Digital Assassination
Protecting Your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two leading reputation experts reveal how the internet is being used to destroy brands, reputations and even lives, and how to fight back.
From false Wikipedia entries, to fake YouTube videos, to Facebook lynch mobs, everyone from CEOs to fashion models, journalists to politicians, restaurateurs to doctors, is open to character assassination in the burgeoning realm of digital media.
Two top media experts recount vivid tales of character attacks, provide specific advice on how to counter them, and how to turn the tables on the attackers. Having spent decades preparing for and coping with these issues, Richard Torrenzano and Mark Davis share their secrets on dealing with problems at the top of today's news.
Torrenzano and Davis also take a step back to look at how the past might inform our future thinking about character assassination, from the slander wars between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, to predictions on what the end of privacy will mean for civilization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There are no shortage of ways that a malicious person can with no great expense or trouble to himself use the Internet to assassinate character, say strategic communications expert Torrenzano and consultant Davis. "Digital assassination" is a deliberate campaign to spread harmful lies, or take a fact grossly out of context or embellish it bizarrely, destroying carefully cultivated brands or businesses, careers, and personal relationships in the process. Though acrimonious backbiting is nothing new, modern-day character assassins have many new platforms from which to attack. The authors discuss the various methods, including search result manipulation, identity theft, undocumented charges and concocted images, Google bombs, anonymous and mirror sites, data theft, and perhaps most insidiously, vendetta Web sites masquerading as news sites. The book's great strengths are its exhaustive research and its discussion of how principles of human behavior, not technology, are the driving factors behind this dark side of the Internet. Its weakness is in the palpable fear and mistrust of the Internet the constant refrain of outdated phrases like "this new digital world" and the authors final admonition to "in a machine world, be more human." However, the extent of their research and suggestions for blunting attacks are admirable and make for a compelling read.
