One social media topic that's held my fascination lately is how to manage one's online reputation. I'm not talking here about how a big corporation does it, but how little guys and gals -- like, say, me -- do it. At which point I happened to read about the resolution of the case of California dentist Yvonne Wong, who, according to this story from MediaPost, has been asked to pay $81,000 in legal fees to Yelp and the couple whom she sued. The couple had complained on Yelp "that their son was left lightheaded from laughing gas administered by Wong, and that he received a filling containing mercury." (The offending review is no longer on the site.) So much for her claim that the review had led her to emotional distress. That seems like nothing compared to having to cough up $81,000 to Yelp and the people who you say libeled you. You can read the down-and-dirty of the court case in the story, but suffice to say that even if Dr. Wong had won, it's clear this woman didn't need a lawyer; she needed a social media strategy and an SEO specialist. That, or she should have just left well enough alone. Of course, upon reading about the case, the first thing I did was Google "Yvonne Wong." Even without adding the initials DDS to the search, her Web site is the first thing tied to her that comes up in the rankings, despite the coverage the case has received. The next mention of her comes in at number ten -- and it's her review on Yelp, where she rates a respectable 4.5 stars. In other words, most of the reviews are positive; it's unclear whether she took any time to rally pleased patients to her defense. In fact, it's not until the next search result on Google that the suit actually comes up. Of course, Googling "Yvonne Wong DDS" makes the court case come up higher, but it's still only no. 5. And let's not forget that if Dr. Wong hadn't sued, the whole incident may well have been buried by now. So, poor Dr. Wong. There's a lesson to be learned here, but it doesn't look like she's learned it: rally your patients to your side, make sure that every online touchpoint over which you have control features comments from pleased clients, and -- above all -- don't sue. Even if you win, it just propagates the negative review. It reminds me of a plea my husband and I got six years ago from a couple who operate a group of cabins in Maine that we've stayed at many times. They got in touch because someone had taken them to task on TripAdvisor, and they needed to fight back, using their regular guests as their best defense. The review by the aggrieved customer accused them of all sorts of things -- including charging for three nights of what turned out to be a two-night stay. The review angered us, not only because we'd come to know the couple a bit, but also because it in no way resembled the great experiences we've had there. Of course, we wrote a positive review. In writing this column today, I went back to their page on TripAdvisor. (No, I'm not going to link to it because the negative review is still there. I wish it was dead and buried.) I'd forgotten this, but the camp's owners wrote a detailed rebuttal that, at the very least, cast reasonable doubt on the negative reviewer's story, pointing out, among other things, that they did not charge the aggrieved customer for three nights. Even though not every review of the cabins is great, the net effect is that that person looks peevish, whiny. Another interesting observation: that more people said they found individual reviews helpful when they were positive than when they were negative. Call it online self-policing, the wisdom of the crowd, or what have you, but people want to believe in the positive. Dr. Wong could have employed many of the same tactics, not to mention saving herself a lot of money. Now one of the main things we know about her is that she's a dentist who lost a court case against one of her patients for posting a negative review. Not the reputation any of us wants to have.(OMMA Social New York is happening on June 9th. Check out the agenda here.)
As a Kindle user since its first model debuted, I've marveled how it has changed my reading habits, and in some ways has changed my life. Some of the most profound changes are the social ones. When I first started reading my Kindle, I was often riding Manhattan's subways, and I realized that I'd lost a valuable form of social expression. Once, when I was reading a paperback book, a friend of the author's struck up a conversation with me, and I've had other such serendipitous conversations. You lose that with electronic readers; the statement is not about what you're reading but the device with which you're reading it. I'd love to see a Kindle case that displays the cover of my book on the back of it. Despite the loss of self-expression, there are several digital ways that Amazon makes books social: · You can highlight passages or take notes and choose to make them public at kindle.amazon.com. · When reading books, you can choose to view the most popular highlights from other readers. Personally, I find this distracting, in the same way that I hated using second-hand textbooks in college. But the so-called wisdom of crowds can draw your attention to passages you might have glossed over initially, and the popular highlights for a book can add to the experience once you finish a book. · Amazon sometimes lets you lend books to others for two-week windows. The only catch is that most books that I own don't allow lending. Maybe I just prefer books from stingier publishers. · It's easy to share your favorite passages in other digital media. When I published a review of the 28 books I read about Africa in the past several months, I was able to take passages from Kindle highlights and sprinkle them in. · You can share passages directly from the Kindle to Twitter or Facebook. It's cumbersome today, but perhaps will work better when Amazon starts having Android-powered devices. An added bonus with the Kindle is that anything publicly shared is available for anyone to see, presenting a fascinating anthropology, something that wasn't possible when bibliophiles kept handwritten notes' in books' margins. Here are six revealing tidbits from the Kindle's popularity rankings: 1) Timothy Ferriss is bigger than Jesus. Really. His book "The 4-Hour Body" is the most highlighted of all time, ahead of the Bible. Granted, there's only one version of his book right now, but four versions of the Bible in the top 10. 2) Timothy Ferriss is more quotable than Jesus. Among the top 25 most-highlighted passages of all time, there are none from the Bible. There are four from Ferriss. There isn't a Bible highlight in the top 100. Perhaps some think highlighting the Bible is a sin. I'd still pick Jesus when it comes to substance, though. When a quote from Ferriss says to "eat the same few meals over and over again," it makes me yearn for anyone else's gospel. 3) The Bible does alright, though, with 5 of the top 25 highlighted passages coming from David Platt's "Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream." One such passage has him saying, "This is how God works," so with that kind of authoritative position on divine actions, I'm not surprised a higher power put him on the bestseller lists. Another 7 of the top 25 are from "Eat Pray Love, "which I'm assuming from the title is 33% about praying. 4) Jane Austen wrote the most highlighted passage of all time, from "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." She also owns the number-five slot. I wonder how many people truly love the quote as opposed to those who just think they should highlight it. 5) People prefer posting public notes about the classics. The four books with the most public notes were written in the 1800s ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Dracula," "Pride and Prejudice"), with Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" breaking the streak in the fifth slot. 6) It doesn't take much to make a book rank higher on the list of those with public notes. For instance, I took notes on "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement." On Monday, I made the notes public and became the first person to do so for that work; it then ranked 4,179th in books with public notes. I did the same thing for "Griftopia: Bubble Machines," "Vampire Squids," and "The Long Con That is Breaking America"; as the tenth person to make notes public, it moved from 361 to 307. As much as I love the Kindle, I miss the way print books liberate you to share books, have them signed, donate them, mark them up with your own hand, and even forget about them in some hotel room without worrying about it. Despite e-readers' drawbacks, their portability and accessibility won me over, and their potential for socializing books can make them valuable in ways we haven't yet anticipated.