When it comes to protecting one’s online reputation, one has to be mindful of the Streisand effect.
For those who don’t know what this is, it’s when someone tries to hide or remove information that you wouldn’t like people to see but in the process of doing this, you make this a far bigger story than it ever was.
So not only do they know this information about you, they know that you didn’t want anyone to know it and thus it becomes significantly more interesting than it otherwise would.
It got its name when Barbra Streisand tried to remove pictures from the sky that showed her house. The pictures were publicly available but no one knew about them and even if they did, the pictures aren’t that interesting.
Before her attempts to remove them, the pictures were downloaded 6 times, 2 of which were from Streisand’s own legal team. Following news of her lawsuit to remove them there were 420,000 visits to the site.
This is a cardinal concept in online reputation management because you need to be aware of the collateral damage.
This is something that Nikko D’Ambrosio was unaware of. Who is this? A Chicago man suing a number of women he used to date for $75 million after they posted negative reviews of their relationships with him on Facebook.
Is this Facebook group defamatory or slanderous? This is besides the point because when you google D’Ambrosio all you see are news articles about this.
To add insult to injury, as a result of his higher profile, there are now stories that he’s facing tax fraud charges.
Good luck to D’Ambrosio now in trying to get a date. Anyone who googles him is going to stay as far away from him as they can.
In this he misses the point entirely just as many businesses do when it comes to negative reviews.
One has every right to feel upset about negative reviews when they fake, but when they’re true and accurate, you need to take that criticism and feedback on board. Acknowledge that something is wrong and use the reviews to help identify what and where the problem is and how to fix it.
While people may not like your service and product, if you improve things drastically and somehow get another chance with them, you can show them how much better things are now.
D’Ambrosio looked at the symptoms instead of the cause. When his poor behavior was called out, the next step should have been to apologize to these women. Instead he doubled down by suing them. Even if he wins the court case, it’s going to be all over page 1 whenever someone googles him.
He should have read Barbra Streisand’s 2023 autobiography My Name is Barbra where she spoke out about the photograph. “My issue was never with the photo . . . it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake.”