It amazes me how many marketing and more specifically PR people don’t understand online culture. How in the world are you going to be effective at communications if you don’t understand the demographic  you are communicating to? Seems simple right? Apparently not.

I recently ran across a situation that unfortunately is more common than I would like to admit. Someone hired a PR firm to help with a online reputation management problem. While there are a few PR firms out there that get ORM (very few), many just see this as an extension of their existing skill-set. They couldn’t be any further from the truth than if they thought the commercial of Tiger Woods playing golf on the moon was shot on location.

The particular situation I ran across included a PR firm with a fairly impressive pedigree. The owner was a Harvard grad, an ex-editor at a major national newspaper and even presided over some Pulitzer winning coverage. He even seemed to have somewhat of a technical background. However, the actions of his firm suggest they do not understand the market they have jumped into.

A client has a rather stressful reputation online. Quite a number of bloggers, site owners and even ex-employees are writing about bad experiences. It has caused quite a stir and now other bloggers are picking up the cry and republishing some of the original complaints or stories. As you can guess this can be a rather large ORM problem and can quickly spiral out of control if not addressed. How you address it is the key however, it is very easy to make the situation even worse. Any guess what the previously mentioned PR firm did?

Here’s an example of what not to do:

Send a letter to bloggers threatening them with civil action if they don’t remove offending content.

Negative consequences of that action:

First: Most of the time, bloggers will not cave to the pressure and will actually take this as a challenge, especially if they were only reporting on something someone else wrote.

Second: If they do remove the content, many times they replace the content with a reference link to the original content. This is even worse. Now the duplicate content (which would have been filtered from search results) is now replaced with a link which gives more weight and strength to the original negative article. This additional link juice makes he situation even harder to handle from a ORM perspective.

Finally: The odds are this blogger has readers, who may have their own blogs. The blogger will write about the threatening email and his readers may support him/her with new articles on their own sites. Again, adding to the overall negative press published about the client.

What do you do?

People online are prone to be a bit rebellious. This is partly because of the perceived anonymity provided by the internet as well as the personality type of those who participate. The best course of action in this case it to let them spout and do nothing, they will move on to a new topic soon enough.

I recommend to all my friends, co-workers and strangers I meet to read The ClueTrain Manifesto. I cannot imagine a better book to get grounding on how to deal with people in the online space. Once you are done with that, pick up Naked Conversations which has been called ClueTrain’s sequel.

I should probably send a copies to the PR firm hinted at above.