Miami Heat owner Micky Arison has been fined $500,000 for venting on Twitter about the NBA lockout.

The fine — believed to be the largest ever levied against an owner
by the NBA — came after Arison responded to a fan’s tweet. That original message
read: “How’s it feel to be a part [sic] of ruining the best game in the world?
NBA owners/players don’t give a damn about fans&and guess what? Fans
provide all the money you’re fighting over&you greedy [expletive] pigs.”

In response, Arison tweeted that the fan was “barking at the wrong
owner,” a reference to the divide between NBA chiefs, according to
Yahoo Sports. Arison deleted the tweet an hour after he sent it Monday, but it
still caught the league’s attention.

The NBA has barred team owners and coaches from discussing the
lockout or any players during the work stoppage. Coaches and general managers
also $1 million fine and a possible loss of draft picks for
retweeting any players during the lockout.

Arison is now the third owner the NBA has fined. Wizards owner Ted
Leonsis got a $100,000 fine last year for comments about possible changes to the
league’s salary cap. Michael Jordan, owner of the Bobcats, also got a $100,000
fine for comments he made in August about the lockout.

Players are under no such constraint and several, including
Oklahoma City Thunder reserve center Nazr Mohammed, Detroit Pistons forward
Tracy McGrady and Kyrie Irving, the top pick in the June amateur draft, have
been using Twitter to express their discontent.

NetFlix‘s price hike caused 805,000 paid subscribers to jump ship in the most-recent quarter, the company reported Monday.

The company finished its third quarter with 23.79 million U.S. subscribers compared with the 24.59 million in had during its second quarter. In Q3, Netflix announced a 60% price increase, which went into effect in September. The company had predicted in a letter to shareholders that the impact of the price increase would be limited and the company would finish the Q3 with 25 million total subscribers. (The company lowered that estimate to 24 million in September, though.) Investors reacted by continuing to punish Netflix’s already-battered stock, sending it down 27% in after-hours trading.

That, despite a relatively sound earnings report: Netflix reported $822 million in revenues for the quarter and earnings per share of $1.16, which beat estimates of $811.79 million and earnings per share of 96 cents, respectively.

In a letter to shareholders, Netflix acknowledged that it handled communication around the price increase poorly:

“$7.99 for unlimited streaming and $7.99 for unlimited DVD are both very aggressive low prices, relative to competition and to the value of the services, and they are the right place for Netflix to be in the long term. What we misjudged was how quickly to move there. We compounded the problem with our lack of explanation about the rising cost of the expansion of streaming content, and steady DVD costs, so that … many perceived us as greedy. Finally, we announced and then retracted a separate brand for DVD. While this branding incident further dented our reputation, and caused a temporary cancellation surge, compared to our price change, its impact was relatively minor.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ross Catrow

1. Don’t post compromising photos on your Facebook. It should go without saying but also don’t  tweet them or post them on Flickr or email them.  You may think that only your recipient will see them.  Think again.
2. Don’t make hasty comments online forums or on other people’s blog posts. Although some online groups and forums let you edit your comments for a short time afterward (very few of them) once it’s up there , you can’t take it back. Sometimes there is no way to pull your foot  out of your virtual mouth.
3. Don’t try to confront an obviously intentional online attacker/detractor directly. If someone really wants to get at you,
   anything you do might provoke him further. And the more he puts out there, the more people will see it, link to it and spread it around, and the higher it will go up in the search engine rankings.
4. Don’t underestimate the number of people searching for you online. According to a Microsoft poll from 2010, 79% of recruiters and hiring managers in the US have used social networking sites and blog searches to screen out candidates. 7 out of 10 adults have searched for information about someone online.
5. Don’t assume that everyone shares you sense of humor.
   It’s not just that different people respond – and take offense –  to different types of humor. You yourself may look back on something you thought was hilarious months or years ago and not find it funny anymore.

Do’s:

1. Establish a presence on social networks. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular, and each serves a different
   purpose. If you want to jump in with both feet, there are plenty of others to explore and engage in. And be sure to keep them all updated.  Search engines favor more recent content.
2. Start a blog, or two on personal or professional topics. Be sure to  link between them and also link to your website and back.   These are great backlink opportunties. Update them frequently with stories, tips or relevant news items. And make (carefully considered) comments on other blogs with topics similar to yours.
3. Regularly monitor your online reputation. You can set up a Google alert to let you know whenever a new mention of you pops up online.  And other (paid) services, like Radian6 offer more sophisticated tools to help you track and control what shows up.
4. Try to get inaccurate information changed or removed. If someone  says  something about you that is misleading or just wrong – in a Facebook or blog post, for example – ask them nicely to correct their mistake or take the content down.
5. Keep your social networks healthy. Make a conscious choice about which friend and connection requests you accept – and initiate.  Your friends and their online presence can reflect on you.  Parse and pare down your networks.  While it may look impressive to have hundreds of LinkedIn connections and thousands of Facebook friends, when it comes to your online reputation, focus on quality over quantity.
6. Remember the Internet never forgets. You can take the old frat party photos down but you can’t delete them from everywhere.  You never know when nostalgia hits and an impelling an old friend to forward the pics to their pals at work, and so on. Assume that anything you ever post or email or tweet will live on somewhere, forever.

Excerpts reprinted with permission.
Reputation.com, Inc. © 2011

See also Reputation Workbook

for more examples and information.

Catherine Devine

Catherine Devine had her first brush with an online bully in seventh grade, even before she ws using the Internet.  Somebody set up a screen name,  “devinegirl,” posing as Catherine, sent messages full of trash talk and lies and rumors to her friends and schoolmates.  “They were making things up about me, and I was the most innocent 12-year-old ever,” Devine remembers.

Devine, now 22, learned to thrive in the Internet and in ocial MEdia sites, like Facebook and MySpace.  But like other young people, she occasionally stumbles into one of its dark alleys.

An Associated Press poll of youth in their teens and early 20s finds that most of them — 56 percent — have been the target of some type of online taunting, harassment or bullying.

Read more  Here

Reputation management on a budget

by Don Martin

Suppose you have virtually no buget, such as a student about whom something negative gets posted and re-posted on-line.  The kind of thing that might come back to bite you when you go to look for a first job out of college. After all 80% of HR directors search the Internet before making a hirng decision. Here’s what I would advise that you can do for yourself in a few evenings:

1.  Sign up for a Google alert for your name along with the offending key phrase. Set it to email you “as it happens” so you’ll get an email every time your name and the negative phrase are mentioned online,  both to know what’s beineg said, and also so you can see how you’re doing with your repair work.

2. Get social! As a student you probably already are, but go in and clean-up that MySpace or Facebook page. Take down anything vulger or childish or petty and especially undesireable photos (although they never actually go away).   If your social sites are not in your actual name, then start new pages with your real name at least for Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Google Profiles, and Squidoo.  Simply follow the instuctions on each one. Doing all of them shouldn’t take longer than an hour or two, but instead spread this out over at least two or three nights, or better yet over a week or two.  Search engines don’t want to think they are being spammed.

3.   Original content. When it comes to your bio or other content that you insert into the social sites, make absolutely certain that you don’t copy and paste the same text from one site to another. Search engines will severely penalize you for not being original.  Just make sure you change each one up a little bit.  Or a lot is fine too.  This is especially true for other links and web sites you create later on.

4. Buy your own domain. It’s easy. Go to http://godaddy.com and search for your name as a “.com” domain (such as “www.johndoe.com” or “www.john-doe.com” or use a middle initial until you find a suitable domain, then buy the name!  You can usually buy the name for $10 per yeat, or sometimes less.  This is valuable web real estate that you’ll want to own forever.  Buy it before someone else does!

5. Create a website. If you got a few dollars, while you’re at GoDaddy, sign up for web hosting of your domain (about $5/month for a basic site – $60 per year – which is all you’ll need).  And be sure you that you also sign up for WordPress (it’s free) as the web page software you will using. That’s why I recommend GoDaddy.  The site will take care of all the work of setting up the hosting of your web site, downloading WordPress to your new web domain for you, and installing it. All in few minutes. WordPress is used universally, it is free, is exceptionally easy to learn right away, yet is is also extremely powerful, has unlimited themes to create your site in minutes, and has thousands of really cool and useful  “plug ins” (you’ll learn about his later, trust me.)  To start, go to “Themes” and selct a theme of your choice (the first one listed is just fine and very flexible.  It’s what I use.).

7. Content. Content, content, content.  Content is King on the Internet.   Create a professional bio page, and perhaps a page about your favorite interest, or an article that has been printed about you if you have one or two, and of course a contact page.  And a blog.  Content is extremely valuable so do some hard thinking about this.  What do you already have already in written form, or can write about? Try to find anything recent, and of course accurate!   Blogs are a great way to add “fresh” content to your website ona regular basis.

Links: Now you have to get your site noticed.  Create links from your web page to all your social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Squidoo, , etc.   Just write a sentence somewhere such as in your bio by typing in http://www.johndoe.com and you have created a simple link.   But links TO your website are even more critical,  so on all of your social sites put in a link back to your web page.  Google search programs want to see that your site is linked to other sites and vice versa (showing that your website is “popular.”)

8. Start a Blog. Start a blog page on your domain using WordPress.   In WordPress each blog entry is called a Post (as opposed to Pages).  It’s is simplicity itself to create a quick, short blog entry. Try for maybe 100 words, about you, or about a facinating article you’ve read,  a non-controversal current even, articles about you….  Try to post something twice a week.  Or once a month if that’s all you can do. What you are doing is keeping your website “fresh” with new content which is a key criteria that the search bots are looking for.  Soon your page will be rising further up the list of search results, Hopefully you are slowly dominating the first page of search results when anyone Google’s your name.  And that starts  ”pushing down” the negative infomration to below the first page of results. That’s the goal.  By now you ought to have maybe 10- 15 entries in your name — the social media sites, your webpage, your blog, and perhaps links others will make for you from their page to yours. — and atypical Goole search as 15 websites on the first page.  Over 75% of people doing search never go to the second page

9.) Search Engine Optimization. One reason to use WordPress is my favorite plug-in –  the “All-in-one-SEO” plug-in.   Go to the “Plug-ins” section in your WordPress dashboard,  look it up by name and then select it.  It will download and install itself!  How cool is that?   This gives you boxes where you can fill in a page title, page description and keywords for each page of your website that will all go into the internal coding of the site — without you having to be a programmer.  Here’s where you’ll use your creativity to make sure the search engine “bots” find you and your important keywords. So give it some thought.  There are some serious pitfalls re keywords and how to fill in the boxes so just use the basic ones first.  I’ll cover this in much greater detail in my workbok.

10. Keep working. Negative posts don’t disappear overnight, but if they are not too severe or too widespread, the steps above may be all that it takes.  But your long-term success depends on being persistent and also creating fresh content.  Make a point to update one of your social sites too, and your web page every so often, and to post a new blog item each week or two if you can.

Best wishes.   — Don Martin  (dmartin@donmartin.com)

See also:  www.Reputation-Fix.com for more examples, articles and my blog www.reputation-fix.com/blog .  (See how cleverly I worked that into this article!)

• Site submission to eight major search engines
• Domain trust
• Page rank checker
• Competition report
• Meta  tag generator
• Ranking Report

Click below to access their site:

Rumors and lies are typically organic and viral. Typically, there’s no organized campaign with funding and muscle. Instead, it’s usually fueled by water-cooler gossip, e-mail chains and other person-to-person contact that begins to grow and gets bigger, sometimes taking on a life of its own.  Sometimes these are deliberate lies posted by former or disgruntled employees, for example.

There are numerous ways to deal with such information as long as you act quickly, be pro-active instead of burying your head in the sand,  and tell the truth. The best defense, however is often a good offense.  Having a good website, in advance, puts your company at the top of the Google or Yahoo search (among others) and keeps the bad information further down in the search list.

With additional work, this incorrect news can be moved even further down the search list as you are meanwhile addressing the lies or rumors forthrightly and openly.

A good website also gives you a ready  forum for discrediting the rumor or lie. Some companies have “Dark Pages” — a page already designed  ready to go to respond to a falsehood by inserting the relevent information and then quickly turning the page on to “go live.”

Propaganda is different. It’s an organized effort to manipulate the public using mass media, including the Internet, using misinformation, half-truths and deliberate lies.  Propaganda often relies on images and emotions, especially fear.

The best known examples of propaganda come from government efforts during wars, with the most famous being posters during World War I and World War II. A big problem in war is making the population — especially civilians drafted into soldiers — see the enemy as something less than human.

Propaganda works by tapping into emotions through images, slogans and a selective use of the facts.

Corporations, competitors, activist groups or individuals, and political campaigns will sometimes be tempted into using these techniques.  The effect of such propaganda campaigns against you can be devastating to your business, or even fatal, if you don’t act fast.  So you need to know how to counter them.

That’s where we come in.

HOW TO: Get Journalists To Tell Your Story

PR crisis managers are being forced to modify their crisis plans in the era of Facebook and Twitter.  What was once a 24 hour news cycle is now the “30 seconds” news cycle.    So how does one adjust?

• Engage.  More than ever it’s important to build alliances and allies before a crisis happens.  Make sure that includes having a Facebook Page and build a list of followers on Twitter over time.  Being present on the various social media platforms can help save your reputation in a time of crisis.
• Resources.  You must dedicate someone’s time at least a couple of hours a week for social media.  Examine the ratio of time you spend on building traditional  media relationships to that of social media relationships. They should be equal or weigh slightly  in favor of social media.
• Listening.  Whether it is basic free tools like Google Alerts, or more sophisticated paid systems, like Radian 6, you must be listening for what is being said about you, your company, group, or clients.  If you don’t know what you’re missing, you’re going to be in trouble.
• Black pages. Create a black page on your website designed to “go live” if ever needed in response to various issues.  Prepare now so can you can respond quickly when needed, without having to bring in  the web programmer and start from scratch.
• Prioritize.  Don’t be fooled by how many people you know who use Twitter.  Twitter users are some of the most educated, active, sophisticated and worse for you in a crisis.  They are most likely to spread what they see on Twitter by word of mouth.  Make sure you or your organization are on Twitter and know how to use it.  Facebook is another default message platform so  be sure that people are following your company or businesses, at a minimum,  on both Facebook and Twitter.

 Remember what Mark Twain said:  “When you need a friend, it’s too late to make a friend.”   Be prepared in advance and build your allies and your followers,  so you can respond accurately and quickly when a situation erupts.