Oops...Watch Reputation Managers Become Reputation Arsonists

Every once in awhile, we all take stock of our careers, reviewing the ups and downs.

For me, it’s been quite a ride since cutting the cord in 2010, never returning to an office again. Spending a decade as an OG digital nomad. Globetrotting for work and play. Breaking and resetting the rules governing my career trajectory.

It’s reading stories like the New York Times’ attempt at an exposé of a reputation management that make me thankful to have found this existence and have left the world of big communications firms.

Terakeet. Woof. Reading bad stuff about people in your industry should rarely be viewed as a positive, but it’s truly excellent when bad actors are called out. An industry’s weakest link holds everyone back, so I always believe it a duty to talk when someone or something crosses a line in the communications world.

The Times has its issues, but it does collect its receipts well, and it looks to have accurately reported on Terakeet as a loose operation with questionable ethics and poor results.

Unfortunately, there’s also a headscratchingly strong volume of the Tarnished Grey Lady’s reporting that features dumb journalist thinking about industry standard tactics.

Monitoring reports are painted as some sort of dark corporate spycraft, instead of regular business document production. A good 80% of the details of the story are mischaracterizations of regular and ethical work. There are many thin-skinned reporters who jump at the thought of being on a media list, as if it’s some sort of offensive act.

The reporter acts as if there’s something dodgy in controlling one’s own results on Google. Corporations are people, but they deserve the right to tell their story as much as any person. That’s a hallmark of a society that extols the virtue in protection of speech.

And it’s asinine to expect that communicators aren’t going to use technology in their daily work. Technical services, like Terakeet’s SEO and GEO, is a mighty but small part of the overall spectrum of projects overseen by a communications department. They shouldn’t be faulted for understanding fundamentals of how the internet works, unlike the New York Times.

But it’s been painfully obvious for years that tactics using AI are open to enhanced scrutiny. That’s a demerit for Terakeet. Plus, someone inside the firm leaked like a sieve to a reporter. A bigger demerit.

It’s hard to know anything definitive about Terakeet’s guilt without knowing all the facts, but Terakeet's initial defense has been weak. Most crucially, they just Streisand Effect'ed their client, Kathryn Ruemmler into an awfully bleak professional future (which she deserves as someone who looked the other way on Jeffrey Epstein.

For better or worse, expect to see this play out in courts soon. It’s a terrible look, no matter how it eventually plays out.

Real reputation management is about skillfully recrafting your narrative to improve your standing and bottom-line. Not about skillfully recrafting facts to obscure truth.

Generating a track record of trust and respect that stands above previous mistakes. Not erasing and categorically denying mistakes.

But the real lesson: don’t just take any bag of cash and then expect to avoid scrutiny. When you take on the most controversial clients, particularly foreign agents, expect to become part of the story.

You get a media frenzy about the existence of professional communications consultants. It’s as if every smart businessperson in the world suddenly doesn’t have a senior executive on speed dial. Strategic communications is a C-Suite level function, but many reporters still let their scorn of private sector operations have an influence on their objectivity.

Personally, it was fun getting into it live on-air in primetime with CNN hosts when they mistakenly pegged me as some sort of alt-right operative. That just came with the territory of being the one to drop a news bombshell that was the top trending topic on Twitter for a full two weeks.

It was popcorn theater to watch the news establishment go to pieces, alleging communicator themselves are automatically bad people. It’s why I’ve always felt like crisis consultants should be a bit like lawyers – available to anyone who’s had the spotlight thrust upon them. There will be no mercy and no mistakes allowed.

[Editor's Aside: That’s not to let the Grey Lady off easy, which is inexplicably self-assassinating it's own reputation. Long ago, their headline editors made the paper into a mockery that’s not worth a subscription. In the Terakeet case, it failed to convey the real implication of the firm’s involvement, which isn’t fair to the subject. Media accountability is more necessary than ever right now, but that’s a whole other article.]

And now we see Terakeet’s feet held to the fire as the industry’s annual sacrificial lamb.

For now, Terakeet will take some big lumps. Maybe they respond authentically, and maybe they don’t. Now it’s time to wait and see how this existential risk plays out for an ostensibly successful company.

Will they walk the walk in reputation management or justify media skepticism. We’ll know in the next week or so.

And for the communications industry, it's a golden opportunity to really show what it takes to do the job with integrity.

Do you need help building and protecting your organization’s reputation? Learn more about Chase Global communications services.