MPs are very like celebrities, in that their reputation is a fragile thing, one month they can be adorned with praise and showered with popularity, the next month their names are dragged through the mud by the media and they are sent hate mail by the public for undue expenses. Like both celebrities and MPS, any high profile person’s name is their own brand but rather than managing the reputation of a company they need to keep their names free from negative associations. This is a unique blurring of lines between the professional and the personal, which is probably why politician’s messy personal lives always get mixed up in their politics.
Yet, this is the risk that they take, and their responsibility is to use their positions of power wisely, which is why the British MP expense scandal had such a huge impact: taxpayers felt robbed because they entrusted a portion of their salaries to the government to use wisely. But how well did the MP’s implicated in the expenses scandal field the criticism? Furthermore, a question relevant to the 21st century, what do their online reputations look like?
MP expenses case study
Julie Kirkbride: “To describe this arrangement as my brother living rent-free is a total distortion”.
The accusations: One of the top conservative MPs on the 2009 expense scandal list, Julie Kirkbride, allegedly allowed her brother to live rent free in her government house, employed her sister as her secretary and made tax claims for structural changes to her consistency house.
The response: Kirkbride stood her ground in the beginning and refused to step down from Office unless David Cameron requested it. But then she ended up having her hand forced and stepping down anyway.
Other’s viewpoints: Cameron didn’t criticise her expenses but the public signed petitions for the high-profile MP to step down.
Her search engine reputation
In search engine reputation management, the first page results (or top ten results) are all important because when people search for a brand (even a personal brand) they tend to look at all the first page results to see if anything negative comes up. Most top results for Julie Kirkbride are news and enchaelopeadia (encyclopaedia?) results and while nothing negative jumps out, most of the sites refer to the MPs expenses scandal somewhere.She has a facebook page but it’s only on the second result’s page and so would not attract much attention.
Search Engine reputation management suggestions:
Julie Kirkbride needs to work on a more comprehensive social media strategy so that she draws more positive exposure to her brand and gives people another perspective on her politics which does not involve the MP expenses scandal. Having said that, something as huge as this never goes away and the public have every right to know where their tax money is being squandered. Kirkbride should take a leaf out of Barack Obama’s book and start using the internet to win more support and in this way salvage her career and win back trust.
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