On 27th January 2011 Social Media Strategy practice Carve and consultancy firm BLT will be hosting a free breakfast seminar in London. Entitled Employer Reputation 2.0, Paul Harrison from Carve will be exploring the impact of influencers, reviews and the social graph on our traditional understanding of employer branding.

Please find an introduction to some of the topics that will be covered below. To attend please email JCF@blt.co.uk Hope you can make it.

This is an enlightening presentation for anyone who is involved in social networking by Paul Adams, a UX researcher from Google.

Probably most relevant for someone who’s daily actions can be fairly consistently tracked on Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter and particularly those who want to keep their personal and professional lives separate online.

And while we are on the topic of social profiles, another great post you might like to check out is about knowing and maintaining your own social footprint effectively from Michelle Prak here.

So, what do we all think of the new website Unvarnished? Described as a cross between LinkedIn and Yelp it allows anonymous reviews of your personal professional reputation.

For those who have decided to keep their ‘personal’ social networking profiles (Facebook, MySpace etc) separate from their professional profiles (LinkedIn, Xing etc) this will make it increasingly hard.

What’s interesting is that anyone can add a profile about themselves or anyone else (you can go in and ‘claim’ your profile if one already exists).

We’ve had quite a bit of debate on this blog in the past about how potential and current employers use Facebook but this throws up so many more issues.

I’d love to know your opinion.

Would you use this to create your own profile?

How would you respond if someone posted something negative about you?

Would you post comments about people you’ve worked with in the past?

Would you use it to research a potential employee?

Nestle is currently fighting a losing battle on its Facebook Fan Page

What they should do next?

For Nestle right now, there are 3 x steps they need to take:

• Get personal. Posting as “Nestle” is a big mistake: people respond to people, and Facebook is after all a social network. Get a senior Nestle team member –with their real profile and photo - engaged NOW in answering questions. This will make a huge difference to the timbre of debate and authenticity of dealing with this.

• Make sure that they’re responding privately and publicly across all platforms – so if the same debate is kicking off on YouTube, make sure a Nestle person who understands YouTube with their profile is there to respond on YouTube, ditto via Twitter, and so on.

• Use it as an opportunity: get a real person at Nestle as above to find out exactly what the issue is, the depth of feeling, and be open and honest. Could Nestle actually take a serious look at the issues raised? Ask these people if they care about this issue, could Nestle create a virtual working group and invite these people together virtually to genuinely address this issue and discuss it, with Nestle responding to ideas and crowd sourcing possible responses / solutions.

Nestle – with Fairtrade for example – has proven it can listen and act responsibly – do that now, do it openly.

In terms of other brands watching and cringing, there are a couple of key take aways from this:

• Have a strategy in place. The fact that Nestle clearly didn’t have a strategy in place re logos / deleting posts etc ( or if they did, it was the wrong one ) is the first mistake. Brands – no matter how big or small – have to be prepared for this “Black Swan” moment, as Habitat and Paperchase have recently discovered..

• This means having an active listening plan in place so that brands can track buzz / negative sentiment and react faster.

• Secondly it’s about having the right guidelines in place: Be polite, be responsive understand that this is ‘not your space, its theirs’ (so a God-like editing of posts / set of 10 Commandments like ‘thou shalt not alter our logo’ are not going to work ).

• Thirdly, brands have to have an escalation policy in place – who gets involved if a death threat is posted to the CEO? Or something like this kicks off? All of these things need to be in place now, not after the horse has bolted. The best way is having a social media working group with heads of sales / HR / CRM / PR / comms etc that meet for an hour a month in order to plan for this type of eventuality.

I recently had the pleasure of presenting to the APSCo meeting in Manchester, where we presented ideas around online reputation for recruiters, or “Reputation 2.0″.

Heard today about a firm offering to  remove bad reviews about your business from yelp. co.uk

This is an interesting development in the ongoing “reputation 2.0″ debate.. as is this from GeekSugar:

There are a lot of business owners who’ve felt the sting of bad Yelp reviews, and one restaurant in San Francisco is getting even (instead of getting litigious).

Pizzeria Delfina decided to embrace its one-star reviews — by printing them on the shirts the staff wears. 

They triumphantly rock t-shirts that say stuff like “This place sucks” while serving their delish dishes.