Financial Self-Defense Part 2: Reputation Risk W hat s in your Google search results? (And who put it there?) Which small lifestyle changes can lead to better management of your family s personal security?
Today s hyper-connected social networking world certainly puts due diligence in a new light. How, when and where you may be at risk Family risk management includes understanding and acting on three pr imar y areas of risk: 1. Financial risk threat of exposure to liability, household management issues and online theft or fraud 2. Reputation risk threat of damage to reputation and legacy 3. Personal safety threat of kidnapping or other violent crime Through our relationships with outside firms, Atlantic Trust offers clients integrated solutions to wealth management needs. In this white paper, on reputation risk, part of our series of white papers on family risk management for affluent families (accessible on atlantictrust.com), we ll discuss the risks, the trends and solutions available. For more information about how we can provide you with specific solutions, please talk with your relationship manager. The Latin writer Publilius Syrus said that A good reputation is more valuable than money. That s as true today as in the first century B.C. But Syrus didn t have to contend with the risk to reputation that comes from a high-profile, online presence. Or even a low-profile one that somebody else may try to compromise. Today s hyperconnected social networking world certainly puts due diligence in a new light. Consider the case of Sandrea Hillburn.* Bad things can happen to good people A 60-year-old self-made multi-millionaire, Sandrea founded and ran a beauty supply distribution company for more than 20 years. She is highly involved in several local organizations and has been invited to sit on several national boards, although she prefers to focus on local groups. Sandrea avoids press coverage and donates to charities anonymously. She sold her company six years ago and now wants her second act to be founding a real estate investment trust, based on her 15 years of personal real estate investing experience. Sandrea s husband is a family law attorney and they have two daughters. Although Sandrea values privacy, she decided to connect with some friends on Facebook for her, it was the beginning of a chapter called bad things can happen to good people. To wit: A disgruntled former client of her husband began blogging about how incompetent the husband was; the blog posts, which included details about their family, came up in first position in Google s results for Sandrea Hillburn. A lawsuit alleging a defective shampoo named her company; although dismissed, the more important point is that her company never carried the product. Lawsuit Summary... Defendant: Sandrea Hillburn... defective shampoos... unable to settle was in second place in Google lists for Sandrea Hillburn. Because Sandrea used her name as her Facebook password, a hacker got into her account and used it to send adult-related spam mail, including pictures. In addition, Images for Sandrea Hillburn show one of her daughters acting somewhat... indiscreet. The pictures were captured from photos on her friend s blog.
Reputation, legacy and risk: Put yourself in control One of the key goals of minding your reputation is to minimize risks across three P s, says David Ascher of RepuMinders: profession, privacy and prestige. Here are some simple, but important, steps your family can take to manage reputation risk. Have a frank and open family discussion on the importance of reputation and how it can impact wealth preservation, business or foundation goals, and family legacy. Try to reach a consensus among family members, particularly the younger generation, about an overall social networking strategy and ask each member to stick to it. At family meetings, ask each person or couple to give an update on events and activities that could influence reputation if it showed up online. Ask an outside consultant to do a comprehensive online audit and share the results with the family. If you have a family foundation, be aware that foundations have numerous reporting requirements that can reveal personal information about family members. These sites, according to Ascher, get heavy traffic, which means they show up high in search engine listings. Families should be very thoughtful on how their chosen foundation s reporting requirements could impact privacy. Develop a reputation crisis plan and appoint family members to serve on the crisis team, along with the family s attorney, advisor and communications or reputation management professional. Reputation is a significant part of legacy keep control of it in your own hands. With that kind of page one profile and business and family being interconnected it would be very difficult for Sandrea Hillburn to attract outside investors to her new business venture, says David Ascher, a principal with RepuMinders, a reputation risk management firm. In addition, her daughter may have difficulty finding a job and her husband s law practice may suffer based on one disgruntled client s blog. It s your brand protect it The routine use of the Internet today puts almost everybody on somebody s radar screen. Anyone with wealth and influence can be a target, says Ascher. Even if you have no online presence yourself, you re not protected there s nothing positive to offset something negative. And if you re the victim of either outright lies or a distorted presentation of the truth, these things can live forever online. Even those who have had a transgression or two many years past paying a fine imposed by a regulatory agency or being sued for outstanding child support, for example don t want to necessarily be defined forever by something negative. Ascher s firm documents clients reputation risk profile and can actually quantify the risk relative to a client s peer group. In other words, it doesn t mean as much to say You have this amount of online content about you as it does to say Relative to your similarly-situated peers, 30% of your content is negative and 10% of theirs is. Ascher says that managing reputation risk is not just about cleaning up your online profile; it s about taking control of it in such a way that you actually build and enhance your own personal or business brand. Sometimes enhancing the reputation of an individual, family or foundation presents an opportunity to advance the agenda and, most importantly for wealthy families, to create and preserve the family legacy. The immediate steps you and your family can take include: Think about your desired brand positioning. What are the three adjectives you want people to think of? What positioning do you need in order to get where you want to be in five years? How high- or low-profile do you want to be? Google yourself. Everybody should do this frequently, advises Ascher. How large is the gap between your desired positioning and your current online footprint? Most importantly, is there unwanted or unfair content coming up? Interestingly, says Ascher, your online presence might not be as robust, positively or negatively, as you think if you have a common name, such as Pete Smith, especially if somebody searching for you doesn t know enough to add other search terms. But if your name is Micah Fitzgibbons III, you re going to be easy to find. Create a Google alert for your name, company, tagline and products. Decide on a social networking strategy and stick to it. Adjust your security settings and be careful what you share. If you haven t already done so, purchase the domain name for your name, and the various iterations of it i.e., petesmith, pete-smith, pete_smith and buy the domain name for as many extensions as you can:.com,.net,.info,.biz. Remember that anybody can purchase a domain name that s not already taken. Somebody with a grudge or axe to grind could easily create a negative website with your name as the domain name and through good wording for maximum search engine optimization (SEO), the bogus site could come up first in a Google listing. There are no online accuracy police keep in mind www.atlantictrust.com Page 3 Financial Self-Defense, Part 2
Reputation: The estimation in which a person or thing is held, especially by the community or the public generally; a favorable and publicly recognized name or standing for merit, achievement, reliability, etc.; standing in the opinion of others; from Latin pp. of reputare, reflect upon. Reputation risk: Common in the business world, it s a type of risk related to trustworthiness, and can be applied to individuals as well. Think of Arthur Andersen (Enron scandal), Toyota (unsafe cars) and BP (fouling the environment) and the reputation fallout of each. Reputation risk management: The process of using expert counsel with technology and branding expertise to help you take control of your online footprint. that Google is in business to give searchers what it thinks is relevant, not necessarily what is true. Remember: There s no barrier to entry for an individual who wants to post things online about you, your family or your business. If, by chance, you wind up having a Sandrea Hillburn scenario, or even just a neutral gap, what can you do? A turnaround story Ascher s firm undertook a six-step online brand and reputation campaign with the goal of positioning Sandrea Hillburn in a positive way. It s never about making things up, says Ascher. Rather, it s about a total transformation of a profile. Along with Hillburn, Repuminders decided on her desired brand positioning and then created content consistent with the positioning. The content was then syndicated on core affiliate sites and a link-building campaign was executed around the content. Hillburn was also asked to change the security settings, including passwords, on Facebook and other social media sites. Finally, through an untraceable entity, the firm requested removal of the top three negative items and Hillburn s daughter s friends were asked to sanitize their content and remove pictures of the daughter. Asking for negative content removal is tricky and best handled by a reputation management firm, says Ascher. We can aggregate our request in a way that essentially says, There is content that infringes on the privacy of a dozen companies and people we represent please take it down. That s the proper way to handle such situations. For Sandrea Hillburn, the result was a Google list led by her very professional LinkedIn profile, a PRNewswire piece about Hillburn Capital Partners, headed by successful entrepreneur Sandrea Hillburn, raising $200 million, a profile of Hillburn in the Women Business Leaders section of the newspaper and a CBS-affiliate story about her green philanthropic work. Although she always wanted a low profile, we finally convinced her to get some credit for her charitable work, says Ascher. The ideal reputation management-and-repair scenario is not a high-profile celebrity or well-known politician in other words, somebody with an already huge online presence and the subject of constant chatter. The person with the most to gain is someone with only a modest amount of content to begin with. Those are the people who most need to be thinking about their online brand and footprint, and also those for whom the most difference can be made, says Ascher. n *Pseudonym for a real person and case. www.atlantictrust.com Page 4 Financial Self-Defense, Part 2
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