Reputation Management in the Blogosphere: Did Whitepages.com Take it on the Chin?

Information today moves in nanoseconds. And a company’s reputation can be damaged or elevated in a matter of minutes or hours with the ubiquity of bloggers and the influence and speed of information distributed over the blogosphere.  There are many fairly current examples of companies not paying attention what the blogosphere was saying until negative sentiment had been solidified and some damage has been done to the brand and company’s reputation.

Last week, the Seattle-based people search company, Whitepages.com announced its “$2.5 million” brand and website redesign. What happened after Seattle Times tech writer John Cook ran a post in his Techflash blog, and what didn’t happen is interesting.

Approximately 74% of the 27 comments posted about Whitepages on Techflash were negative. With stinging critics about:

• The amount spent on the redesign. “Hilarious! 2.5 millions FOR THAT?!,” or “$2.5m????? thats (sp) ridiculous. Someone needs to be fired over there.”
• To the technology used. “Ruby has traditional been shown is just about every major benchmark to be 2-3 times slower than Perl, PHP and Python which are the leading scripting languages.”
• To John Lusk’s Facebook reference. “Facebook comment, wow, how clueless. Boy, if that tiny upstart makes it big, boy.”

Comments good or bad is what the conversation intrinsic to blogs is all about. What’s surprises me though is that Whitepages didn’t respond to any of the comments. So that prompted me to create a list of five things to do to help companies manage reputation in the blogosphere. The principles and strategies of reputation management are really the same as in the offline world, which includes a bit of patience and common sense.

Top 5 Actions to Reputation Management in the Blogosphere

1. Monitor the blogosphere – There are many tools, some free, to monitor conversations in social media that includes blogs, Twitter and others. Simple and free tools include Google Alerts, search.twitter.com and other more analytics-based tools include SM2 (just acquired by Alterian) and Trackur.
2. Respond quickly – Not in haste, mind you. But as quickly as can. Today, the absence of a rebuttal to criticism is close to admitting fault. It makes the company seem as if they are hiding something and some trust is potentially lost.
3. Be nice, don’t flame, ever!–If you are upset, push away from your computer and take a few deep breaths. Once you are cooled down, craft a response and maybe ask for some internal feedback before posting. And don’t forget to thank the person who posted. Remember, you are glad to have people talking about your company or product.
4. Share more. Be more transparent–If facts were misstated or misinterpreted, clarify. In Whitepages case, the $2.5 million was not actually a fee they paid agencies. Rather it was a number spliced together based on the value of internal effort and resources. My PR experience would tell me that to throw out that large figure in a headline, when it requires further explanation, is risky and misleading.
5. Befriend the bloggers –If the posts or comments are from bloggers you don’t currently follow, then make sure you subscribe to their blogs and participate. The power of conversation can turn potential enemies into friends.

Revealing Update on Dex’s Phone Directory Dumping

Following up on last week’s post about the continuing practice of unsolicited phone directories dumped on my doorstep every year, I received an email from Phil Wojcik, Director – YP DND, e.g. the Yellow Pages Do Not Distribute website. Phil is a former employee of the Yellow Pages Association and holds insider knowledge on phone directory publishers, their business model and current practices.

First, Phil wants to clarify that the YP DND web site has only been live since January 2009. He explained that. YP Goes Green is another popular site, yet publishers do not have a relationship with them. I think that’s where I thought I had opted out years ago. Phil further explains: “We on the other hand, have been working with the publishers to accept our opt out lists. The entire site was designed around their specs, and what information they needed to verify the actual request, including which directory. It has been a very long and slow battle, since many publishers don’t want to take responsibility for their blanket delivery lists and actually manage who gets delivered to.”

The rest of Phil’s email response verbatim is below.

“I will admit, RHD, as well as the other 2 major Telco publishers have been slow to respond to our quarterly list distribution, even though we break it down by directory number and zip code per their request. Given that RHD just filed for bankruptcy, and Idearc (Verizon) is not far behind, I can understand why they are reluctant to loose any distribution numbers. The independent publishers have been great to work with.

The other thorn that we have run into lately, is that many of the independent delivery companies, that delivery the directories, get paid by the book. We have had drivers openly admit that they do not look at the list to see if house number xx is supposed to get a book, they just deliver one.”

In the end, for the publishers, it comes down to money. Take RDH for example. In Seattle, Washington they tout almost a 500,000-book distribution. If 50 or 100,000 households say they no longer want the directory, then they have to adjust their ad rates that the businesses pay, which cuts into their 24% profit margin.

While we may not currently have 100% saturation with all 226 publishers here in the US, we are working very hard to reach that goal.

This is clearly a complex issue and there’s no silver bullet to an easy way to opt-out of yearly Yellow Page and White Page phone directory deliveries. Still, it’s great to learn that some folks such as YP DND and Whitepages.com are actively addressing the issue and working towards ending this archaic and wasteful practice.