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#46 – How Likes, Retweets, and Shares affect your online reputation



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A federal court has ruled that using the Like button is an expression of opinion. We discuss how the court of public opinion views it.

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

Bloomberg reports that Liking a defamatory post does not make you guilty of defamation. In this week’s episode we discuss how Likes, Shares, and Retweets can influence your reputation.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Andy Beal:                  All right, we’re going to kick this show off with a story that has been reported by Bloomberg. It’s a ruling from a federal district court, and they were asked to look at a defamatory statement that somebody else had clicked like on, so when something gets posted to Facebook you can click like. They were asked to rule on whether or not clicking that like button was basically an endorsement of the defamation and that that person should also be guilty of defamation. Probably a surprise to nobody, at least not to Erin and I, that was thrown out because the court ruled that if you click like, and I guess by extension if you retweet or share something that is defamatory, that is a protected expression of opinion. You cannot derive from that anything else other than this being an opinion.

However, it brings up an interesting question because we often talk about how your statements, whether written or oral, can be used to define your reputation. It often goes undiscussed that even your actions online can affect your reputation, so your likes and retweets, while they may not be held against you in a court of law, they can certainly be held against you in a court of public opinion, isn’t that right Erin?

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely, you know something that I feel like I’m constantly reminding family, friends, clients, my younger sibling and his friends, people who use social media for a more social basis especially, that every time you click, comment, or share a post you’re not only endorsing the post that your attention is on, but you’re also endorsing the brand behind that shared content. You really need to be aware of what you’re clicking on and who can see it.

Andy Beal:                  Yes, and those funny little memes, or those risque photos, you like someone else’s comment on a polarizing story, those can all be seen by your friends and your network, and they can also be seen by people generally, just the general public if you’re not careful. You may have this really squeaky clean Twitter feed or Facebook stream where you’re very careful about what you say, but you don’t realize that when you like something, when you retweet it, and we’ve seen backlash from some major personalities in the public space where they’ve retweeted something and then it’s come back to haunt them because now that’s an implied endorsement and people make their opinion on your reputation based on that.

Erin Jones:                  Most definitely, and even on those posts where you might mark the angry face or a heart in support of sadness, people don’t always know what kind of response you put on a post and they don’t always take the time to look. If they’re just glancing through they see that you responded to something. They don’t know if it was in a positive or a negative light, but they do see that you’re in on the conversation and sometimes that’s enough to be really off putting depending on the topic of conversation, where the conversation is being hosted, and who else is a part of that conversation.

Andy Beal:                  Right, and I think you touched on something right there that’s really important, where it’s being hosted. Even if you like a story from a particular publication, so when I share stuff online I’m even conscious of people judging my reputation based on the source of the article that I’m sharing. I like to throw people off and keep them guessing so I’ll equally share stories from Fox News, NBC, BBC America, so that they can’t tag me as either being a liberal or a conservative because I am aware that if I share or I like something from a particular source, if that source is not respected by even just a small segment of the population it will get discounted and I’ll be judged on that.

Erin Jones:                  Definitely and the audiences of each of those places make a big difference too. An example I’ve been using a lot lately is I have two family members who are very, very polarized on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and when one of them comments the other one surely posts something in retort, but then the first person’s friends and people who have like minded ideas all jump on the person who responded. Likewise, when the other person posts something and the family member who disagrees with them comments, they’re getting it from the other side. You can have one opinion get perceived very differently in two different arenas just based on the audience.

Andy Beal:                  Likewise your inaction can affect your reputation, so if there’s a heated debate going on, or someone’s posted something that’s a racist comment, or even just a distasteful comment, and if you don’t come in and chastise them and rebuke them, then it’s almost an implied endorsement of that. We kind of saw that in a story recently where the gypsy taco place he could have just stayed out of the ugly comments, but he knew that if he done that he was basically endorsing those ugly comments, those racists comments, and so he came in and denied them and rebuked them to demonstrate hey, don’t judge me based by my supporters comments. I think it’s important to understand that if someone posts something to your wall and it’s really nasty or disgusting, if you don’t delete it or you don’t challenge it, then people are just going to assume you’re totally fine with it.

Erin Jones:                  Agreed, and that’s on both personal and public brand profile pages. We’ve all got family members and friends who tend to trend towards the inappropriate, or at least I know I do. They’ve all been threatened repeatedly to keep it off of my wall just because I don’t want to host those conversations. These are people who have professional level jobs and so I’m constantly cringing going, “Oh my gosh, what if your employer looks at this? What if a future employer looks at this? What if your mother-in-law is looking at this? What are you thinking?” They seem to continue to do it, and I think that eventually that kind of behavior tends to catch up with people, whether it be professionally, personally, with peers at our children’s school, you just never really know who you’re going to affect when you affect them. I think being as close to a genuine version of your true self online as you can is really important here so that you’re attracting the kind of people that you want to attract into your life.

Andy Beal:                  That is true, but there are some people, like you said family members you can’t really choose. Some tips that I think are worth keeping in mind. Now of course you can make everything private, you can make your Facebook page private, you can make your Instagram account private, you can protect your tweets, but you need to assume that someone is going to take a screen grab and post it publicly. While that is a little bit of protection to mark everything private, you are not out of the woods completely. A couple other things that I do, if I know I’m going to post something that I don’t feel like I want the general population to see then I may select a certain people group that gets to see that maybe on Facebook. Then likewise as well, what I like to do is I have it setup that if anybody tags me on Facebook or post anything to my timeline it actually does not show on my timeline until I approve it.

For the most part I’m avoiding pictures of wiener dogs and stuff like that that maybe just I don’t really want it to be part of my public reputation, but there’s sometimes where people will post things and I’m like, “Eh, I don’t really want that shown publicly.” You can go into Facebook and you can change your settings so that if anybody tags you you have to approve it to put it on your timeline. You get a little notification, your friend still sees that they tagged you, but it just won’t show on your public timeline. It might still show in search results but that’s at least a little bit more hidden.

Erin Jones:                  Yes I definitely recommend this, especially if you have younger siblings. I feel like my brother and his friends tend to get in comment tagging wars sometimes with things like this and they do pop up, and again if you don’t go read you may not have even been a part of the conversation but if someone tagged your name in it then you’re going to show up on somebody else’s wall saying this person was tagged in this post and sometimes they’re terrible. Definitely keep an eye on who’s using your name where and keep those settings as clean as you can for sure.

Andy Beal:                  If you’ve got the ability to pick and choose who your friends with or who follows you then certainly do that. There are some networks where you really don’t have a choice and you could block somebody, but it’s not much you can do. With Twitter it’s generally accepted that whoever follows you is not really an endorsement by you. However, there are a lot of people that will, for example on LinkedIn, they will accept every connection request that comes through your inbox without even taking a cursory look at who is this person, what do they do, are they a spammer, are they involved in something illicit, and protecting their brand. They’ll just go ahead and think to themselves, “Oh great, somebody else that wants to follow me,” but they don’t realize they’re diluting or risking their reputation because now they’ve become this friend with somebody that if they had taken a couple of minutes or even a few seconds to take a look at they would say, “No, I don’t think this really reflects well on me.”

Erin Jones:                  I agree, and I think there’s a hard line with some of that because there are those people that we have as friends, and then for me Facebook is where the people I really know are, and LinkedIn is more people I know through industry work. It’s interesting because sometimes these are people you respect when you hear them speak or you read what they’ve written, and then as you get to know their private personality a little bit better you start to back up a little and go, “Whoa, okay I liked that public persona but now I’m not so sure that I want to be this connected anymore.” Knowing where your networks are and how you interact with them in different places is important here also.

Andy Beal:                  It is a good idea to segment certain social networks based on how well you know that person. I think that’s a really good idea, and I think for the most part the social networks themselves have done a good job of segmenting themselves. You’ve got LinkedIn that’s like we’re your professional network, Facebook is your we’re your friends and family network, Twitter is a big old mess because I don’t really know, I’ve got a mixture of everything there. I think Twitter to me it’s where the brands speak and where we speak to brands and communicate with brands, I think that’s how I would define them.

There’s a lot of other social networks out there. I mean I’ve had a Flickr friend one time post photos of reenactments of bondage to their Flickr account. I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not who I know you to be. We’re shown here as friends,” so you have to keep an eye on this stuff. The smaller networks, you can’t just let them go stagnant and not be involved because you don’t know how they’re going to change and how that’s going to effect you. This is why it’s important as well to Google your name on a regular basis to see which of your social networks show up, and take a look at them from the same perspective that a potential spouse, employer, investor is going to look at because there’s been lots of stories of people that have had job offers retracted or lost clients because of things they have said in social media, whether they were just truly horrible or just a hint of political that didn’t match with the politics of the party.

Now all of a sudden, rightly or wrongly, you are being judged. Whether or not that’s subjectively or objectively you are being judged. You have to kind of keep an eye on what shows up in Google and say, “Hey, is this authentic to who I am?” I think that goes back to your point Erin of being authentic in your actions so that you attract the right kind of people that are similar to your own reputation.

Erin Jones:                  Definitely because you’re not only judged on your own actions, you’re judged on the actions of your neighborhood, the group of people that you associate with online can either elevate you or they can hold you down. Really knowing where that line is is critical, even for people applying to colleges. This doesn’t just go for professional employees, college admissions offices are looking at social media profiles and we’ve seen stories repeatedly of schools who have rescinded offers. There’s jobs, internships, social groups now check social media, there’s some emphasis here, people complain about how social media is bringing us down and doing horrible things to our culture, but I think there’s a real opportunity here for everyone to be better and to really put your best self forward and become that person that you want the world to see you as.

Andy Beal:                  We’ll finish off and that’s a good reminder. I mean you are the sum of all of your different characteristics, and while you can try and curate, and try and hide some of it, it’s better just to be authentic to your character and realize that that’s what your reputation is going to be. You need to decide how far you’re willing to let that go, so if you’re totally fine with your antics on Instagram showing up and effecting your reputation then that’s living an authentic life. Just keep in mind that all these things, even if you think you are keeping them in nice little separate piles where they don’t blend, they’re going to be seen, they’re going to effect your reputation. The next time you hit like, share, retweet, whatever your favorite flavor is, just keep in mind that you are going to be judged.

Whether you care or not, whether it’s rightly or wrongly it doesn’t matter, someone out there is going to be influenced by what you click on, just be thankful that if it’s defamatory the court has ruled that you are not also going to be liable for defamation so that’s a good thing.

All right, thank you for tuning it. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you have a question or there’s a story you’d like us to comment on please go to the Facebook page, which is /andybealorm, or you can go to AndyBeal.com, find any of the latest podcasts, posts, and leave a question in the comments. As always Erin enjoyed chatting with you this week.

Erin Jones:                  Same, thank you so much for having me.

Andy Beal:                  Thank you guys for listening. We hope you have a great week. Thanks a lot and buh-bye.

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#45 – Defending your reputation from defamation, libel laws explained, and the sordid industry of fake court orders

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Just because you don’t like what someone has written about you, doesn’t mean you can sue them for defamation!

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

WordPress.com explains how it handles defamation on its blogs. We explain how the process works, how to get defamatory content removed from the web, and why you shouldn’t try to fake a court order.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Andy Beal:                  Welcome back, and we’re going to do something a little bit different this week. Looked around the stories for a Reputation Roadkill or Reputation Rainmakers. Didn’t see anything that was jumping out to me, but I did happen to read a story over at Techdirt, and it was interesting because it was penned by, I think the WordPress.com team. They were explaining the standards that they have for removing defamatory content from WordPress.com blogs. That kind of got my attention. I thought we would spend a few minutes this week talking about the difference between defamation and something that’s a negative review and how you can handle each of those, but let me tell you, just read a couple of sentence from the article because it’s somewhat lengthy, but this kind of sums it up. Here’s the quote.

“The threat to legitimate speech posed by the notice and take down process is behind our policy for dealing with defamation complaints. We do not remove user content based only on an allegation of defamation. We require a court order or judgment on the content at issue before taking action.”

Erin, we see that with a lot of different publishers and search engines, and it seems like it’s pretty fair because they don’t want to just start removing things from their index or their service just because you don’t like something. They want a judge to confirm that, “Hey, yeah, this is defamatory.”

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely, and I think that this is a really tough spot for publishers to be in, holding the gavel on what’s good and what’s not, so I think when a court can come in and say, “This absolutely looks defamatory,” then it makes more sense to move forward with taking something down.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and it’s to protect themselves because if they start making that judgment, then you could argue, “Well, maybe they should’ve made that decision earlier on in the process and not allow it to be published,” or maybe you argue that they have to edit out what is considered defamation. Then they get into the content creation and editing business, and that gets them into potential legal trouble there because now, they could be enjoined on any kind of lawsuit because the person can claim that, “Hey, not only was this posted by somebody, but then Google, WordPress, Yelp went ahead and made an edit,” and now, they’re, instead of just hosting and publishing, they’re kind of part of the problem. I think it made sense from that perspective as well.

Erin Jones:                  I agree, and I think that if they were just going in and, like you said, becoming part of the publishing process, editing things, then we’re getting into some really dangerous territory as far as biases and possible political leanings. I think it’s a lot of where people are ending up today with mainstream media feeling like they can’t always trust what’s being read because the publishers are controlling the narrative. I think WordPress is saying here that they absolutely do not want to control the narrative, but that this is a really a tightrope walk.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, it is. I speak to a lot of people that come to me and they want help with a reputation issue, and 95% of everybody I deal with is the kind where they’ve got a negative review or some scandal or issue has happened to themselves or a company, and they really want to work to get it cleaned up, not only the actual underlying issue, but they want to get the search results cleaned up, the review site cleaned up, that kind of thing, but there’s a small percentage where it’s clear it’s defamation.

I may refer them to an attorney that could help them because getting, it’s an opening case, an open-and-shut case of, “Hey this is clear defamation. It’s obvious you’re going to win this,” you’re looking at around $10-15,000 to have an attorney file that complaint, go through the process, get a court order, which you can then submit to the search engines or to, in this case, WordPress.com, whereas if it’s a case of just trying to rebuild something or trying get something negative pushed down in the search results, that could be 40, 50, $60,000, but here’s the thing. You can’t just claim something’s defamation just because you don’t like it. The laws here, at least in this country, there’s a number of boxes that you need to be able to check. Let’s go through those.

One is, it has to be false. It does actually have to be something that’s wrong, but it also has to be presented as fact and not just an opinion. Thirdly, it actually needs to injure someone’s reputation. You can’t just say, “Andy Beal likes to eat cucumbers.” As heinous as that is in my personal opinion because I hate cucumbers, it’s not actually going to injure my reputation. I can’t point to any loss business because of that. Then there’s a final layer, if you’re super famous or a politician or a movie star, then you actually have to prove intentional malice, Erin, so you actually have to prove one step further, and that is you did all of this to try and harm their reputation.

Erin Jones:                  Right, and I think people throw around words like defamation and slander really freely. I’ve had some people come to me and, like you mentioned, say, “I want to take this on,” and it’s really, really hard to prove. Now, say somebody said that you hated cucumbers, and your main client was the Cucumber Growers Association of America, that might change the narrative a little bit, and it may actually give you a case because now you’re losing income, but this is one of the more stressful parts of our business for me just because there are so many variables, and it’s really, really hard to say.

I was reading an article this morning that said, “Out of about 360 product liability cases that were studying defamation, 40% were one; however, only three of those cases resulted in punitive damage awards.” You’re spending a lot of money to go to court, and a lot of money to try to get this resolved, and unless is someone is very, very grossly negligent, you’re probably not going to even get your money back from going to court. Like you said, is it better to just try to move forward and recraft your reputation from here forward, or is it really worth it to go to court and try to fight all of this. I think that, really, unless you’re incredibly wealthy or very, very high profile, oftentimes, it’s better to just let this stuff go and get buried in the search engines.

Andy Beal:                  We often, like you said, we confuse what’s defamation and what’s just negative opinion, but then likewise, on the other side, you can’t make a defamatory comment and then hide behind just tagging on the end, in my opinion. It does kind of go both ways. We see where consumers and individuals will leave reviews, and they stray away from facts and opinion and start speculating or deliberately making false allegations and defaming an individual.

As a consumer, we have to be careful too that when we write a negative review that we understand these libel laws and understand that defamation is, it doesn’t have to be the entire piece. You could be 90% opinion, but then you take 10% of your review and you stray into the realm of making a false claim that can hurt their business, for example, you said, “They don’t have liability insurance, and they employ people that are maybe illegal citizens,” or something like that, and you don’t know that for sure, but that could hurt their business. Well, that 10% of your review, which was not needed, is now going to get you into trouble, and someone can still sue you for that 10%, even if the remainder of it is pretty accurate.

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely, and I think people forget, sometimes, when they’re leaving reviews. The Internet is still kind of the Wild West, and when people are upset, they will spout off or think they’re being funny and not realize that it’s not only affecting the business owner or manager that they’re upset with, but all of the employees, and it’s really looking poorly upon the reviewer too. There are just so many angles of this that I find dangerous and frustrating, and it really, really goes back to being transparent and genuine, whether you’re the business owner or the customer. If you don’t say anything that’s not true, then you don’t have a story to remember, something I tell my kids all the time.

It really, I think, comes into play here, and also there’s the definitions between slander and libel. There’s verbal accusations, which is slander, when someone says something verbally about you. I believe that can also play over to when you say something and it’s recorded and shared online. Then libel is written statements. You could even just be in earshot of someone and get yourself in big trouble.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, or you, yes. You may go live on Facebook or post a YouTube video. Interesting thing I wanted to circle back on, you talking about transparency, there’s also this issue where we see a lot of anonymous reviews, and that doesn’t provide you any protection, and it also doesn’t really present too much of a problem if you’re the person being defamed because you can actually sue to either uncover the name of the person that was anonymous, or even if you can’t do that, let’s say it’s impossible to find out, you can sue, effectively, John or Jane Doe.

You basically sue this character, and if they can’t discover who it is, then the judge can just take the case and look at the evidence, and basically, the defendant is this John Doe, and you can still get a court order. You don’t actually have to know who’s behind it. If you’re leaving something anonymous, they could either discover who you are or still get it removed or still get a court order and damages against you, which, if ever they do find out that you’re behind it, you’re going to have to pay.

Erin Jones:                  Right. We see things, people edit Wikipedia entries, they leave, quote-unquote, “anonymous reviews,” even when people post things on Reddit, I don’t think people realize that there are a lot of breadcrumbs back to their computer or cellphone or wherever they’re posting from, but they can uncover who you are. People need to be careful.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and then this can get expensive. $10-15,000 if it’s a pretty clearcut case, but it could run into the tens of thousands, maybe more than that. We’re seeing a big increase in the number of black hat techniques when it comes to defamation. By that, we’ve seen everything from fake court orders that have been submitted to Google where it all looks official and looks like it’s been signed by a judge. At one point, Google was just taking them on the face of it and not investigating, and it was working.

Now, we’re seeing fake defendants where someone sues and they make up the defendant, and defendant basically agrees that, “Yeah, I did that,” and they present a settlement kind of thing. Now, even seeing fake complaints where it’s not even a positive or negative, there’s no real parties there. You’re just pretending that somebody is upset and hurt, and it’s all fictitious. Really, it’s playing to the games where maybe WordPress.com or Google or Yelp, they get that court order to say, “Hey, you need to take this down.” Whether it’s the search engine or WordPress getting duped or if it’s a judge getting duped because neither of the parties actually exist, somebody’s just concocted this all, it’s really a nasty business that I hope will eventually come to an end. Techdirt does a really good job of uncovering this stuff and trying to weed it out.

Erin Jones:                  They do. This whole thing just makes me wonder who has time for all of this? I really do. I wanted to ask you. I know you’ve seen things like this with clients that you’ve worked with in the past and things. Does it usually work out in their favor if you feel like they have a really solid case?

Andy Beal:                  Generally, if I feel like it’s a really solid case, then yes. What I will do is I will even just back out of the entire campaign. I won’t even take them on as a client. I just refer them directly over to an attorney. Sometimes, it’s kind of muddied, and so sometimes I work with … I had a client where some of the reviews, some of the things said were defamatory, and so they pursued those aspects of it, but there was … They say there’s no smoke, what is it, no fire without smoke, no smoke without fire, so they also had some issues that led other people to believe that that was accurate. I work with them on those parts to clean up.

You basically want to have a reputation that if anybody questions it, nobody would believe the allegations. If you’ve got a slightly tainted reputation, it’s going to be easier for everybody else to believe these defamatory comments, and so you kind of go hand-in-hand.

Then I … There’s those clients where they come to you, and they said it’s defamation, and you spend 10 minutes talking them through it, each point, and you quickly help them understand that no, it’s not defamation. They just didn’t like what was worded, and it’s somebody’s opinion, but it’s actually based on some factual circumstances. Those are the people where you just, you don’t even try for a legal resolution.

Erin Jones:                  Right. I actually made a mistake in trying to assist someone with a situation like that. They had actually won their court case, but they had other issues going on in the background that it just, sometimes, it’s near impossible to help them repair their reputation, but if it’s someone where you feel like it is a defamation issue and they really are running a good business, will you help them work on reputation repair on the side while they’re going through the court case so that they can get some things cleaned up while they’re waiting for something to be taken down or do you recommend they wait and see what the judge says before moving forward with something like that. Can those two areas get mixed up together and cause problems?

Andy Beal:                  It depends. It’s a good question because it’s not cheap. Reputation repair is not cheap. It’s more expensive than going through the legal process. If someone has got deep pockets and they really want to get this cleaned up as quickly as possible, then absolutely, we can do both parallel to each other and work on it. It probably wouldn’t hurt to do that anyway because, generally, somebody that comes to me, this negative item is showing up in the search results or it’s tainting their review profile, and the reason being is, is they’ve not worked on building a solid foundation for their reputation in the first place, so it’s easy for anything negative to show up.

We work on building a stronger foundation so that when this is ultimately removed by a court order, if something else happens in the future, they’re better protected, but for the most part, if it’s a pretty clear case of defamation, then generally, it’s a case of, “Hey, go ahead and just get this cleaned up. You need assistance in figuring out how to figure out how to submit a court order and all of that stuff,” then, yeah, I can definitely assist you with that. Generally, after that, it kind of becomes a little bit of a clean-up, but not as much because then we’re just reaching out to maybe newspapers that may have covered the story just to point out that this was a resolved, a defamation, and they should either remove their story or update it. It’s kind of just doing little bit of a clean-up that way, but generally, you get rid of whatever’s the main culprit that’s showing up, whether that’s on a blog or review site or in the search engines in general.

Erin Jones:                  You mentioned newspapers that may have picked up the story. What kind of a nightmare is it if something like, some serious defamation goes viral? Then does the judge order all of those places to take the statement down or just the original … I have so many questions about this.

Andy Beal:                  That’s a-

Erin Jones:                  I haven’t been this deep into it.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, so you can obviously get everything removed from the original author. It would be a better question for an attorney as to how far you can go in terms of getting newspapers to take it down because they’re covering what’s been reported. That will be a little tricky. In fact, we may actually, what we might do is get somebody on the show that can answer those questions specifically because that would be a little trickier to get removed because if there was, if everybody that had defamation written about them online was able to get it removed, the newspapers would probably be out of business pretty quick because they’d be spending so much time just removing everything.

I think there’s a level of protection that they’re afforded because they’re reporting the news, and as long as they do, and this is what the problem is. They generally just do a follow-up and maybe print a retraction or a follow-up story, and the original story ends up staying in the archives with maybe an asterisk next to it with a small update, which generally doesn’t help you. But yeah, I mean, if it were me, I would be pushing to get all negative instances removed. Certainly in Europe, you’ve got the right to be forgotten, so it’s a little bit easier over there. Maybe in the next year or two, we may head that way over here in the US.

Erin Jones:                  It’s very, very interesting stuff.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, it is. That’s our show for this week. We wanted to dive into this a little bit. If you have any other questions that we’ve not covered, then feel free to head to our Facebook page, which is /andybealORM, and just leave a question. If you have any particular case study maybe for yourself or for your, quote-unquote, “friend” that you want us to talk about, then we’d be happy to dive into that as well, but we’ll be back again next week. We’re keeping an eye on all of the stories that are going on. Whether they affect somebody’s reputation positively or negatively, we’ll bring them to you. As always, Erin will join me again because it’s always a delight to chat with you, Erin.

Erin Jones:                  Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

Andy Beal:                  Thank you guys for listening. We hope you’ll tune in again next time. Thanks a lot, and bye-bye.

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#44 – Which Super Bowl ads were #ReputationRoadkill and which were #ReputationRainmakers?



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Some were cute, some were thought-provoking, and some were just weird, but which ones had the most impact on the advertiser’s brand?

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

We rate the reputation impact of some of the most talked-about Super Bowel ads of 2018.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Coming Soon!

The post #44 – Which Super Bowl ads were #ReputationRoadkill and which were #ReputationRainmakers? appeared first on Andy Beal .

#43 – Billy Bush is Rebuilding, Gypsy Taco is Rebranding, and Panera Bread is Reacting

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Rebuilding, Rebranding, and Reacting are the three themes for this week.

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

How do you rebuild a personal brand after a scandal? Billy Bush is working on it.
Maybe you’re not offended by Gypsy Taco, but enough people are and the owner is .
Panera Bread is trying hard to not become the next Chipotle.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Andy Beal:                  Welcome, welcome. We’re going to jump right in because we got three good stories for you this week, and we’re going to start off with Billy Bush. In case you have a short memory, let’s remind you what happened with Billy Bush, because he was the person that was talking to President Donald Trump with that shameful conversation that was very degrading to women. Billy Bush foolishly, we hope foolishly, went along with it. It was one of those circumstances where we hope he was uncomfortable by it, but kind of felt like it was probably private and so just kind of went along with it. It was recorded and we all got to hear it.

Now he’s talking to People Magazine about trying to rebuild his tarnished reputation. He talks about the fact that he’s ashamed and he was embarrassed. He talks about basically losing the career that he built. He talks a little bit about what he’s doing to change, and he’s saying all the right things. Is this enough, Erin? Do you think Billy Bush is on the right track for a comeback?

Erin Jones:                  You know, one thing I really like about what he’s been saying about this, is he’s owning what he did and he’s calling it bystander abuse. Saying that, by not acting on the problem, you’re endorsing it. I really would like to give him some credit for taking that stance instead of trying to explain away what happened or trying to say, “Oh, you know, Donald Trump was in a position over me and if I had disagreed with him then it would have meant bad things for the show.” You know, there are a million excuses he could have come up with. He’s really gotten in front of this and said, “I have three daughters and I’m trying to educate myself and change my perspective.” I kind of feel like we should give some credit where credit’s due here. I think that the bystander abuse claim is legitimate and I think we see it a lot.

Andy Beal:                  Well, I mean, I for one have been involved in uncomfortable conversations where sometimes I have been brave enough to say, “Well hey, wait a minute. You can’t say that about somebody,” whatever it may be. There’s been other times where people have said stuff and I’ve kind of cringed and maybe just excused myself. I’d like to think I’ve not kind of gotten drawn in and gone along with it, but even not taking an action can hurt your reputation. The fact that he actually got caught up with this and actually went along with it, yeah, he says “bystander abuse,” yeah, I can kind of somewhat see that.

The thing that really kind of strikes me here is, you know, Bush’s biggest problem is, he kind of had a somewhat clean image, whereas, Trump really didn’t. Right? There’s a lot of rumors about Trump and he didn’t have this image that Bush had. When this tape come out, Billy Bush let us down, whereas Trump’s behavior was kind of really not enough of a departure from what we already knew about him. I think that’s part of the reason why Billy Bush took a greater fall with his reputation, and Trump went on to survive and become president. That’s because the starting point for our expectations for reputation were different, and Billy Bush was, for all intents and purposes, clean cut, on a rising stardom, very popular, on TV a lot, you know, good looking guy. Just kind of, you felt like, at least for me, he let me down more than Trump did.

Erin Jones:                  Agreed. We expected better, even though he was on a TV show and Donald Trump went on to take on the presidency. You know, there’s definitely some conflict when you look at it that way going, “Wow, our expectations are definitely set by past behavior.” I think that when you set the bar high, you need to maintain that bar.

Andy Beal:                  Right, and I was keynoting an event one time, we did some Q&A afterwards. This was just before the election. I was asked about Clinton and Trump, in terms of all of their arguing and all of the stuff that’s coming out and all of the scandals for either side, and would this hurt their reputation, would this hurt their chances of getting elected. I made the point then that, no it wouldn’t, because they’re really just acting in line with what we’ve come to expect from either one of the candidates at the time.

You’d have to take that into consideration with your own reputation. If you build a reputation of being squeaky clean or being above reproach, you don’t cuss, you’re respectable, that kind of thing, then you have something like this, you’re going to fall a lot further because you have let your audience down. They have bought into your brand and you have kind of tarnished the brand that they’ve been paying for. When you’ve got a brand where you’re kind of more, maybe foul-mouthed or you’re a brand where you do womanize, or whatever it may be, then yeah, it’s still disgusting, but it’s also not that same level of drop off because we had low expectations to start with. You really have to kind of consider your actions in contrast to the expectations from your reputation.

Erin Jones:                  I agree with that, and I also think you really need to take a look at your industry and kind of set that reputation accordingly. Someone who is big in the media is going to get away, probably, with a lot more than a news reporter or someone who works with children or, you know, something that’s considered morally higher standarded, I don’t know if standarded is a word.

Andy Beal:                  It is now.

Erin Jones:                  I just coined that one. You know, but I definitely think that it is something that we both had to consider when going into the reputation field. You can’t coach people on their reputation if yours isn’t above board. I think that that is a really good point, as far as knowing what you come to expect and where you place yourself accordingly.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and I think it’s a good practice for anybody to assume that there’s a hidden microphone recording you. You really need to kind of like have this assumption that, “Hey, I’m being recorded. Is what I’m about to say going to be something that I want the world to know or I want my mom to know or I want my God to know,” whatever it is. Just make that assumption, because then that will help to keep you to a standard.

I think it’s, like you said, I mean, everything I say and do I try to be authentic. We talk a lot about your reputation being the extension of your character. That way, how I act in private is pretty much 99.9% of how I act in public. I’m hopeful that I don’t have this big trip-up. If you’re the kind of person where you’re trying to portray yourself as something that you’re not, then you have to be on guard all the time.

For Erin and I, and I know Erin very well and I can tell you she’s the real deal. What you hear is what you get. We try to walk the walk because we talk the talk, and so, I think that you have to keep that in consideration as well. Assume that you’re always being recorded. What’s the worst thing that could happen, and that is, whatever you’re saying in private gets pushed public. Whatever you do online gets pushed public, and how would that reflect on the reputation you’re building?

Erin Jones:                  I agree, and that’s something that I talk to even my children about a lot. Is, it shouldn’t matter who is in the room. If you’re being yourself all the time, you should be able to say the same thing to five different audiences and not be embarrassed or ashamed of what you’re saying.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah. I think that’s ultimately the downfall. I do think Billy Bush is going to be able to come back from this. I think he was smart to lay low for 15 months. I think that he was kind of complicit in all this, but he wasn’t the instigator. I think that there is a small window that, if he does the right thing, says the right things, moves slowly to get back into the public eye, I think he can rebuild his reputation. Perhaps not to where it potentially could have reached prior to this, but I think in the next couple years, you’ll see Billy Bush back on TV.

Erin Jones:                  I agree. I think really not making excuses and coming out and saying, “This was absolutely wrong and I’m getting some education here and changing my perspective,” is a really good way to reenter the public eye.

Andy Beal:                  That’s a good segue to our second story, you know, because doing the right thing, saying you’ve been educated, you’ve got a story about a food truck named Gypsy Taco and what the owner is doing after receiving some backlash.

Erin Jones:                  I do. Hopefully I can say this right. The owner of Gypsy Taco’s name is Mitch Ciohon, I believe.

Andy Beal:                  See, I wouldn’t have even attempted it. I just would have called him the owner.

Erin Jones:                  Yes, owner Mitch, he actually goes by Chef Mitch, so he’s probably aware of the fact that his last name is a little bit tough, issued a public apology for the name of his Milwaukee taco truck, saying that he accepted fully blame and was not aware of the term’s derogatory origins regarding the long history and plight of the Romany people. What he said was that he didn’t understand the negative commentary of the word gypsy, but he’s done a lot of research now and understands and does not want to be hurtful to anyone, knowing that saying I’m sorry or I didn’t know isn’t going to be enough. He’s changing the name of his business and he’s rebranding.

You know, he said all the right things, that the local community had spoken and he was making it his mission to listen. Then he went on and condemned those who were supporting his soon to be former brand name, saying that working via hateful speech is not supportive in any way, and if they can’t accept his choice, that his only request for them would be their silence. I think he hit this out of the park. He took quick action. He apologized. He changed his behavior, and he’s educating himself and the local community on why he’s making the change.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, this is just a great example, because we often see large brands do bone-headed mistakes. We wonder how that could ever happen. This is just a guy that likes to run a food truck. He’s a chef. I don’t want to judge him, but maybe he’s not social media savvy, maybe he’s not branding savvy, he just liked the name because he considers himself kind of a nomad. I mean, it’s a food truck, so Gypsy Taco, I could see how he can come to that.

To be honest with you, sometimes I feel like I can’t keep up with what is acceptable to say these days and what’s not. It’s an education for all of us as to words that, I mean, I’m 43, and there’s words that we cannot use today that I totally used growing up. In fact, gypsy was one of those. It’s an education that we all go through. What I really like is that, he didn’t try to defend it, didn’t try to kind of continue to build is brand on quicksand and take two steps forward and one step back, because he’d always be fighting against this brand.

He listened, he got educated. He said, “You know what? You’re right. I’m going to change the name of this brand.” He doesn’t know what he’s going to change it to yet. He’s not announced it. He has made a decision that he’s going to change it, and that’s the key here. It’s like, sometime we do mess up, and if it’s a genuine mistake, we can demonstrate that by our reaction that and quickly apologizing, fixing the situation, and moving on.

Erin Jones:                  I agree and I also like how he didn’t ride the fence on this one. He went straight to the side of the people who he had wronged and said, “I fully support this. I agree with you. I’m making it my mission to hear you,” and then he condemned the people who came back and said, “Don’t listen to them, your name is fine.” He said, “No, this is not okay. I want to make this right, and if you don’t agree with me, I don’t want to hear it.”

You know, I feel like he’s handled this so well all the way around, even to the fact of saying, “We are working on rebranding starting now, please be patient with us as it takes a little while to change signage and things.” There was just no hesitation there. He took it full force and got ahead of it. I just feel like he handled the whole thing really well.

Andy Beal:                  It helped that his business appears to be less than two years old. There wasn’t a lot to unravel here or to redo. The Washington Redskins, you know, they’ve been around for decades and they receive a lot of pressure, but that’s a huge brand and they’re continuing to fight, and I think they’ll eventually lose that fight and have to rebrand. It helps that his business was a little bit newer. It also helps him that he did the right thing quickly, because now all of this publicity that he is getting from this, instead of being continually negative, instead of having to fight one star Yelp reviews and all the backlash he would have gotten, he’s now going to write some positive coverage from this, which is really going to help him.

For the rest of us the lesson here is, when you start coming up with a brand, a brand name or a product name, try to get input from a broad selection of friends and family and peers to say, “Okay, this is what I’m thinking. Anything you think about this that would potentially hurt me or anybody that might be offended from this brand?” If you do that at the outset, you don’t have to go through these steps later on.

Erin Jones:                  Exactly, and if your friend group isn’t incredibly diverse, find a group on Facebook. There’s always somebody that’s going to be offended in one of those groups, so if you can get consensus from a group on Facebook, like a mom’s group or a local community group, you’re good.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, good advice. All right, let’s move on to our last story. Panera Bread is recalling some cream cheese products that, they did a small sample and on a single day they found evidence of listeria contamination. They didn’t find it before, they didn’t find it afterwards, just one specific batch had it. Nobody reported being sick, so this was not like a reaction to media coverage where they had to fight the fire.

They were proactive in making the announcement, pulling the product from the shelves, and really getting ahead of the story. I really like the fact that they did this, because now the media is kind of latching onto their narrative and showing that this is a proactive thing. Boy, Erin, what a contrast to everything we’ve talked about with Chipotle over the various years.

Erin Jones:                  Oh, it’s amazing. You know, the chief executive said of Panera that it was their intent to go above and beyond for their guests and that they want people to expect nothing less from Panera. You know, I think it rendered a lot of people who typically would want to be outraged completely speechless because, what do you argue about with this? I think they did a great job, and it was definitely at their expense, completely recalling all of the food and throwing it away and getting new batches made. It really makes people feel like they care about the health of their guests and the happiness of their guests and the quality of their product.

Andy Beal:                  Right, and you’re absolutely right. If you look at this from how this could have played out, so if you say they didn’t take any action and then there was listeria reported and people got sick, so now you’ve got this company that claims to be part of this clean food kind of trend, you’ve got this company that’s saying that, but then has this big breakout, so now they’re on the defensive and they’re trying to recover their reputation.

Whereas, the approach they took, I’m sure it gave them a little bit of heartburn to actually go out and say this, because nobody else was talking about it, they proactively announced this, and effectively they’re saying, “Hey, we are so serious about the quality of our food. Even though this has not been reported as contaminating or anybody’s gotten sick, this is not acceptable standard for us, and when we are taking action to make sure that our food stays clean and healthy.”

Yes, you’re going to get a little bit of angst because there is going to be this report about listeria and it’s going to be associated with Panera, but long term and ongoing, it’s really going to reinforce Panera as being a place where, hey, they really care about the food that they are serving you and it’s really going to reinforce that clean eating image that they’ve got.

Erin Jones:                  Not only that, but the inherent trust in their brand. You know, if you’re out and about all day and you get home in the evening and you’re not feeling so well, you know, someone’s going to say, “Oh, is it something you ate?” You’re going to go, “No, I had Panera and I know they’re really good about taking care of their food.” Not only is it making them look good for being proactive, but it’s really instilling trust in their brand on a subconscious level.

Andy Beal:                  You can’t help but think if Chipotle had taken this approach the first of the whatever dozen times that they had this situation, then they may be in a different situation, different circumstances right now and their brand might be stronger. Because they are always one step behind, now every time there’s even a remote breakout or anybody reported sick, then they’re going to take a big hit to their reputation.

The key thing for Panera here is to continue to do this, to continue to be proactive in monitoring the quality of their product, be proactive in getting the story out with their narrative. That’s the thing, whoever breaks the story first gets to decide the angle that the news media pick up on. That’s why when it’s usually an outbreak or something negative that happens, it’s whoever’s been slighted, or in this case whoever’s puking that gets to decide the narrative. Because Panera came out first, they get to decide the narrative.

Now of course, journalists are going to dig around, see if anybody got sick and they haven’t found anybody, to my knowledge. This is really just a great example of, yeah, it might give you a little bit of heartburn, but do the right thing by your customers, be proactive, and you’ll actually build a stronger brand because people will trust you that if anything does go wrong, you’ll be the first one to tell them.

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely, and that point you made about controlling the narrative is incredibly important because like you said, if the news media had broken this first, even though nobody had gotten sick, Panera’s reputation would be tarnished. Where, when they came out ahead of it, we’re all going to side with them because they did jump in front of it and they let us know and they cared about us over their bottom line for that day.

Andy Beal:                  This story, I’m not really seeing it widely reported, I’m not really seeing it affecting their search engine reputation. It’s going to be a non-issue in the next day or two. Now, a key thing is that they’ve got to make sure that this is an isolated incident. They got to find the cause of this, make sure it doesn’t happen again. Maybe step up their testing for the next few weeks and months to really make sure it doesn’t happen again. All the signals are pointing that this is going to be a breeze for Panera. They did the right thing and it’s really a good example of getting ahead of the story.

Erin Jones:                  Agreed. My only complaint, and it’s incredibly nit-picky, is that they didn’t address this on their Facebook page. I would have liked to have seen if they broke the story, I would have liked to have seen them say, “Hey, all of our fans, we wanted you to hear this first,” and shared something about it there just to ease concerns. I don’t think it’s a big deal, and like you said, I don’t think any of this is going to affect them in the long term, but as someone who uses social media to kind of monitor the temperature of what’s going on with brands, I would have liked to have seen them jump in there.

Andy Beal:                  It’s a good point. That’s something to discuss for another show, because there is a tendency for companies to segment the channels. Right? “Hey, we’ll announce this in a press release and on our corporate site, but you know, we want to keep that happy-go-lucky feel to our Facebook page, so let’s not disturb anybody there. Let’s just keep posting photos of recipes and food.” It’s a valid observation and something we’ll discuss with a future show and we’ll kind of talk about how, hey, you’ve got a voice. You can’t have one voice on one channel and one voice on another. You’ve got to be transparent and you’ve got to be, hey, radically transparent across all channels.

We’re out of time, so we will talk about that at some point in the future. If you have another topic, story, or question for us, please go to our Facebook page which is /andybealorm, or just go to andybeal.com, find any of the podcast pages and just leave a comment there. We’d love to get your feedback or answer any questions you have. As always Erin, thank you for joining me this week.

Erin Jones:                  Thank you for having me.

Andy Beal:                  Thank you guys for listening. We hope you’ll catch us next time. Thanks a lot, and bye bye.

The post #43 – Billy Bush is Rebuilding, Gypsy Taco is Rebranding, and Panera Bread is Reacting appeared first on Andy Beal .

#42 – Are you relying too heavily on Facebook & not keeping an eye on other social networks? Should you pick a fight with bloggers? And, which bank is the most evil?

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Facebook changes are coming, but you also need to keep an eye on other social networks!

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

The dangers of relying too heavily on one social network.
Are you keeping track of your reputation beyond your main centers of influence?
Why we don’t typically recommend picking a fight with bloggers.
Wells Fargo and Bank of America are vying for the most evil bank of the week.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Coming Soon!

The post #42 – Are you relying too heavily on Facebook & not keeping an eye on other social networks? Should you pick a fight with bloggers? And, which bank is the most evil? appeared first on Andy Beal .

#41 – Our 6 reputation management predictions for 2018



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We break out the crystal ball and make some bold predictions for ORM in 2018.

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

We outline 6 stories/trends we think you’ll see on the podcast in 2018. Which do you think will come true?

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Andy Beal:                  Happy New Year to you. Yes, this is our first show back from the break for 2018. What I thought we would do is have a little bit of fun but also put our own reputations on the line by making some bold predictions for the coming year. Erin and I have put together a list of some reputation management predictions that we think we’ll see. And I’m going to kick it off with the idea that I think we’ll finally see some kind of alternative to credit scoring based on your reputation. What I mean by that is instead of using social security numbers and instead of relying on services like Equifax, which obviously had a major breach this year. I think we may finally see someone coming up with a system that will be based upon some kind of reputation scoring. It could be your social media engagement. It could be some specialized system that finally doesn’t offend enough of us so that we actually really accept some kind of personal scoring. But I’m thinking we’re going to see … I don’t know … I think we’re going to see something along those lines where banks and credit cards companies are finally going at least partially start bringing into play our personal reputations. What do you think Erin?

Erin Jones:                  I think that’s really interesting and I hadn’t thought of it much until you brought it up the other day but I think that with the way that our lives are blending personal and professional and so many other areas that way that this is kind of a natural progression. And we’ve seen it already when you go to get car insurance or when you go to turn on a utility, they’re checking credit scores and other aspects of your life aside from can you pay your utility bill? I definitely see this is as a possibility. I think Clout tried to do it a few years ago and fell off a little bit because their methods were maybe a little bit too rudimentary for scoring. I’m curious to see where this goes though and how they’ll do it. I know a lot of people that have really, really great real life credit scores that aren’t involved in social media at all. And then I know some people who are really involved in social media that I probably wouldn’t loan $20 to, if it were up to me. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Andy Beal:                  You make a valid point because what about those people that are not active online. Maybe it could be something that is like an opt in alternative scoring system where you can kind of check a box to have it considered. And then you make an interesting point about services like Clout. And we’ve seen other services try to create a reputation scoring system. And I think their downfall has come from the fact that they wanted to make these scores public for everybody. And I think if it’s going to work in any capacity, it has to be like your own credit score, whereby, yeah, it’s transparent to you as the individual. You can look up your score but we certainly don’t want the scores published for everybody to look up because that’s what will make us feel uneasy and that will kill it before it even gets off the ground.

Erin Jones:                  Definitely. And I think that the way we’re blending technology and all of these different things into our lives, not just professionally anymore, it makes a lot of sense. And I’m curious to see too if our look at me aspect and our look at me perspective with social media if people would keep that private if they could or if it’s something that people would wear as a badge of pride. Something that we also discussed on the subject of credit and the lines blending and things is people hacking credit scores, people hacking internet of things devices, artificial intelligence. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of that blending as people buy refrigerators that can order groceries for them and all of these internet of things devices that are in our homes that are continually listening to us. It’s really funny because we had talked about a few of these topics over email this week and I started getting some ads in my Facebook feed and some other places for some of the things that we only discussed in my Gmail.

I feel like everything is listening all the time. And I think that there’s a huge potential for hacking going on there, kind of moving onto our next point where if all of these devices are contributing to our reputations and possibly our credit scores, which devices are going to be listening and how vulnerable are those devices?

Andy Beal:                  Wow. It’s a scary thought. Heck, apparently we can’t even keep the humble processor in our computers and tablets from being hacked with the intel and all these processes apparently having some kind of back door that needs to be patched. And it does somewhat concern me that we’re starting to rely heavily on things like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. And who knows just how our hackers are working to try to find a back door so that they can start listening to our conversations. We already … I don’t know about you but I put a little piece of tape over the camera on my laptop, just in case someone’s hacked into it. Because I’ve heard the horror stories that hey, someone can activate your camera without you even knowing. So what if they activate my Amazon Echo and start listening to me without me even knowing?

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely. And I don’t know if this is true or not, I heard a joke that someone had Google Home and Amazon Echo and they asked their Google device what they thought of Alexa and Google responded and said, “I like her pretty blue light”. And then the Alexa blinked twice in response. All of these things are connected from our watches to our toasters to who know what else. I think that one thing that we’re going to see is a lot of these companies going to have to really buckle down on security if they want to protect their own brand reputations and the reputations of their client bases. Because like you said, what’s listening when? And what’s looking when?

Andy Beal:                  Yeah. And Amazon is riding high right now. And I’m sure it keeps them awake each night, the fact that they could be hacked because the line of Echo products, they’re now going to be in … what is it? Toyota and Lexus cars, everything could be potentially be hacked if someone can find the back door here. And I know that even in our house we get a little bit paranoid. Sometimes we hit the mute button on the Echo because we’re like, “Ah, she doesn’t need to hear a conversation about refinancing” or something like that. It’ll be interesting to see if that prediction comes true. I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see some kind of, whether it’s Samsung or Google or somebody that’s got some kind of technology wi-fi connected device. I’m pretty confident you got a good one there, that may see some kind of hacking.

Erin Jones:                  Definitely gives a new meaning to the walls have ears.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, true. Alright, here’s my third … my prediction that’s number three. Remember when McDonald’s botched their Black Friday tweet? And it was insert coffee here kind of thing. I kind of had a little bit of conspiracy theory that was it deliberate? Were they just trying to get some attention? And it was tongue and cheek because 99% sure that this is accidental. But they turned it into a really positive story and good a lot of good positive press. Well, I think we’re going to get what I’m going to call “fake and bake” and I think that we’re going to catch a company that’s going to pretend like they’ve either been hacked or they’ve made a funny goof and they’re going to orchestrate it to try and get publicity. But I think they’ll ultimately get called out. They’ll leave a paper trail or an employee will let slip and it will backfire and they’ll actually find themselves as reputation roadkill because they were trying to spoof us and trying to take us for a ride.

It’s kind of a little bit bold but I’m … I don’t know. I’ve got 12 months. I think somebody might make a mistake like that. What do you think?

Erin Jones:                  I definitely think that this is going to happen. We’ve seen, historically, even before the internet the “accidental” leaks to the press, things like that have been happening for a long time and I think as soon as someone figures out a way to try to manipulate the system to get a spike in traffic or get that viral traction that everybody would love to get. If they can do the oops, sorry, hehe, kind of innocent move then it hits all the marks that the public likes. It shows some vulnerability. It humanizes the brand. It’s cute and it allows to fix a mistake without really getting themselves into too much trouble if they do it right. I definitely see this one, at least happening once. I think we’re going to see it more than once.

Andy Beal:                  It’ll be interesting. I think it could definitely happen once. If it happens, hopefully … I’d like to think that other companies would learn from that but as we’ve seen over the last few years, companies don’t learn the lessons when they see somebody else make a mistake. And it all gets repeated. Yeah, it could happen a few times for sure.

Erin Jones:                  And not only as a mistake, I think if seeing how well it worked for McDonald’s, who is a company who people typically kind of scoff at as far as their coolness factor. They go, “Well, it worked for McDonald’s, maybe it could work for us.” And then I think we’re going to start seeing some increased mistrust from the audience because of that. Like, “Oh, was that really a mistake? Hahaha.”

Andy Beal:                  Well, my money’s on the airline industry to try it. Let’s see-

Erin Jones:                  Oh no.

Andy Beal:                  That’s not an official prediction. But I think they need something like this and I think they’ll probably socially just savvy enough but also dumb enough to give it a shot. Let’s see if that part of it comes true as well.

Erin Jones:                  I’m really, really hoping to see some new fresh life breathed into the airline industry. But I think that you’re probably right. Going on with that, I think that mistrust in big business and current political climates in the government is going to really … we’re going to see some more adoption of block chain technology. I think that people are going to be looking decentralized currencies and as we see more questionable payment security, which going back to everything we’ve already discussed today, people are concerned about who’s watching, who’s listening and who’s recording what they’re doing, so I think that we’re going to see a lot more acceptance of the kind of crypto, decentralized currencies. And I’m already hearing that companies like Amazon are talking about taking Bitcoin as a payment option. Car companies are doing this. I’m curious to see if an industry that is typically been considered the dark horse of payment options is going to come forward as more of a standardized thing.

Andy Beal:                  I think it’s got potential. My concern and why I’m going to disagree a little bit on this is when I hear stories of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency even block chain, it’s for the average person, when I speak to my friends and I include myself in this, it’s kind of like behind the curtain stuff. There’s a lot of mystery to it. There’s a lot of volatility to it. How is the price of Bitcoin fluctuating so wildly? I think there’s a little bit of a perception that it’s kind of … right now, the kind of currency that hackers and dark web people use, which to some degree they do, so I think if Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are going to really flourish this year and really going to become widely accepted by consumers, it’s got to have a reputation makeover. We’ve got to find something to talk about. Like you’ve articulated, it’s the positives, the decentralization, the not anonymity of everything and give it something positive to talk about other than the volatility of the price of Bitcoin and who’s using it and governments cracking down on it, that kind of thing.

Erin Jones:                  I agree. And I think though and this is a way out on a ledge prediction.

Andy Beal:                  Okay.

Erin Jones:                  I don’t think that Bitcoin is going to be the one that people adopt.

Andy Beal:                  Okay.

Erin Jones:                  I think that from the very, very limited education I have on this, that some of their developers have done some things that people are mistrustful about, which I guess messed up the mining situation or something police … don’t skewer me for getting this wrong, but I think that someone is going to come up with something that has a similar technology but gets in with someone like Amazon or somewhere and figures out how to become trustworthy within the market. The tech is there, but like you said.

Andy Beal:                  When you think about it, we almost have something similar to this that’s been around for years and years and that’s PayPal. You can use PayPal to make a purchase and nobody ever knows your credit card number or your bank account number and you deposit the funds and then you make the payment. Maybe PayPal comes up with something along those lines because it’s already somewhat consumer friendly and accepted. I guess, yeah, hell, why not. I’ll just go and put my money on PayPal to come up with something.

Erin Jones:                  I like it. They’re trustworthy. They’re … people like them and I know the generations that aren’t as tech savvy like them as well. I think that’s a good bet.

Andy Beal:                  Okay. Alright, let’s move on to the fourth prediction, make sure I’ve got that right. I don’t know where we are. Well, just the next prediction. And that is I think that one of the companies that we saw in 2017, as reputation roadkill, is going attempt to re-brand and try to improve its reputation. Because think about it, you’ve got a lot of companies that had some issues: Photo Bucket, Chipotle, United. And they see other companies re-branding. I think perhaps one of the largest ones was Google re-branding their parent company to Alphabet and they see that there’s a positive connotation with that. And I think that they’ll try to position it as, “Hey, we’re re-branding because we’re changing. We’re more consumer friendly, da da da da da”, whatever it is. But I think it won’t necessarily be a success because I think it will probably be too soon and people will think that they’re just running away from their bad reputation. But anyway, I’m going to kind of go on a limb and predict that there’s going to be one of the big companies we talked about last year that’s going to try and re-brand.

Erin Jones:                  Now, who are your top contenders for this?

Andy Beal:                  Well, I think Chipotle possibly. I even think think maybe even United Airlines because United Airlines is just at the bottom of everything right now. I even saw a poll, a study recently as to their average response time on social media was dead last. I think it was like almost a couple hours to get a reply versus five or six minutes for the top companies. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t want to say a small brand where you would be … everybody would be listening and say, “Well, of course. They’re a small company. They got nothing to lose.” I want to make this bold and pick a large brand that would really have to go through a considerable effort to re-brand. But United, maybe Chipotle. If I wanted a safer bet, maybe Photo Bucket because Photo Bucket’s kind of a eh, kind of a meh, kind of brand anyway and they’ve had a lot of issues. Maybe they might re-brand but maybe one of those three. But definitely one that we’ve mentioned on the podcast. It needs to be one that we’ve already talked about and then had a significant enough an issue that it made it onto the podcast. That’s what I’m staking on.

Erin Jones:                  I think you’re onto something with Chipotle. They just released queso. They haven’t offered queso forever. Maybe you’re onto something with them. I was also thinking that Uber would have a really, really strong case for this as well.

Andy Beal:                  Okay, yeah. I considered Uber but I think the concern I have with Uber is they have not shown any dramatic changes to justify spending the effort and the money on re-branding because they’ve not shown that they are really trying to improve it at this point. And then also they seem to be really going hard after the whole Uber this and Uber that, like Uber eats and things like that. I don’t know. That might be a little tougher, but certainly not out of the realms of possibility.

Erin Jones:                  Yes. That’s a good point. My thinking on that was that their new CEO has worked in so many capacities where they’ve taken on multiple small brands and turned them into one large brand. I don’t know. I’m curious to see how they do this year.

 

Andy Beal:                  The last one, take us home.

Erin Jones:                  Alright, the last one: I’m thinking we’re going to be seeing a lot from Tesla and Amazon, bringing more affordable “big idea” tech to the consumer market. I think that they’re going to have to be very careful with the race to market with some of the big brands that they’re competing against because as we’ve seen with companies like Samsung this year, if you hurry too quickly then your products not only flop but they get you in hot water reputation wise. I think that we’re going to see these two in the forefront bringing some really, really neat ideas forward. And hopefully with what we discussed earlier with those internet of things devices, these are both huge tech companies that use a lot of technology as far as operating their products and connectivity with their support services. I think that they’re going to have to be really careful but if they do it right, I think it’s going to be a good year for both of these companies.

Andy Beal:                  Okay. Sometimes random thoughts come to my head. I have not thought this through, so if you’re listening, you’re hearing this literally seconds after I just thought this.

Erin Jones:                  These are my favorite.

Andy Beal:                  What if Amazon buys Tesla this year? Now, the reason I’m saying that is think about it, Amazon is really interested in automation. Tesla’s got self-driving cars. Amazon’s really interested in gadgets and technology. Tesla’s got these batteries that last forever. Amazon is flushed with cash. I could really see Amazon even buying Tesla and that would kill two birds with one stone. That would really give you the winner for the year.

Erin Jones:                  The other thing is you mentioned Amazon’s flushed with cash and there have been rumors that Tesla has been struggling and now they’ve got … they’re sending rockets to space and working on hyper loops, maybe they’re getting bored with automotive. You could be on to something.

Andy Beal:                  We’ll see. What we’re going to do is we’ll keep an eye on this for you and towards the end of the year, we’ll circle back and let you know how we did. Of course, if any of these actually happen, you’ll definitely hear from us before the end of the year. If none of them happen, it will be a real sheepish podcast, probably just two minutes long because we’ll have to eat humble pie. But we will keep an eye on these for you. And we’d love to hear your predictions for the year. Do you have any predictions or trends that you think we’ll see regarding branding, reputation management for 2018? If so, head on over to our Facebook page /AndyBealORM or just go to AndyBeal.com, find the latest blog posts, find that latest podcasts and leave a comment there. We’d love to hear from you. What are your predictions for branding reputation management in 2018?

Erin, as always, enjoy chatting with you. Thanks for putting on your thinking cap and coming up with some ideas for the coming year.

Erin Jones:                  Yeah. Thank you for having me and thank you for listening to my wild ideas this year.

Andy Beal:                  And thank you guys for listening to us. We always appreciate you tuning in. We’ll hope you catch us again next time. Thanks a lot and bye-bye.

The post #41 – Our 6 reputation management predictions for 2018 appeared first on Andy Beal .

#40 – The top 10 reputation stories of 2017…and we need your help picking #1

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We’re coming up on the end of 2017, so it’s a good time to look back on the year’s biggest Reputation Roadkill and Reputation Rainmakers!

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

Want to know the top stories of 2017? You’ll have to listen to the podcast. Or wait until we upload the transcript.

#39 – Massage Envy, Amazon & Walmart face friendly fire, while “Dilly Dilly” to Bud Light & Maisie Williams



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Hear ye, hear ye, let it be known that this week we have Reputation Roadkill thricely, and two examples of regal reputation engagement.

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

Your contractors, franchisees, and vendors are YOUR reputation.
Bud Light’s fun cease-and-desist has us saying “cheers” and “dilly dilly!”
Don’t be a one-way monolog on social media. Engage your fans and reap the benefits.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Andy Beal:                  Welcome back. We have a pretty good show this week. I know I say that every week, but honestly, stick with me. We’re going to start off with a trifecta of Reputation Roadkill. In fact, we’re not going to discuss the individual stories. We’re going to discuss a bigger picture here, but we’ll put the links on the show notes to the stories.

Amazon had a contract driver defecate on a customer’s driveway. I guess when you got to go, you got to go. Massage Envy is facing more than 180 sexual assault complaints against individual franchises that are under its branch. Then, Walmart had to pull an offensive T-shirt that was offered by one of its vendors. All three of those could make up an entire show, but I think it’s pretty obvious what the individual issues are here, and what you should avoid and what you should fix.

However, the bigger picture that Erin and I want to talk about is when you rely on almost third parties, you’ve got a delivery contractor for Amazon, you’ve got an individual or a couple of individual rogue franchises from Massage Envy. Then you’ve got a third party vendor, but when it’s all reported, when the scandals break, all the public are really seeing are the brands behind those: Amazon, Massage Envy, and Walmart. So, the actions of those contractors and third party vendors are just hurting the main brands, Erin.

Erin Jones:                  They are, and in these three instances, I feel like it’s valid. None of these companies have had any of this be a one-time issue. So, congratulations to the Amazon lady because she actually rendered me speechless, which is pretty difficult to do, but we’re hearing complaints about people all over the place saying, “People are showing up in U-Haul trucks or Home Depot trucks and tossing packages out onto my porch.” We’ve had stuff left at the end of our driveway, which is almost an eighth of a mile away from our front door.

So, I’m seeing this locally, but these are not isolated incidents. Massage Envy, there have been literally hundreds of complaints. This T-shirt company, this is the second large news item I’ve seen from them. Regardless of the fact that they’re not directly employed by these companies, the companies are continuing to pay them and not doing anything about the negative actions. Where does the company become responsible?

Andy Beal:                  Well, I think the company absolutely needs to be help responsible. It’s almost like we’ve not learned from the Dell Hell classic case study, where Dell outsourced customer service. When you outsource any part of your business, you learn the high standards that you set for your own employees, and that oversight and leasing of those standards. You’ve sacrificed that because you’re trying to cut costs, right? If you look at all of these, Amazon is trying to get the packages delivered as cheaply as possible. Massage Envy is trying to expand to as many markets as they can, so they’ve done the franchise route as opposed to building their own stores. Then, Walmart’s trying to get as many products on its website as it can, so it’s opening it up to third party vendors instead of being strict about what products get on there.

All three of them have cut corners. The buck absolutely has to stop with them, and now it’s down to them to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, whether that’s firing that particular delivery firm, closing down those franchises, whatever it is. They’ve actually got to take action here because the public is going to be looking to them to say, “Okay. These are really bad mess-ups that your contractors and affiliates have done here. Is that acceptable to you? Are you going to let that ride or are you going to take decisive action?”

Erin Jones:                  I think decisive action is a really good point here because everything I’m reading from these articles, I keep hearing, “We’re appalled. We’re so sorry. We’re going to do something about this.” Then, three more days, we hear about another allegation or another driver doing something ridiculous. Hopefully, they won’t all go to the lengths that this recent one did, but the T-shirt company, even. This is the second time that they’ve been completely appalled by someone’s actions that went against their policies, so they’re going to go ahead and take the post down. Okay, you need to do a little bit more here because clearly you being appalled is not changing anything.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and I wonder how much it’s got to do with the fact that these are low-cost companies. Amazon, Walmart, Massage Envy, none of them have the reputation of being a high-quality luxury product or first-class customer service. Although I have to admit, Amazon does a pretty good job if you’re a Prime member, but you’ve really got a race to the bottom here. Massage Envy is popular because it’s cheap massages. It’s a lot cheaper than if you went to somebody that provides a more medical, clinical-type massage. Walmart is just trying to be … Well, I don’t know what they’re trying to be. They’re trying to just make everything as cheap as possible.

So, are we getting what we pay for, right? We, as consumers, are not willing to pay the high prices of small businesses, local businesses. We want it cheaper, faster, delivery, and lower priced products, but are we willing to accept that that means the standards are going to be a lot lower?

But at the same time, though, I mean, I’m going to link to the Massage Envy, but please know that it will make you sick to your stomach when you read about the sexual assault complaints. I’ve never been there. I’m sure there are some fantastic franchise owners that have installed structure and policies in place that are stricter than what Massage Envy Corporate has put in place, and I’m sure there’s some fantastic places you can go to, but generally, reading this, you’ll probably never want to go to a Massage Envy again.

Erin Jones:                  No, I actually canceled my membership after I read that article, and I had been with them for five to six years. Our local franchise owner is fantastic, and I just point blank told her, “I’m sorry. I cannot give my money to a company that condones this kind of behavior.” Sadly, she agreed with me. I’d love to see some of these franchises go off the franchise model and just open regular spas. They may gets some really good traction with local markets. It’s just publicly acknowledging that they’re not going to support this.

Andy Beal:                  No, I agree, and I truly expect we’ll see that. Why wouldn’t we? You’ve got to get out of that contract. Whether you need to hire an attorney or not to break from that franchise agreement, yeah, they need to get out of that.

Alright. Let’s move on to something a little bit more lighthearted, and you could even say a little bit more bud light-hearted. Sorry for the intro, Erin.

Erin Jones:                  Dad joke alert. You know, Budweiser did something this week. We know that they’re a huge massive corporation. They’re clearly aware of that. They, this week, served a local small craft brewery with a Cease and Desist letter, but they did it in style and nobody’s mad about it, so that’s really fun to see. They didn’t just serve … a process server come out and give them their documents. They sent a medieval scroll and a town crier to read the process letter publicly within the brewery.

Andy Beal:                  That’s awesome.

Erin Jones:                  I loved it. Absolutely loved it, and the brewery did too, which was really fun. Modest Brewery had a new IPA out and they called it, Dilly Dilly, which is a phrase that Budweiser’s been using in their commercials and a lot of merchandising lately. Someone at Budweiser got the message, and they very, very creatively told Dilly Dilly to back off.

What was fun is that they used the theme from their Dilly Dilly commercials and extended it to real life. So, I thought that was a really fun way to handle it. They let Modest know that it wasn’t going to work out for them, but then they also said that they created two thrones for them to watch the Super Bowl in Minneapolis with the Budweiser team, which I thought was really neat. Modest is taking it all in stride. They’ve hung the scroll up on the wall behind the bar. This is great publicity for them and they were happy to rename the beer. They’re calling it Coattails, so I thought that was kind of cute.

I really think both brands handled it well. They both handled it with grace and laughed it out, and they were willing to meet in the middle and work it out instead of turning it into a big heated battle.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and I love one of the lines from the scroll. It says, “Disobedience will be met with additional scrolls, then a formal warning, then finally, a private tour of the pit of misery,” which was absolutely hilarious. In character with the Dilly Dilly campaign. The best thing is that Bud Light … It’s a win-win. They needed to police this trademark that they have for this slogan, but they did it in a way where they don’t look like a big bully trying to shut down a craft brewery, which could have easily gone against them because there’s a lot of people that like to pull for the underdog. Like you said, they softened the blow by offering two thrones, is how they named it, for the Superbowl, and just handled it in a fantastic way where both brands came out on top and didn’t really have to get into a nasty legal battle.

Erin Jones:                  It was great. Now, I would love to see Dairy Queen hop on board here and go after both of them, since they’ve had the corner on the Dilly bar since who knows how long, but yeah, I wish we would see more things like this because I think they handled it fantastically, and it didn’t get ugly, and nobody got nasty. It’s great publicity for a small brewery, especially when Budweiser’s kind of been under the microscope lately for buying up local breweries.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, and someone told me that this is not really the normal tone that Bud Light takes. They are pretty aggressive, like the 800-pound gorilla that tries to police everything and protect their branch, so this was a really good approach. However, definitely more in line with the Bud Light brand, right? I think they did a really good job with that.

I think the lesson here for us is if you look at the video, it wasn’t like they set up a studio. It just happened to be a couple of employees with their cell phones out, capturing it on video. So, you have to assume that your words, your actions are always going to be recorded, screenshoted or whatever it may be, and how will they be perceived by those that see them later, especially those that maybe root for the underdog. I’ve had situations where I’ve had to police a brand, and I’ve done it in a soft way, a lighthearted way, to try to get resolution and it worked, but then I’ve been on the received end of someone that sent me just a Cease and Desist letter out of the gate without actually contacting me first just to say, “Hey, could we work this out?” It ruffled my feathers and I could have easily played the underdog here and instead, I just decided, “Hey, let’s just work this out like normal human beings.”

Whenever you have to police something like this, always try the softer approach first, and always assume that whatever you send, even if you think it’s a private email, it is gonna make it into the public domain and how will that reflect on you?

Erin Jones:                  Absolutely. I think the old colloquialism that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar … I think it applies in most areas of life, but always if you could get through to someone without causing those ruffled feathers, I think that that should be the first attempt every time.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, absolutely, and if you throw in two thrones for the Superbowl, it doesn’t hurt either.

Erin Jones:                  Yeah. That probably could’ve softened a whole lot of blows.

Andy Beal:                  Exactly. Alright, speaking of thrones … I’m full of puns, this week. Speaking of thrones-

Erin Jones:                  Hey, that was a good transition.

Andy Beal:                  You liked that? Okay, so Maisie Williams is a star of Game of Thrones and other movies. She, on Twitter, asked her followers for suggestions on where to donate clothes that she no longer needed. I love the fact that she was asking for advice on Twitter just like the rest of us normal people would, where we would ask our friends and family and followers, “Hey, I need some help here. What are your ideas on where I should donate these clothes that I no longer wear?”

The fans loved the interaction. In fact, they couldn’t believe it at first, but they got on board and started giving her lots of ideas as to where she could donate them. Then she closed the loop by thanking them and following up on a lot of those ideas, which must have done wonders for building just that fan and follower loyalty.

Erin Jones:                  I absolutely love this. I also love that when people said, “You know, don’t donate everything. Please let me buy something.” She said, “okay. I’ll sell the nicer pieces and donate that money to charity.” Then, I think she said her more working clothes or something referring to her casual wardrobe, she said she would donate those.

So, I think that it’s really neat, like you said, she took all of those suggestions into consideration. It sounded like she really took the suggestions to heart. It wasn’t just a, “I’m going to put this out there to have a post out today,” kind of thing.

Andy Beal:                  Right, and we can learn a lesson here. Even if you’re tweeting or hosting on behalf of a brand, you can still give yourself a personal voice. You can still make that connection. It doesn’t always have to be this one continual stream of announcements and press releases and links to your latest blog post. Why not engage your audience and built that rapport. Then use this as a means to build greater loyalty and support. If you’re going to make a decision on a product launch or a new service or a new feature, whatever it may be, ask the question, “What’s your recommendation? What would you like to see?”

Then if you can actually implement some of the more popular recommendations, just think how more enamored your fan base is going to be. Your customers are going to be more loyal because you’ve listened to them and they’ve played a part in whatever the decision is.

Erin Jones:                  I completely agree. Two of the things I always tell my clients when they’re going to manage their own social media is, first of all, listen to what people have to say because sometimes they just want to be heard. Second is ask people’s opinions on things. If you want engagement on social media, don’t just tell them what they need to know or what you want them to see. Ask them what they think because we love giving our opinions on social media. You’re almost always going to get feedback when you ask someone what they think about something.

Andy Beal:                  Yeah, if you want to see engagement increase across any of your social media channels, just put a question mark at the end of your next post. Ask a question of your audience. People love it. It builds engagement. It builds loyalty. Who knows? You may learn something that you may not have learned if you’d been too afraid to ask, and that might be the tipping point for the next great surge for your company.

Erin Jones:                  Definitely, and if you ask someone’s opinion and they give you feedback that you implement, they have a much stronger connection to your brand than they did before, and that’s going to increase loyalty, as well.

Andy Beal:                  Absolutely. Good point. Alright, we’ll end it on that note. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you have any questions about this week or there’s any stories that you’ve seen or reputation management questions you have for a “friend”, then feel free to ask them over at our Facebook page, which is facebook.com/andybealORM, or just head to andybeal.com, find any of the podcast blog posts, and just leave your question there. We’d love to see your questions or get your feedback.

Erin, as always, enjoyed chatting with you.

Erin Jones:                  Thank you so much. I love being here.

Andy Beal:                  And we appreciate you guys tuning in each week. We hope you’ll join us again next time. Thanks a lot and bye-bye.

The post #39 – Massage Envy, Amazon & Walmart face friendly fire, while “Dilly Dilly” to Bud Light & Maisie Williams appeared first on Andy Beal .

#38 – Uber’s $100k hacker cover up, McDonald’s Black Friday winning fail, and a Denver coffee shop in hot water!

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A tale of two coffee social media campaigns. One will get you pumped up and the other frothing at the mouth!

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

Uber tries to cover up data breach by paying off hackers.
Did McDonald’s social media team make the biggest Black Friday Twitter blunder or was it a clever ploy?
A Denver coffee shop’s controversial sign has social media up in arms.

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Coming Soon!

The post #38 – Uber’s $100k hacker cover up, McDonald’s Black Friday winning fail, and a Denver coffee shop in hot water! appeared first on Andy Beal .

#37 – EA Games feels the full wrath of the force, Logitech loses customer Harmony, and the 3 hottest ORM tips for 2018

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Two tech companies face a reputation backlash but demonstrate how to quickly recover good will with their customers.

Each week, Erin Jones and I take a look at the most interesting reputation management stories, answer your questions, and share valuable ORM tactics. In this week’s episode:

EA Games sets new record for Reddit down votes, quickly reduces game credit costs.
After Logitech announces Harmony Link’s demise, backlash ensues, forcing the company to apologize and appease.
Erin’s back from one of the largest marketing conferences in the US, with her top 3 take aways for ORM.
Don’t miss Erin’s workshop in South Denver!

If you have a question you would like us to tackle, please leave a comment below or on my Facebook Page.

Transcript (forgive us for any typos):

Coming Soon!

The post #37 – EA Games feels the full wrath of the force, Logitech loses customer Harmony, and the 3 hottest ORM tips for 2018 appeared first on Andy Beal .