03 Mar Is online reputation a true reflection of offline reality?
A few weeks ago I published a post on the subject of how not to manage your online reputation, citing the case of recruitment agency BD Recruitment which has spectacularly failed to do just that. The result is two of the top ten results in a Google search for the term BD Recruitment being negative blog posts from disgruntled customers. My post, which was originally published on a different blog, also now appears at the top of page two of the SERPS and, as the blog in question gains traction on the web, this is likely to make it onto page one within a few months.
So imagine my surprise yesterday when I received a phone call from none other than BD Recruitment. I’ve been looking around for a new challenge in the field of digital media and social communications for a few weeks and have uploaded my CV to a couple of job sites (contact me on Twitter if you’ve got an opening!), and a BD Recruitment consultant called me regarding a “fantastic opportunity” that I really should find out about. Needless to say, I was equally (if not more) curious about the recruitment agency as the job opportunity, given what I’d written about it only a few weeks before.
Sad to say, BD Recruitment lived down to its reputation. At least, the consultant I spoke to did. The conversation started badly when he couldn’t pronounce the name of my current PR agency, something that I have never experienced before and still can’t quite get my head around. Would you pronounce Cirkle ‘Kirkle’? Leaving aside the consultant’s apparent illiteracy, however, the conversation then deteriorated into a kircular, sorry, circular exchange about my experience in which the consultant seemed to singularly fail to grasp what I do and what it means. For a specialist digital marketing recruitment agency to demonstrate no grasp of the responsibilities of a social media director is more than a little worrying. It didn’t exactly inspire my confidence, and I think it’s safe to say that unless BD Recruitment turns up a job that is my perfect role, within 15 minutes of my house and with a six figure salary, I won’t be pursuing anything offered. Oh, and as for the “fantastic opportunity”, it took about ten minutes to get to that, and it was barely relevant to the skills listed on my CV.
So this inevitably led to me thinking, as these things generally do. If BD Recruitment’s online reputation actually is a true reflection of what the company is like in real life (at least, in my experience), then is this generally the case? Is social media and the web in general a ‘truth filter’ that strips out all the marketing bullsh*t and reveals an organisation for what it really is? And what are the implications of this for communications professionals? I’d love to hear your thoughts below…
tweetmeme_source = ‘ThePaulSutton’; tweetmeme_url = ‘http://tribalboogie.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-online-reputation-true-reflection-of.html’;
Like This Post? Subscribe to Tribal Boogie
