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Answers to Online Reputation Management questions are often very nuanced, however, this one really isn’t – so we’ll say it straight away and up front. The best choice of wordpress theme is one that is SEO optimized, it might seem like the answer would be more complicated, but it simply is not. That makes this […]
In this post, we review a documentary released in 2015 that’s available on Netflix. It’s called: “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” and it’s about one of the titans of the tech industry; in fact, you might say one of the very founders of it – Steve Jobs. One may wonder what a film about the creator of Apple and Pixar might have to do with ORM, but the answer is actually very simple: everything.
The documentary tells the story of Jobs and his rise in the 1980s when he began making a tremendous difference in the tech field; it tells of his visionary approach throughout his career even into the 2000s and 2010s especially with the release of the iPod, the device that changed everything. Indeed, we wouldn’t know what “pods” and “pads” are today without Apple and Steve Jobs himself. Even at the very beginning of his career he was smart enough to understand that 20 years later, everyone would essentially forget what came before. Indeed, while many people may remember the Apple IIGS, there are a bevy of other Apple products from yesteryear that no one does. The same is true for Microsoft products, not all that many people can raise their hands and say they’ve used, or truly remember Windows version 1.0 from the 1980s.
However, it is absolutely the case that the internet did not exist as it does today in the late 1980s, and equally and as such, there was no such thing as Online Reputation Management at the time. To understand the problem one must think about what Apple became to many people. The film clearly shows that throughout its history, Apple released products that people just “had to have” and products that were sold from no other type of corporate outfit anywhere. So in other words, people would go as crazy for the Apple IIGS as they would for the iPod, and keep on buying these products no matter what.
But Steve Jobs himself played a very dangerous game internally with his own people under his charge. He often acted very ruthlessly – in fact, both towards his own employees, and anyone else outside his organization who crossed him. From the founding of Apple as an organization, he openly and proudly created a very confrontational business environment, and by the end of his career, was handling situations among his own workers in ways that were in some cases either borderline criminal or directly criminal, and everyone knew it. For the purposes of Reputation Management, this is a disaster.
We recommend that people reading this post watch the film to find out what we mean. The reality from an ORM perspective, is that the only reason Jobs was able to get away with this was that his company began in the 1980s, and at that time there was no such thing as online reputation problems, because there was no internet the same way there is one today, and even in the 1990s, when the company was much more “down on its luck” than it had been previously, such search engine problems were less of a major issue. The other reason, is that people fell truly, madly, and deeply in love with products such as the iPhone, and there was no other place to go for that exact “name-brand” Apple item.
If other types of companies, such as a hardware store, pizza shop, or even a bed and breakfast were to create that type of work environment, it could be seriously dangerous, since old employees could go online nowadays and bash the organization from afar, and those results could end up on page one of a google search, especially for businesses that have a very limited online presence. Treating employees the way Jobs treated his own can be as dangerous as treating customers openly with contempt, and in the same way, such incidents could easily end up online for a disgruntled employee. We recommend against doing so under any circumstances in the utmost.
We can see how absolutely nuanced Online Reputation Management can be; it isn’t simply about tracking search engine results using social media management tools (and the like); it’s also about thinking in a hands-on way about how to prevent these problems in the first place. There’s an article here – http://www.hopliteorm.com/recommendations-for-businesses-on-how-to-avoid-negative-reviews-in-general.html that can help when it comes to thinking about how to deal with customers in a way that fosters ORM success. You can check out their site for ways regarding thinking about how to deal with issues such as this. And check back for the latest here at Online Reputation Tracker on how to make your internet search results look the very best they can, no matter what type of issue you’re dealing with.
Steve Jobs