Online reputation

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Revision as of 17:22, 13 January 2012

Introduction

Reputation is considered to be the opinion and thoughts that a person or community has about a particular person, group, organization or company, brand… In other words, reputation refers to how the world perceives a particular subject. It can be said that the word reputation is very close with the image that the subject has in a community, the subject’s image can be perceive as good or not trusty.

An individual knowing the opinion of other people about the particular subject will decide how much he can trust in the subject. The role of reputation deciding if it deserves to be trusted or not is very important due to two decisions. Firstly, because usually actions that happens in the past might imply that these actions will be repeated in the future. So, if a problem with a subject has happened before, and more if it has happened more that once, the same problem might happen in the future. Secondly, because an individual or a group’s bad opinion or complaint, although it is a lie or a gossip constructed to deceive, can be taken seriously for the community and this can lead to problems for a company or subject. For example, consider that a person has expanded a gossip that involves a member of a company, although the gossip is false the community might trust it and the company will be affected as it has the responsibility of this worker. In this case, the individual might not trust the company for its member. In addition, the weight of some opinions has more weight of others and could be trusted for the individual easily.

Online reputation takes the description of reputation as it has been described before, but with a difference. Online reputation refers to how much online community trust a subject and how they perceive their image looking to the opinions and other content that they find in the web.

Consequences of online reputation

The role of online reputation is very important and having a bad reputation can imply big amount of money, especially for companies.

Suppose a company wants to launch a new product, it implies a huge advertising and marketing costs, but also a lot of advertising and marketing work to do the product known and be sold. Although the company has spent big amount of money in the advertising and creation of the new brand or product, it can be lost as consequence of bad comments or experiences with the product, especially in the Web, as nowadays the Web is the first tool for looking for information.

However, the effects of online reputation for a company are not only damaging when a new product is released, a bad reputation usually implies that the user will look to the competitor. The bad opinions will put the company's credibility questioned, carrying with it big financial complications, sometimes so big that the financial sustainability will be affected heavily involving the company’s disappearance. In this case, the company has to decide who is the responsible of the bad reputation, and take appropriate decisions like if a worker needs to be dismissed or it is worth to maintain this worker in spite of the financial losses. So, online reputation implies financial, moral and more kind of consequences.

The consequences of online reputation are not only referred to a company or its products, it can affect to individuals. As an example a particular person may become affected for bad reputation from contents like comments, images, blogs, etc. This bad reputation might affect the individual in some moments, like when he applies for a job. Nowadays, in most of the cases before employing a person the company looks for interesting information about him in the Web, and in this moment bad comments can be very decisive about the candidates. For example, some compromising images might show if this particular person will be good for the image of the company.

In this context, the Internet and new social sharing platforms have become very important. They have given new and modern tools that can be very useful to organizations and particular persons in order to build a good reputation, but also they can be tricky and the reputation can be affected badly. These tools allow people to comment, inform and communicate, like Web 2.0 and its versions, forums, social platforms, blogs… There are basic tools in the world of online reputation and it is essential to pay attention to them to achieve a good online reputation.

The growth and importance of this type of space has transformed the Internet into a platform for freedom of expression. People can use it as they want, using them to deceive others or in other words, they can make an inappropriate use of it. As a consequence, the online community’s use of these tools is not in accordance with the interest of the organization, or is not good to aim the online reputation that you are interested in. One of the most powerful and used tools in this area are the comments. Comments may become very beneficial for your reputation if they are good and they can put you in a good position, however they can be very damaging if the comments are not what you expect. For this reason, the harmful comments must be deleted preferably, or at least they must be difficult to found for users.