Reputation | interlucation

Just finished reading the article, Corporate reputation in the era of Web 2.0: the case of Primark, which appeared in the Journal of Marketing Management. This concerned the case of Primark, a British retailer of inexpensive clothing and how their reputation as a good corporate citizen was called into question by a BBC news article which brought forth allegations of sweatshops, child labour and exploitation of illegal immigrants being paid half of the minimum wage.

The first portion of the article presented an overview of monitoring reputation management in the web and provided a matrix with 4 quadrants of monitoring effort with depth of measurement and breadth of monitoring comprising the axes. There is some discussion of the consumer as critic/reviewer and prosumer (professional consumer), the goal being to present the consumer as being more informed and with more resources for company and product research. That is quite true and some general examples were cited.

In the case of Primark, the response was to not address the mass-media criticism of the corporation, but to present their case to the web public and let them decide. Media and communications specialists were divided on the idea of this being the best approach. Regardless, fans of the company (fans of inexpensive clothing) vigorously defended the company and one is left with the idea that all is now well with Primark’s on-line reputation. This simplifies the article somewhat, but that is the gist of it.

The idea of the article is good, but that is pretty much it. A slight quibble here is that one would expect a journal to have editors and those editors would proof the article for errors and such. Not this one. There are glaring errors of poor punctuation, dropped prepositions, dropped definite articles, and made-up words. Difficult to present a publication as professional with that sort of thing. The real issue is that the article is that after putting forth a number of ideas, there is no real conclusion other than effective on-line reputation management is about community conversation, participation and collaboration. Wow. What a payoff.

Were one interested in on-line reputation management it may be better to read Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier by David Thompson and Michael Fertik or read web pages directly related such as The Online Reputation Management Guide. Both would be very good starting points.

But what about Primark? Did they clean up their act? An article in the Telegraph suggests that they may have some additional work in that regard. Seriously.

Briefly, an overview of on-line social management starts with awareness of the objectives, areas of management, tools in the social media arena, and a strategy.

There are a lot of examples on-line about how not to run a business and that customers do take offense when they have been mistreated or taken advantage of in some way. Invariably, such behavior can be damaging to one’s on-line reputation. Even before the Internet and the idea of on-line reputation management there were communication issues as seen in the video below.