Dealing With Venom on the Web 326
theodp writes "In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, BusinessWeek finds Corporate America woefully unprepared and offers suggestions for how to cope, including shelling out $10,000 to companies like ReputationDefender.com to promote the info you want and suppress the news you don't. And in what must be a sign of the Apocalypse, BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up as a model for maintaining civility in message boards."
Here's a thought ... (Score:4, Informative)
2) Empower your employees to deal with problems when they arise and make things right
3) Obey laws (for instance don't cook the books, backdate stock options, spy on employees and the press).
4) Have contact information for problem resolution on your web site.
5) Admit problems when they occur, publicly state what you're going to do to fix them, never cover things up.
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:2, Informative)
You wouldn't be referring to the bitchslap.pl woud you?
LK
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What can "ReputationDefender" really do? (Score:3, Informative)
ReputationDefender does a lot more than just emailing website maintainers. Obviously, there are additional service fees for higher levels of service, as the article in question alludes to, ranging from SEO services, to arranging for legal counsel in certain cases (when appropriate).
The specific range of possible services is highly dependent on the type of content in question, where it is hosted, who has posted it, etc., and there's a detailed series of procedures that the company has developed for a pretty wide variety of scenarios. We have a great combination of cool technology for personalized search result aggregation and filtering, with a dedicated team of customer service professionals and a body of institutional knowledge on dealing with a wide variety of online reputational issues.
Obviously, in some cases, you can do all of this yourself, write your own friendly and potentially more insistent letters, notify the appropriate authorities, administrators, or other relevant parties, do your own personal SEO, find your own legal representation if necessary, and so on and so forth, to deal with the range of issues that can come up in this area. But many people find value in having a service offering like ReputationDefender that will coordinate all of this, and make all these offerings available in one place.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually a nice way to bring closure to a topic or to restart discussion at a much more advanced level.
Of course, you would probably have to hire a serious amount of editors to do that to every article on
Re:Are you trolling? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility? (Score:3, Informative)
By letting only a subset of the whole audience moderate, by forcing a choice between posting and moderating and awarding moderation points according to meta-moderation, it is much less likely that a given Company X fanboy or shill has moderation points when an article about X gets posted.
By financing enough fanboys or shills, Company X can swing the posts somewhat to its side, but those shills would get caught in meta-moderation and would become useless in a short time, having to recreate logins every couple weeks. By also being unable to both post and moderate, they get even less useful.
That's why Digg shows much more abuse than
Re:NO! (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot does display 0-rated posts, just not by default. What would go wrong? Spam. If people have to go out of their way to view an anonymous post, then fewer anonymous trolls will bother, because their posts will get modded down before they get seen. If 0-rated posts were seen by default, there would be 300 +1-rated posts and 2,000 0-rated posts.
0-rated posts that are worth anything get modded up.
You're free to browse at 0, by the way.