Online Reputation Management Blog

7 Ways Doctors Can Improve Their Online Reputation

 

While you’re busy caring for your patients, it’s easy to forget about the importance of online reputation management for doctors. Your patients are web-savvy medical consumers who are interested in your background and reading reviews about you. The smart medical consumer will conduct an online background check on you either before or after their first visit, so it is very important to have a positive online reputation.

[Read more…]

Online Reputation Management for Doctors

There is a powerful prescription for doctors who are concerned about negative reviews hurting their medical practice – online reputation management.  Doctors are including online reputation management as part of their marketing strategy, recognizing that to attract new patients you need more than just a good bedside manner – you need a positive online reputation.

[Read more…]

How to Change Your Facebook Privacy Settings

With the introduction of Timelines and Open Graph at Facebook’s recent f8 conference, many people are concerned about the impact of these changes on online privacy. On Facebook, your name and username, profile picture, gender, user ID/account number and networks are visible to anyone.

If you are one of Facebook’s 800 million users, and you are concerned about who can access your personal information online, it takes only a minute to go private.

Follow these 8 steps below to secure your account and take control over your online image.

1. Log into your Facebook account and click on the dropdown arrow next to “Home” on the upper right hand corner. Use the drop down and click on the “Privacy Settings” link.

2. Under “Control Your Default Privacy,” click on the “Custom” link.

3. The screen will show you four options to select:  “Friends of Friends,” “Friends,” “Specific People or Lists” and “Only Me.” You can also hide posts from specific people or lists by typing the name in the blank space provided.

4. Then, scroll down to the “How You Connect” section.  Click on “Edit Settings” and after the popup use the drop down menus on the right side of your screen to select who you want to view this information.

5. Next, be sure to click “Edit Settings” to the right of the “How Tags Work” section.  A popup window will appear and you can adjust the “Maximum Profile Visibility” settings and adjust your default settings to “Off.”

6. Scroll down to the “Apps and Websites” section.  Click the “Edit Settings” link and follow the drop down menus on the right side of your popup to restrict which apps, games and websites you share your information with.

7. Click on the “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” link to protect information you may have shared publicly in the past.

8. Scroll to the top of the “Privacy” settings page  to make sure that your new settings have all been applied.

Tell all your “Friends” how easy it is to change your privacy settings on Facebook and protect your privacy.

NLRB Defends Employee Free Speech on Facebook

In my post, Do You Need a Social Media Policy, I mentioned that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released a recent report detailing the outcome of its investigations into 14 cases involving employee use of social media and employers’ social media policies.

In four cases involving employees’ use of Facebook, the NLRB’s Division of Advice found that the employees were engaged in “protected concerted activity” because they were discussing terms and conditions of employment with fellow employees. In five other cases involving Facebook or Twitter posts, the NLRB found that the activity was not protected.

Two weeks ago, in Hispanics United of Buffalo, Inc. v. Ortiz, an Administrative Law Judge ruled that five employees who were terminated because of comments they made on their Facebook page should be rehired.  The judge ordered the employees back to work, and held that the employees must be paid for their time off.

The Facebook conversations took place on a Saturday (outside of work hours) and involved a coworker who seemed to think her fellow employees were not doing enough to help their clients and the angry response by the affected employee followed by some crude complaints about working conditions by other employees.

The cases that have come before the NLRB, are generally decided on question of whether the social media activity of an employee is “concerted activity” that would be protected under the law and/or whether the employer’s social media policy is overly broad.

In this most recent case, the judge noted that “[e]mployees have a protected right to discuss matters affecting their employment amongst themselves.”  The fact that the protected discussion is taking place in a public setting, visible to millions of non-employees for an indefinite period of time, did not affect the ultimate resolution of the case.

In the context of the NLRB’s social media decisions, factors used to determine whether the employee activity is “concerted activity” typically include:

  • Whether the employee discussed the post with other employees
  • Whether other employees responded to the posts
  • Whether the post was intended to prompt group action
  • Whether the post represented the collective concerns of employees

Individual concerns or complaints about an employer, broadly publicized on the internet, are unlikely to be deemed protected activity.  However, as some of the cases illustrate, in the 24/7 workplace, the intersection of work and social network can blur.

Policies that would “reasonably tend to chill employees in the exercise of their rights” under the National Labor Relations Act, including the right to engage in protected concerted activity, are unlawful.

The lessons gleaned from recent NLRB case law indicate that companies will need to carefully balance their online reputation management goals with labor law requirements.