Many businesses have public relations departments dedicated to managing their reputation. In addition, many public relations firms describe their expertise in terms of reputation management. The public relations industry is growing due to the demand for companies to build corporate credibility and hence reputation. Incidents which damage a company’s reputation for honesty or safety may cause serious damage to finances. For example, in 1999 Coca-Cola lost $60 million by its own estimate after schoolchildren reported suffering from symptoms like headaches, nausea and shivering after drinking its products.
Reputation can be considered as a component of the identity as defined by others and is the social evaluation of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as education, business, online communities or social status.
Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.
Online deception could mean to deliberately transmit, retransmit or alter a communications to mislead an adversary’s interpretation of the communication with the use of devices, operations, and techniques, misleading links or internet navigation systems.
