Gossip Girls Gone Wild

Gossip Girls Gone Wild

Gossip can be good. It can work to your advantage. But when it starts to hurt your coffers that’s when things start getting serious.

June 28, 2011 4:30 by kippreport

It spread like wildfire. With a few clicks and taps on the mobile phone, rumours that one of the staff members at the Reema al Badawi beauty salon in Abu Dhabi had tubercolosis was reaching anyone who had a Blackberry or had an ear to the ground.

Ah Word-of-Mouth. It’s such a gift and a curse.

Inspectors have given the salon a clean bill of health—twice, according to an article in The National. But with news of the positive inspection not moving as swiftly as the gossip that started it all, there’s no way to tell how much damage in revenue this has cost the salon.

Could it really be skullduggery from the salon’s rivals? It’s possible. But then again, it’s also possible that it was just a joke that’s blown out of proportion about a staff’s miscalculated, untimely cough—we’ve all had those before.

Kipp remembers though, more than a few years ago having crossed paths with an unassuming gentleman with a questionable yet highly lucrative career. Said gentleman was frequently hired to find ‘dirt’ on rival companies and leak them to the public.

Whether or not that gentleman has found his way to the shores of UAE, Kipp doesn’t know. But this is just another example of how important it is for companies to take charge of managing their reputation. It doesn’t really matter what platform it is—twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blackberry messages, word-of-mouth, point of sale, viral marketing, outdoor…whatever.

Being able to act quickly and know how to manage your reputation in a public setting can make or break a company. And our friends at BP, Facebook, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Honda and Coca-Cola would agree.