If you don’t invest in proactive online reputation management for your company, it can not only hurt your business but also your recruiting efforts. In a recent guest article for Monster.com, Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik and Reputation.com Chief Privacy Officer David Thompson explain some of the ways that anonymous web surfers can tarnish a company’s reputation and offer some proactive brand management advice.
From the post:
Whether you’re a mom-and-pop business looking for seasonal help or a large retailer, your online brand management is more important than ever, particularly as you recruit candidates.
The best and most savvy candidates for any position now spend time researching online before sending a resume, scheduling an interview or accepting an offer. They often look for reviews from current employees, search for information about the employer’s culture and values and research competitive salary information. Even if a candidate doesn’t go online, they are likely to hear echoes of online content from their friends and the media.
At the same time, many of your current employees are probably searching online for news and gossip about the company. What they find can shape watercooler talk and either boost or sap your office morale.
In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about the usual suspects (Google and Facebook) as well as an interesting court case that touches on parenting in the digital age.
The Federal Trade Commission has formally requested Google turn over the WiFi payload data the company accidentally collected via its Street View cars. In reports yesterday, government spokespeople in Germany and Hong Kong expressed frustration over the fact that Google was not giving them the information in its entirety. Google plans on destroying the data and has said that turning it over to government agencies would be a further violation of consumer privacy.
According to the L.A. Times, the defendant tried to frame the case in terms of a mother protecting her child from posting inappropriate content to his Facebook profile. The judge disagreed and found the woman guilty, ordering her to pay a $435 fine and complete anger management and parenting classes. If she fails to complete the terms of her probation, she will have to serve a 30-day jail sentence.
Recently released data from Google reveals that Facebook is the most visited website on the Internet, reaching an incredible 35.2% of the Internet population with 540 million unique users per month. Facebook also has the most page views per month, a staggering 570 billion.
This article from ABC News discusses how people search engines like Spokeo.com have made it incredibly easy for web surfers to find personal information online. The article also touches on the overall state of privacy online and how ongoing privacy issues at companies like Google and Facebook can make some web users feel helpless about protecting their digital lives.
A poll at AppScout.com asks readers if they still plan on quitting Facebook on May 31st, the designated Official Quit Facebook Day. I doubt there was a significant number of people who were really planning on quitting Facebook anyway, but with the company’s recent move to make privacy controls more simple, I would bet even less people will stand by their threat to leave the site for good.
While they don’t offer the ideal privacy solution, it is a significant step in the right direction and Facebook should be commended for listening to feedback from users. Currently, the changes are not available for all Facebook users, but they will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
If you’ve already adjusted your privacy settings using the new controls, let us know what you think in the comments.
In today’s Quick Hits, we follow up on Facebook’s new privacy controls, Google’s WiFi privacy drama, and a study that shows college kids are better at Internet privacy than their parents.
Google is resisting regulatory pressure from Germany and Hong Kong to hand over the 600GB of WiFi payload data the company collected through its Street View cars. Google announced plans to destroy the data, but the German and Hong Kong governments wanted to have it themselves. Interestingly, Google has not turned the data over because they worry about the privacy implications of turning consumer data over to government agencies. It’s a strange Catch-22 for Google: the company got in trouble for violating privacy, and it’s getting in more trouble for trying not to violate privacy further.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Google is facing lawsuits related to its WiFi collecting in multiple states, including California, Massachusetts and Oregon. Some legal experts believe the lawsuits won’t go anywhere and that Google is protected from culpability by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. However, the negative publicity from the lawsuits still hurts the company’s reputation.
BP has enough problems on its hands trying to contain a massive oil spill spreading through the Gulf Coast region. Now the company has to deal with Twitter hackers, as well. BP is already being mocked on Twitter through a satirical account pretending to be BP’s global public relations team, but recently a hacker was able to access the company’s official Twitter feed and left an update ridiculing the company’s clean-up efforts.
According to an article in the Guardian, Facebook’s new simplified privacy controls have not been well received by everyone. The UK group Privacy International expressed disappointment in the settings, calling them a “red herring” and saying, “the latest changes merely correct some of the most unacceptable privacy settings on the site. Very little has changed in terms of the overall privacy challenge that Facebook and its users need to navigate.”
The American Civil Liberties Union was less harsh, offering praise for Facebook’s recent steps, but expressed a desire that the company return to the practice of keeping most information private by default.
A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project revealed that younger Internet users are more likely to take proactive control over their Internet privacy and online reputations. According to the study, “social networkers ages 18 to 29 were the most likely to change the privacy settings on their profiles to limit what they share with others online. The percentage who did so was 71 percent, compared with just 55 percent of the 50- to 64-year-old bracket.” This data is consistent with other reports that show college-aged students and young professionals are taking their digital lives more seriously.
Earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the Washington Post apologizing for Facebook’s complicated privacy settings and offering new simplified controls later in the week. Today, Zuckerberg made good on his promise during a special press conference at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.
In his remarks, Zuckerberg explained how Facebook evolved to its current position, citing the various changes the company has gone through over the last six years. Essentially, Zuckerberg made the argument that Facebook’s privacy betrayal was not a malicious act, but a side effect of the company’s efforts to adapt to growth and changes in user behavior. (Many would disagree with this explanation, but we won’t get into that right now.)
In any case, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s current privacy controls were too confusing for some users and that the company would be rolling out a new option that makes the process much easier. These new controls, which can be seen in the screenshot below, still allow for granular privacy settings but also make it easy to restrict all profile information with only one click.
As you can see from the screenshot, the goal of the new privacy controls is to give users the option of easily sharing all of their information with any of Facebook’s three defined groups — friends only, friends of friends, and everyone. To make customized changes (you want to share your birthday with friends of friends, but everything else with friends only) the user can select the Custom option and go through more granular controls.
Facebook also offers its own recommended sharing settings, though I personally don’t agree with them – should photos and videos really be for friends of friends? For more information on Facebook’s changes, check out the company’s official privacy guide.
We haven’t used Facebook’s new controls for ourselves yet, so we’ll reserve full judgment until we can play with them a bit more, but from these early screenshots, it looks like Zuckerberg really took the criticism to heart. A one-click solution was something that many critics demanded, but I honestly didn’t expect Facebook to deliver.
When myself and the rest of the RepDef team get the chance to play with the settings ourselves, we will update this post with further impressions. We will also update our Comprehensive Facebook Privacy Settings Guide to reflect the new controls.
In the meantime, what do you think of Facebook’s new privacy controls. Does it address your privacy concerns?
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