Web washing: how to manage your dirty linen on the Web
Strategies and techniques in case your public image is at risk: in a word, the web washing.
The web is a living organism that moves in many different directions and changes at a fast pace, without asking your permission. Any information on the web is potentially “forever”, because the concepts of time and memory are dilated and become mixed up. For this reason, those who occupy a position of prestige or power want to protect themselves from possible leaks that could cause scandal, but also from criticisms that are likely to spread and indelibly stain an otherwise immaculate public image. But there’s more. Because if driving content, focusing on marketing, PR and reputation management is not enough, then there are the web washing techniques, literally “wash away from the web”, which means clean off (and no, not metaphorically) from the Internet.
Many agencies have now inserted web washing services into their portfolio, and they try to hide users content considered harmful by their customer. But careful: we’re not just talking about VIPs and politicians. Even candidates who want to highlight their CV or companies that want to fight competition keep asking for web washing activites.
In 2012, the italian Rai called for nominations because they wanted to rely on professionals to manage the web reputation of the company and its leaders, Gubitosi and Tarantola.
But how does web washing work?
As we all know you cannot delete any content on the Internet, so the initial assets are the accurate monitoring of the reputation on websites, blogs, social networks, chats, videos, and the creation of a protected digital identity, with studied and planned activities to prevent risks. For example you can use instruments such as ImetriX or Blogmeter, which focuses on social intelligence. If the problem occurs despite these efforts, you will pass then to the next phase, contact the sources and clean the damaging content. The next step may be link building or a SEO activity, to hide in the depths of the search engines all the bad content and highlight the favorable one. In short, if you cannot remove it then you try to hide it.
In the RAI example, as I mentioned a few lines above, in addition to reports and planning the management required official stances, careful spread of information in order to avoid misunderstandings, creation and management of conversation flows well channeled towards business goals.
At this point you might be wondering what is the role of ethics, and how can the web really be accused to be “the guilty”.
In my opinion a careful web literacy of the client cannot be ignored: you should know the potentials but also the risks of the tools you use, especially if we talk about social networks where an arrogant tweet or a grammatical error becomes a satirical TT in no time. Even a deep knowledge of human brain dynamics (I’m talking mainly about behavioral psychology, which is what we are interested in here in FBDA/GROUP) and a daily exercise of empathy can very well protect from damages. But aside from this we should not forget the role of the ethics: listening, putting consumers/voters at the center of your business/activity and generate real value should not be underestimated.
This blog is written by the members of the FBDA / GROUP team. Learn more on www.fbdagroup.org
