Managing Reputation
Reputation is not the easiest thing to manage. The telephone game can roll your name around in it like a pebble caught in long-shore drift, smoothing all the edges off it, and totally changing the way it appears.
It often seems, when one starts to dig into the way online reputation works, in particular, that you are witnessing a very public weighing of your heart against the feather of truth, and if you are found wanting you can plunge into anonymity, or even worse, ignominy.
Some people teeter totter on the edge, and some seem to thrive despite or because of having a terrible reputation — in the way that people like to rubberneck a car-crash. It all depends on what kind of business that you are doing.
If you are in the kind of industry where you need to be perceived as honest and trustworthy, and people instead believe that you lie and that you steal, you aren’t going to be doing much trade with anyone.
Dealing with the people who run the places that people interface with the arena of public opinion — that acreage of cyberspace that is known as social media, and search engines, can be more than a little painful, when you start to realize that the algorithms are in charge and the humans are asleep at the wheel. People have built these digital boxes in an effort to screen out having to deal with problematic situations and people, but they don’t often realize how unworkable their systems are for the people who do play by the rules who have to deal with someone who is being problematic.
Trying to get someone to operate with the policy that they have in writing as a living and breathing thing, rather than a concretized infrastructure that is incapable of anything but rigidity, is not easy. It can be incredibly frustrating when you can look at something and see that there is an error there, but because on the surface it doesn't contravene any regulations, the error is allowed to persist.
It’s hard to deal with someone that is only trained up to the point of being able to parrot a script, when what you are asking them doesn’t fit into the pre-chewed answers that they have to regurgitate. Scripts should be like training wheels, and if you take those wheels off and the person repeatedly crashes and burns then that person has an issue. Who wants to wait 5 or ten or maybe more minutes in voice-jail just to get through to a human that has been trained to act like a robot? No one.
One thing that can help is that if there is a flaw in the system then you know that you are not the only person that is having the problem, and that means that you can get help by asking all those other people who are in the same boat to chime in. This may not always get the implacable machinery you are trying to work against to move in the right direction, but what it can do is sometimes generate enough sympathetic feeling that you generate some good opinion that way.
Promoting anything that you do that is good and that helps people, with easily verified evidence is a great way to counterbalance anything negative. Testimonials are great for this.
One thing you also have to consider, at the end of the day, is — if you have someone that you are dealing with that only wants to believe the worst about you, or who goes out of their way to find negative things about you to justify their doubts, then they might not be someone that you want to work with anyway.
You will sometimes find that you have some customers who know you really well and who have been with you for a long time, and have seen the results that you are able to deliver, who will not waiver in their support of you, and dismiss any negativity for what it is — rubbish.
Of course, not creating problems is the number one way not to gain a bad reputation of any kind, but with the way that the internet is set up at the moment, you can get people trolling your social media accounts and writing something untrue about you that you never had any dealings with at all. This isn’t a new phenomenon really — there have always been gossips and slanderers who just want to destroy something for whatever reason. However, the potential for the lies to be disseminated was perhaps not so great, which begs the question of why it is not something that is being addressed as a way to increase the value of the data presented to the world.
After you have followed all the paths that you can towards a resolution, at some point you may have to just ignore it and carry on with the successful actions that helped you build your reputation in the first place. Sometimes it can be a bad thing to focus too much attention on something negative that someone has said, when the viewpoint being espoused is in the minority. The more you succeed and the more that you get people who you have helped agreed to join the chorus, the more that solitary detractor is going to look false, and foolish, and the less people are going to hear them.
