The State of Online Reputation Management in 2009
A 2009 snapshot of online reputation management, from viral backlash reshaping how brands handled complaints to the first monitoring tools businesses used.
A single video changed how companies thought about complaints
In July 2009, a musician named Dave Carroll wrote and posted a song called “United Breaks Guitars” after United Airlines damaged his guitar and, in his account, refused to compensate him after months of back and forth. The video spread fast on YouTube and Twitter, racking up millions of views within days, and it became the reference story of the year for what could happen when a company let a customer complaint go unresolved in public. United’s stock reportedly dipped in the days after the video went viral, and the incident got cited constantly for the rest of the year as proof that reputation problems could now originate from a single dissatisfied customer with a video camera rather than a coordinated media campaign.
Review sites were becoming a real business factor
Yelp had been growing steadily since its 2004 launch, and by 2009 it had become a genuine factor in local business decisions, particularly restaurants, salons and other services people research before visiting in person. Google was also folding local business listings and reviews more directly into search results, which meant a business’s reputation was increasingly visible the moment someone searched its name, not just when someone thought to look it up on a dedicated review site.
Monitoring tools were new and mostly manual
Formal reputation monitoring software was still young in 2009. Google Alerts, free and simple, was the most common starting point for businesses that wanted to know when they were mentioned online. More sophisticated tools built specifically for tracking brand mentions across blogs, forums and the growing volume of social chatter, platforms like Radian6 and Trackur, were gaining early enterprise customers but were still out of reach for most small businesses. For everyone else, reputation management in 2009 largely meant manually checking Twitter search, Google and review sites on a regular schedule and responding by hand.
What separated companies that handled it well
The businesses that came out of 2009 looking good weren’t the ones with zero complaints, that was never realistic. They were the ones that responded quickly, in public, without getting defensive. Comcast’s customer service Twitter account, @ComcastCares, kept getting cited as an example of a company that treated public complaints as something to solve rather than something to hide from. The companies that got burned, United among them, tended to be the ones that let a complaint sit unanswered long enough for someone else to control the narrative.
Where this was headed
By the end of 2009 it was clear that reputation management could no longer be treated as an occasional PR task handled only after something went wrong. The volume of public, searchable customer commentary, on Twitter, on Yelp, on blogs, meant that silence itself had become a kind of response, and usually not a good one. Businesses that built the habit of watching for mentions and responding quickly were starting the decade in a much stronger position than those still treating their online reputation as something outside their control.
Related reading: more social media coverage, everything published in 2009 or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
