The theoretical understanding of how reputation works remains shallow even if there has been interest in this area by Public Relations specialists and those who have decided to make a career out of online reputation management. Being among the latter, I feel there is a new era upon us, where reputation will mean much more to a broader segment of the population. This is because more people get rated openly and more publicly than ever before. These rating are so easily accessed that we will naturally gravitate towards concern.
Political science has been one area that has used reputation to resolve issues. There is the wide acceptance, for example that reputation is central to State security. Deterrence theorists believe that it is essential to making credible threats,
A reputation is essentially a judgement of a person’s character. We make these judgements all the time. These judgements extend to people, to companies and brands. They also extend to politicians and their cabinet. In fact, they can extend to an entire political party. This is why public relations specialist have studied reputation very carefully. This is how reputation management is broken down in the world of politics.
A reputation is shaped when 2 things happen. First, the observe must see dipositional (or character based) attributions to explain the subjects behavior. Second, one must observe if past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior. So a dispositional attribution is necessary but not sufficient to generate a reputation.
Since a disposional observation is being made, one must recognize that a reputation comes from outside, it is not something you keep in your pocket. You do not control it. So like many things that cannot be controlled, you must then decide to manage it.
If the 2 conditions for reputation are met in a negative context, than you will have a bad reputation. It is therefore critical that reputation management role start with the intercept of any judgement being formed a communicated. This is done by reputation monitoring.
It is important to decode the message, understand what it means in terms of judgement. In politics, the world is always watching. For example, several months US troops occupied Port-au-Prince, some armed Haitian demonstrators directed by Haitian security forced blocked US troops on a UN mission from landing into the city. Several policy makers remarked that this hurt American credibility which was “one of our most precious assets”. Implicit in this statements are the 3 assumptions made by deterrence theorists and economists about reputation.
First, everyone will think this behavior is attributed to character. Second, everyone will view this behavior similarly. Third, everyone will assume we will behave this way again. These 3 assumptions mean we have to worry about our reputation.
Most people in business do not have a political or military background. But valuable lessons can be learned by all this. The vast majority of fortune 500 companies have executives from either politics or military background.
Once we know what the public has learned about our character and our brand, we can only stop having a reputation by ensuring nothing of the same nature reinforces the information being circulated.
In the non-digital world, PR specialists would say, time is on your side. Because eventually people would forget. All the material that is here this week, will be replaced by new material. With time people will forget. Information in the non-digital world ended up on microfiche; hard to find. but in today’s world, this information sticks around. Very easily found and shared. This is whre online reputation management comes into play.
How fast can you change before the digital footprint catches up with you? Reputation will be more important in that it will have an impact in our lives. To mange it, we cannot just keep changing at such rapid pace. The information itself must be managed. The systems like prominence, importance, credibility and response will all come into play.
ORM experts understand how to downplay and dilute negative messages, we are experts and downgrading and burying information. Particularly on social media and search engines.
If you manage a political campaign please reach out to us and see how we can help you candidates by implementing a reputation system. We will insurance top to bottom strategy and execution.