Most celebrities are at least moderately active on social media, and rightly so. It’s a great way to connect with fans and reinforce your brand. However, a momentary lapse of judgement could create a viral explosion of negative news that could impact your reputation significantly. In fact, most celebrity reputation crisis' issues these days are self-created on social media.

When things go wrong on and offline, famous people are more likely to attract bad press . But it’s not just cheesy tabloid magazines spreading false gossip. Respected news sites can also pick up negative stories.

The press is a voracious beast. In a world where competition is high for click throughs and traffic, even the most trusted media sites give in to the temptation of click bait to drive more traffic to their sites.

The internet has a long memory

In our cyber-driven world, it only takes one person to screenshot a social media post to make it last forever on the internet. People are drawn to social media missteps that are funny, outrageous or scandalous. Within minutes of posting, the post has likely been saved by thousands who will gladly share their copy even if you delete the original. News cycles will move forward and your name may fade from the media, but your mistake will live on.

Search engines too

Google’s algorithm was specifically built (and is frequently updated) to maintain neutrality and relevance. The algorithm examines trillions of articles, images and videos in an effort to suss out how they all relate to each other.

When Google recognizes that various topics are repeatedly mentioned together, it concludes that there must be a correlation between the two. The more frequently these topics co-occur within your entire body of indexed content, the stronger this correlation. This is called search density, and Google uses it to suggest related search results.

Celebrity search results are also incredibly volatile because of a constant influx of fresh content. Whether sipping a latte, hitting a club or making a racist comment on Twitter, someone will probably write about it online.

So what can you do to protect your reputation in a viral world?

1. Don’t give them any fodder: We don’t preach morality here at The Brand Ninja, but we do bang on about wisdom. Making wise choices both privately and negatively will go a long way in protecting your reputation now and int he future. They’re 1001 stories of people being sold out by ex lovers, poses, assistants and managers, so guard your privacy by surrounding yourself with good people AND living the best scandal free life possible.

2. Watch what you say, limit what you share: “Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.” - Proverbs 21:23. However keeping our mouths shut and sitting on our hands is one of the hardest disciplines to master. We’re often tempted to throw our hat into the fray, to say what we think or believe and voice our opinion in the public arena without thinking through the consequences of a bad tweet. First of all to our community – by degrading, hurting and bringing uncalled for shame on innocent people and secondly to ourselves - loss of respect, reputation, and for some celebrities and athletes, the loss of their career, contracts and legacy. When it comes to managing your brand, let go of uninformed opinion. Seek knowledge, seek honour and seek truth. Otherwise it could cost you the world.

3. Monitor your search engine results and social media websites round-the-clock to keep your public image in check. In a crisis, maintain full vigilance to get through the sheer volume of content generated each day. As you can imagine, this is no small undertaking. Although it may not be possible to look at every Tweet, Facebook post or Instagram picture, we can sift through them to determine public sentiment.

   • Is it positive or negative?

   • Do any of the posts seem to be staged attacks or defamation?

   • How real is the threat, and what’s the appropriate response?

   • Is there an underground channel of positive content we can leverage to flush out the negative information?

4. Use a powerful SEO strategy to counteract the vitriol with positive content that overpowers the negative Google, Bing and Yahoo results.

5. When it gets too hot to handle, get in the professionals. Should a crisis begin to get out of control, your manager, publicist and even lawyer needs to be immediately alerted, to determine whether the issue warrants further legal and or professional guidance.

   There are plenty of unique challenges that come with maintaining a celebrity’s brand. Contact our team for advice and to see what we can do for you to help protect your reputation in a viral world.