Risk managers should monitor bloggers to help assess reputation risk

Risk managers need to familiarize themselves with “high-authority bloggers” tracking their industries if they are to better guard themselves against reputation risk in the Internet age, delegates of the Risk and Insurance Management Society’s 2009 Conference heard.
Richard Levick, president and CEO of Levick Strategic Communications, defined a high-authority blogger as “just someone who blogs but has someone with credibility that links to them.”
Examples include, thedeal.com, which is linked to the New York Times, or the HuffingtonPost.com.
“They are the early-warning signs,” Levick says. “And they are also the people who tell journalists what stories to cover.”
Risk managers and their organizations can no longer look to the newspapers or the television news networks to tell them if they have a problem or not within the first 24 hours of a potentially damaging event, he said.
Levick pointed to a recent incident at a pizza chain, in which employees videotaped one another tampering with the food and then posted the video on their blogs.
Within the first 24 hours, only 7,000 people had seen the blog. But over the next 24 hours, more than 250,000 people watched the video, severely damaging the pizza chain’s reputation. Millions of other viewers have since seen the posted video.
“The speed at which communication now works is far faster than our ability to comprehend or deal with,” Levick says.