Reputation management isn’t just a personal issue

Anyone that follows the internet marketing community Sphinn would have noticed the linkbait storm that erupted over the last few days. For those that missed out, Lyndon Antcliff went public with an outrageously successful linkbait case study, in which he generated half a million page views and media mentions from Fox News and The Sun newspaper (Note – Lyndon later pulled the article from his site due to the ensuing controversy). Social media was the catalyst that allowed the story to snowball (Digg in particular). The only problem was that the article at the centre of the case study was a fake. The story, which included tales of 13 year old boys stealing their father’s credit card in order to hire hookers and rack up a $30,000 debt, was a complete fabrication…

Naturally, this raised a number of issues within the digital marketing community, including:

1. The ethical considerations of publishing deliberately false information for commercial gain.
2. The obligation of offline journalists to check their facts.
3. The implication such a successful case study will have on linkbait and social media activity in the future.

The debate has raged passionately over at Sphinn – you can catch it here if you’re interested. For what’s it’s worth I consider the tactic unethical, although I do admire Lyndon for his courage in running with it and then going public. The point I am more interested in discussing however is reputation management. The community at Sphinn seem to have a firm grasp of the importance of reputation management. Indeed, we’ve seen 4 reputation management articles hit the front page of Sphinn in the last week:

1. Before your reputation needs cleaning up
2. Angry? Destroy their reputation online
3. A new wave of reputation management issues
4. 50+ sites to help you bury negative posts about you or your company

Given the support (aka votes) shown for reputation management as an issue, you’d expect it to be at the forefront of the community’s mind. So I found it interesting that many in Sphinn didn’t see this issue as reputation management dilemma for our own industry. Indeed, many advocated Lyndon’s ingenuity. Let’s think about it from the publics perspective though – marketers fabricating stories to attract traffic, links and media attention for their clients. Hmmm… doesn’t sound like a public relations winner to me.

Digital marketers are already on fairly shaky ground to begin with. In the eyes of the public, we’re already responsible for ruining the search engines and email (blackhat SEO & spam). Do we really want to add social media to the list? Some people would argue with me, but I believe social media carries a fair degree of credibility at the moment. Sure… sensationalism is widespread. But there’s also a whole lot of good stuff for the serious social media user. This credibility is at risk however if fabrication becomes a mainstream tactic.

The real question I’m posing is whether we are selfish in our definition of reputation management? Does it only extend to the reputations of ourselves and our clients? Are we not concerned about how our profession is perceived as a whole..?

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Tagged as: Digg, Linkbait, Social media, Sphinn