls your reputation?

Jon Goldberg: 09:51

The one entity that does not own and control your reputation is you. You control it to an extent, but ultimately everyone else holds the key, if you will. The trick is, and I'm glad you brought up the term architect, because I did choose the name reputation architects. There was a thought process that went into that, but the piece you only touched on briefly was you have to engineer, you have to, in order for a reputation to withstand attack, to hold up over time, there are all of these supports and braces and trusses and all sorts of engineering techniques that go into it, because if your reputation is not built on an actual solid sturdy foundation, it is at much greater risk of being damaged in a storm, an attack, but building that solid foundation of your past record, what you do and how you do it, how people feel you treat them, the respect your customers have when you make hard decisions, that may not be the cheapest decisions for the company, but they are the right decisions. You built that foundation and then everything else is devoted to safeguarding it, to fortifying it, to protecting it.

Abbie Fink: 11:34

And those are difficult conversations to have. Nobody wants to be told that their reputation is less than stellar, and to face those hard facts and be willing to put in the time to evaluate it and work to change it, enhance it, improve it wherever we happen to be, those are hard conversations to have. You don't just walk up to CEO of large brand say, hey, dude, let's talk about your reputation and expect them to be open and engaging. Sadly, it comes, I think oftentimes when something is happening. So, what can we, as advisors and counselors to our clients in this realm, help them think about in advance? What are some of the things, or some of the things we should be evaluating and paying attention to that might ultimately have that impact on our reputation?

Jon Goldberg: 12:37

The one thing is you always need to know and be tuned into what is being said about you. You may not want to hear it, but if it's being said on the internet, especially, or in other circles, it's better that you know about it and can think about at how to address it, and address it directly if you can, than to just let it sit out there, because it's going to spread, guaranteed. That is the way communications and the internet and humanity work. They spread information that is interesting to them. And unfortunately, negative things about companies and executives spread much more quickly than the good things. That's what gets people agitated. That's what makes them share things. So, know what's being said out there about you, but don't overreact to it. When an organization or executives, people in a company feel like they're being unfairly maligned, the adrenaline starts pumping and the immediate reaction is we have to do something about this, and we have to do something fast. And that is the number one way organizations get in trouble, because if you overreact, if you react without thinking through carefully the ramifications, you can very quickly do a lot more damage to yourself. So a lot of the time I spent with organizations, unfortunately I have to tell them their reputation is seriously damaged, and it is their fault. That's a hard conversation to have, but it has to be very clear that they had a hand in it. One of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is they don't like something that's online. They line up the lawyers and say, make this go away. Let's file a lawsuit. They're disparaging us, whatever it is. And what often happens is they wind up bringing far more attention to whatever that piece of content is than it's ever had in the past. They bring it to people's attention who would never otherwise see it in the classic case number of years ago, Barbara Streisand's home in the Malibu Cliffs, an aerial photo was in a database of images put together by a bunch of earth science scholars that were tracking short erosion, beach erosion on the California coast. Somehow she found out that the image of her home was in this database. She told her lawyers to get that image, get that photo out of that database. I don't want that online. By the time the lawyers got involved, the image had been accessed six times. Four of those times were by her lawyers. A month later, a month after they filed a legal against the owner of the database to get that photo taken down, 400,000 people had seen that photo. And you know what? The photo was nothing damaging at all. Nothing you couldn't see by walking by on the beach.

Abbie Fink: 16:07

I had a conversation over the weekend with a organization that I'm affiliated with. And we were talking about, what should we do? We don't like this post. What should we do? We should take it down. And which I don't believe is ever the first reaction. It may ultimately be what happens, but at that initial point, and I echoed much of what you said about, let's think about the audience that we are talking about and whether or not this particular instance really evoked the amount of angst that you are creating for it, or if it's because you see it and you know it. And by doing these other actions will actually elevate its importance. And ultimately, we just let it be. And I think what happens oftentimes is the commenters on those things take each other down much faster than the organization itself could ever do. They end up being less about the post and more about the interaction amongst each other.

Jon Goldberg: 17:13

Arguing with each other.

Abbie Fink: 17:14

Yeah, exactly. And I think though for me, the underlying conversation there is about that take a deep breath and let's think about our action steps before we actually put anything into action, because it's always going to seem worse to those of us that are in the midst of it and that there are things we can do and things that we should do, but let's talk about the timing of how those things roll out and using your Barbara Streisand example, the likelihood is no one would've known it was her house, nor would it have mattered had we not called attention to it in the first place, and now it's a thing. And so, again, the timing and the management of all of this is so critical to ultimately doing what you needed to do, which is not negatively impact your reputation.

Jon Goldberg: 18:14

Yeah.

Adrian McIntyre: 18:14

In another licensed profession, in the medical field ... Jon, you mentioned a health metaphor earlier. I was just struck thinking of the word "iatrogenic." So here's your word of the day, everyone. Iatrogenic refers to an illness that is actually caused by the medical doctor's examination or treatment. So the cause of the thing is the doctor's intervention. I think that we don't worry about this in the communications profession enough, as one would rightly about this sort of thing in the medical profession. I don't know the extent to which, and certainly professionals may very well think about this a lot, but those who are communicating on behalf of their organization themselves, et cetera, probably don't think about this enough. What is the potential cost of me trying to fix this? And what you're pointing to is that actually those can be quite serious. And unless you're aware of some of these reputational dynamics and the way in which your intervention might be taken, rightly or wrongly, might be taken in a negative light, you can actually deepen the harm and make it even harder to undo the problem. So Jon, someone comes to you in a situation like that. What do you do? How do you keep them from causing further harm?

Jon Goldberg: 19:43

Talking them off the ledge, if you will. And by the way, just to add one thing to the Barbara Streisand story, not only is it a thing, it's known as the Streisand effect, google it. So she now has her name on a phenomenon.

Adrian McIntyre: 19:59

Forever.

Jon Goldberg: 20:00

Forever. I was the only child of an overbearing Jewish mother who was very disappointed in my career choices. I did not become a physician. I did not become a lawyer, but central to what I do is the premise of first do no harm. I walk into a lot of boardrooms and conference rooms and companies where everyone is running around saying, don't just stand there, do something. And my message is no, stop. Let's figure out if something needs to be done. Couple of things, going back to the whole overreaction, there is an entire industry built around people, reputation repair consultants. They do an extremely good job of SEOs. So they are really findable online. I always say, if they did as great a job for their customers, as they did for themselves, I'd be out of work, but they promised things that they can never deliver. They promised to make things vanish from Google, instantaneously, and forever guaranteed all your money back. And they tell you it's perfectly legal. Okay. What happens is, and I can do a whole, and I've done a two hour presentation just on the preposterous techniques they try and use and the absolutely absurd legal methodologies that they try. And that they apply, things like forging federal judges names on fake court orders and submitting them to Google to get things removed. And they do it in their client's name. And believe it or not on, for me on my scale of one to WTF, that's only about a five or a six. So you have to be very careful, because what happens is something shows up online and somebody in an organization doesn't like it, and people are told to do something about it. So they go online, they search for how to get things taken off of Google. And they see these organizations, these consultants out there that promised to remove negative content. Here's the thing nobody thinks about, Google does not have a rewind button. So you may get your money back, it may not cost you anything, but the debris trail these efforts can leave, which are generally much larger than where the organization started, it is much more difficult to clean that up because somebody made a conscious effort to try and influence Google, undoing that is very difficult. You may get your money back, but you can't go back to where you started. So the idea of first do no harm is, look, let's stop, let's step back and figure out how this reputational problem might morph into something bigger, and what might happen if we do nothing? That is the most important question. What would happen if we did nothing? And one of my doctors likes to use the term watchful waiting. There's a lot to that in reputation management too.

Abbie Fink: 21:11

And that's hard for all of us to, it's human nature to jump into action and try to save and try to fix and try to do something, but there may be that the best course of action is no action until such time as there's something that needs to happen. But I'd like to think about some things that we can be, you've touched on a few things about consistency of information and things, I'd like to talk a little bit more about what can we do to build that online reputation and then, and which ultimately we want to protect, but what are some of the things that are best practices, some really good tried and true things that businesses, big or small can be really thinking about as they're, if we all agree that social media, online, digital is here to stay, but it's not going anywhere. Whether you choose to be on it or not, somebody's putting you there. So we have to pay attention to it. So what can we do to get ourselves, put the best foot forward to begin with and to protect, protect, yes, but to really establish that good and solid reputation online?

Jon Goldberg: 24:35

The first thing is to serve your customers, to put their interests and the information and what they need to be hearing from you ahead of your other interests. And you do that by creating content that people, that your customers are searching for online, that answers their questions, and that brings them value. And you want to do that better and more than your competitors. Now, I talk about it. Again, getting back to the health metaphor, it's nourishing Google, plain and simple. If you feed Google, the algorithms, a healthy diet of well written content that people are looking for, and that brings them value, it does two things. First, if you want to be found on Google or any search engine, if you want to be found, you have to give people content that is worth finding, that responds to their search intent, what they are looking for when they type something into the search box, that answers their question. That is the number one way to show up on the first page of Google. The more you do that, the more you rise to the top. Now, something else happens when you do that, the more content you can pack, you can produce that winds up on that front page of Google, the harder it is for the negative stuff to take hold. Now, unless you have extraordinary domain authority, you're not going to keep a New York Times expose off the front page of Google. But what you will do is keep the secondary websites, the trash websites, the review websites, the less credible sources of negative information down on page two or three. There's a joke, what's the best place to hide a dead body? Page three of Google. Nobody ever goes there. When was the last time you were curious enough to look there for something? So really what you're doing is fortifying that first page of Google with your own content that your customers want and are actively looking for. And by doing that alone, you are strengthening and immunizing your online reputation against attacks, against negative content.

Adrian McIntyre: 26:59

Jon, I just wanted to say something here because this distinction may be subtle, but it seems to me very, very important. Everything that you just said probably has people nodding their heads, thinking I already know this, except for that where you are coming from is very different than a typical social media, or content campaign. In other words, everything you just said came from a place about building the foundation of a reputation, not marketing, or awareness, or attention. And they're not unrelated. But they are a different starting point. And I wonder if you could just tease out a little bit the implications, because I realize in listening to you, oh, I don't know if I've made a piece of content coming from reputation, although I've certainly tried for utility, searchability, things of that nature, but, aha, there's actually something here that is a different starting point. Can you say something about that?

Jon Goldberg: 28:00

Here's the thing, all of it impacts reputation. It's all part of your reputation. When you are helpful to your customers, it builds your reputation. When you keep your promises, when you say you're going to deliver something and you deliver it, you fulfill your promises, reputation increases, you break your promises, trust is eroded, reputation is eroded. So even the content you are creating that talks about, that answers questions about your products that customers are always asking in the sales process. You create a piece of content about that because your customers are always asking, that means other customers are wondering the same thing and searching for it. When you become the source of help that they are looking for, that builds your reputation. It doesn't have to be content about your reputation. In fact, it's better if it isn't. Let your customers form their view of view, if you try and tell them your reputation is good, they are not going to listen. And they certainly won't believe it.

Adrian McIntyre: 29:12

Don't be the person that walks into the bar and announces that you are great in bed.

Jon Goldberg: 29:16

Right.

Abbie Fink: 29:17

Now, where am I going to go with that?

Adrian McIntyre: 29:18

To the bar!

Abbie Fink: 29:21

No, what I was going to bring that back to is what we talked about last time, which was trust, way in the way back machine when I was first teaching classes about social media and would talk about this concept of trust and it would be, I just moved into the neighborhood, Adrian, can you recommend a dry cleaner? And you would say, yeah, I go to Bill's Dry Cleaning on the corner. And I go to Bill's Dry Cleaning because I like Adrian, I trust Adrian. Therefore, the dry cleaner is what I want to do. And when we first had social media at our disposal, it was much more person to person. And that's what we would do. Hey, does anybody have a recommendation? I'm going to be in town? Whatever it would be. And as businesses saw that kind of chatter and such, they started getting more and more active. And so, when I recommend Bill's Dry Cleaning, I now can tag Bill's Dry Cleaning, and it becomes a marketing, but it all is based in this idea of trust. And it goes back to what you said about, being the place where your customers or prospective customers and clients come to for information that's relevant to what they're looking for. And what that does in my view is gives us, it gives us the chance to be human in the event that we do make a mistake that I know this can't be what they are, or I've seen other things, or whatever it might be. So even if that expose in the New York Times presents itself, there is other things that are there, your community giving, the doing good in the community, the boards that you're serving on, the way you resolved something in a more public way, or the things that you've done, that just are good business practices. We want to, I believe as a society, we want to trust the businesses that we do business with. We want to give them the benefit of the doubt. We are holding our business colleagues and those that we do business with to a much higher standard these days, we are expecting them to have a voice in the civil discourse that's happening. We want them to be a green company. We want them to stand up for diversity, equity and equality, whatever is our issues, we want to see those businesses do the things that we do. And I think when we see that we react differently when something doesn't happen the way we might have expected it to do. And perhaps if they have advisors like yourself or the work that I do, where there might be somebody telling them step back for a minute before you go and make that statement, we've got some latitude here. We have a good reputation. Our customers and colleagues know who we are and what we stand for. And we are going to have the benefit of that time to formulate an answer, or a response, or an action that is in line with what we've stood for all along. And it's an interesting place to be in. I think when you have that good reputation and something does occur to be able to step back and take a look at that and say, you know what? We've done things right all along. And they know it. And that's what our reputation is. And maybe this time we didn't do it, but man, we've got a lot of opportunity here because of the goodwill that we've built up in the community. And let's focus on that instead of that immediate, take down the post, or change the action, or say something that we're going to regret later.

Jon Goldberg: 33:19

And when you do that, if you have built that bank of, the term is reputation equity, you can hold your head up high and say, we let you down. We know we've let you down. We know how we have let you down. We understand. And here are the things we are doing to regain your trust. Heartfelt apology goes a long, long way. Why? People now expect it. People have been trained. If a CEO doesn't step up and apologize, there must be something wrong and they can't be trusted or else they say, they're sorry/ when you have that reputation equity in the bank and you get hit by a crisis, it may be diminished somewhat, but it's recoverable. If you start from zero and go down, it's much harder to dig yourself out of that reputational deficit than if you have a positive balance of the bank.

Abbie Fink: 34:25

We all like the underdog story. We all want people to see the success and the turnaround. And we might maybe rose color glasses a bit. But I think we all ultimately want to see those interactions that we have business wise with our nonprofit organizations, wherever we might be, that there are people behind those actions, and we make mistakes, and we do things. How we react, what we do, the owning of that potential mistake really goes a long way in protecting and preserving. And then ultimately building it back up. It can come crashing down quickly, but if it's what you do and how you do it, I think that ultimately protects that online reputation and gains that and establishes that trust and reestablishes it moving forward.

Jon Goldberg: 35:23

I'll tell you one quick story. And this is as simple as an example as I can provide of how reputation and trust, how people are exposed to reputation and trust and what it means. Couple of years ago, my water heater exploded. I needed a new one. I needed a new plumber also, I won't go into that. So I called around, got three recommendations all from people I trusted, as we just talked about. Before I called them, I went to their Facebook pages. I went to their website to see what was there. One in particular, one Facebook page caught my eye, because a woman had posted on the Facebook page in the reviews, not that she received poor plumbing assistance, but that one of the plumber's trucks cut her off in a parking lot. And she thought the driver also made an inappropriate gesture and that's just wrong, and she was with her kids and how dare they. And I'm going to tell everyone how horrible you are. The CEO, the plumber, not immediately, because it took him a while to notice, responded and said, I really want to thank you for raising this here, even though it doesn't relate to the great plumbing we do. I called in all my technicians as soon as I read this, and we had a conversation about safety, about how we are perceived as a company by our simple actions in the community, positive and negative. I know what happened, I've addressed it with my team. They understand, please call me if you'd like to discuss that further. I'm very sorry this happened. She responded to the post, she was sucked that she even got a response, even responding to someone is surprising these days. And she said, I never expected that kind of response. Thank you. And you know what? When I need a plumber, I'll be calling you. What better story is there than that? The guy did what was right, what she didn't expect. And he addressed the issue straightforwardly, he didn't make excuses. He didn't say, oh, the driver was having a bad day. He put it out there. And most importantly, he made clear that he had addressed it more broadly in his relatively small company, but he was treating that like it was a huge conglomerate. He went to the employees and said, you need to know this, our reputation matters. And our reputation is all of our responsibility.

Abbie Fink: 38:09

Well, and that's what I was going to say. We all own a piece of the reputation that our companies have. And whether we are the ones that are ultimately responsible for it as the CEO is, or we are the ones driving around in the truck with the name of the company on it. We all play a role in this. And it's difficult to build and keep a reputation. And it takes nothing to ruin that. And the focus and the energy really should be on all of our efforts to make sure that we have that and keep it engaged and improving and always looking for and asking the tough questions to make sure that we maintain our reputation. And Jon, I am so grateful for giving us a little bit of your time today to talk a little bit more about reputation. And as we, in this podcast are looking for opportunities to speak to CEOs and decision makers about so many things that have to do with their business, their own internal discussions, as well as what impacts those have on communication. Reputation is such a critical part. It's not just what happens online. It's all of your business practices that lead to that. So, I appreciate you giving us some time. Again, Jon Goldberg with Reputation Architects. Thank you so much for your time tonight.

Jon Goldberg: 39:32

Thanks for having me.