The convergence of globalization, instantaneous news and online citizen journalism magnifies any corporate wrongdoing or misstep. Barely a day goes by without some company facing new assaults on its reputation. Reputation recovery is the long and arduous path to rebuilding equity in a company’s good name. Research has found it takes approximately 3.5 years to fully recover reputation and it takes a company seven years to go from good to great. The path is clearly long. The reason reputation recovery has risen in importance is that the “stumble rate ” among companies has risen exponentially over the past five years. In fact, 79% of the world’s most admired companies have lost their number one positions in industries in that time period. Companies which were once heralded as invincible, no longer are.
Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others and is the social evaluation of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.
Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.
Online deception means to deliberately transmit, retransmit or alter a communications to mislead an adversary’s interpretation of the communication with the use of devices, operations, and techniques, misleading links or internet navigation systems.
