Yelp! is a company that compiles reviews from customers about particular businesses. It has been so successful because people can literally log onto their iPhone at the restaurant and let off some steam about how their steak was medium, not medium rare. This sort of feedback from customers has created a major shift, putting the brand image in the hands of irritable and tech-savvy customers, rather than clever marketing executives. However, Yelp! appears to have been involved in some shady practices recently.

“When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like [the negative comments] have been moved,” a restaurant owner told East Bay Express. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant.” The owner said that a sales rep offered to remove negative reviews for $299 per month.

That’s not good. It’s things like this that cast a shadow on the industry of search reputation management, a legitimate industry which serves a productive and positive purpose.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/yelp-facing-class-action-suit-over-extortive-ad-sales.ars

The obvious is confirmed: employers look at your social networking pages. When an employer interviews you these days, you should assume that they either already have, or are going to, plug your name into a search engine and sift through the results.

The survey done by Microsoft found that 70 percent of HR professionals in the U.S. have rejected a job applicant based on what they found out about that individual by searching online (that number is lower in other countries).

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, though the number is a tad higher than most people assumed. The personal reputation management industry can, of course, prevent this from being such a major problem.

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/27/yes-virginia-hr-execs-check-your-facebook-page/

Was the Toyota recall an engineering problem? Definitely. But the reason it has become such a media feeding-frenzy is because of failures by the management and public relations people at Toyota. Professor Daniel Diermeier penned an excellent explanation of these failures for BusinessWeek last week.

This situation escalated because of what the company didn’t do early on—which was try to rebuild trust. And there are different aspects to that. Take transparency, for one. That it took 10 days for the president to deal with the issue and that it was originally in the hands of the U.S. head of sales sends the message that there isn’t the right level of accountability.

Toyota has to re-establish the belief among customers that quality is the most important thing for the company.

The whole article is good, I highly suggest reading it. Prof. Diermeier accurately pinpoints the problems Toyota has had, not with engineering, but with their reputation management strategies.

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca2010029_503075.htm