Life… and a Little About Marketing

A few years ago I remember reading an article in Wired Magazine on {ORM} or Online Reputation Management. The article was focused on a booming new start-up company named Reputation Defender.

Here’s an important excerpt from the page: “ The partners of ReputationDefender originally conceived the company as a way for parents to protect their children from potentially damaging postings to social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

“I don’t like the idea that kids and teenagers might suffer lifelong harm because of momentary mistakes,” says one the creators.

Using both site-scraping robots and good old-fashioned human detective skills, ReputationDefender promises to scour the internet — particularly social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and Flickr — for materials that could threaten the author’s employability once he reaches the professional world and its army of Google-savvy hiring managers. ”

Since then I’ve been hearing more and more about Online Reputation Management and how it is becoming a vital part of business and politics. Bad publicity about your brand is not a good thing to have out there on the web. What if your brand is your name? I gave up trying to hide on the internet a long time ago because my brand is my name. Current or potential customers, employees, business partners, investors or other people search your company name all of the time. It happens all the time, a prospective client or existing client searches a business owners name and finds unsatisfactory search engine results. What will they do with that information? While it might not concern some, it may give others cause for concern. Frequently this leads to the client forming a negative opinion of a company. Furthermore it may stop them from purchasing your products or using your services. As the internet grows it’s becoming increasingly harder to fly under the radar or to keep your home from being viewed by anybody who knows how to use Google Earth. So who needs ORM and SERM? Restaurants, celebrities, politicians, professional athletes, excutives, large scale businesses all the way down to smaller family ownded shops. Its easy for it to happen. Imagine; years of Good Business getting wiped out by 1 negative result in the top 10 of Google, Yahoo or MSN.

In this internet, YouTube, Facebook Society it’s not on common for hiring managers to use search engines to research potential employees. It’s hard to hide those pictures, videos, comments or old stories if your social web page isn’t set to private. Even if it is private and you let someone in as a friend on your network, they have access to reproduce some unfavorable search engine results. The more you plan ahead, the more you take time to create a good reputation for yourself, the less time and money you’ll need to spend in the future to combat negative information. Combining that with simply realizing that the information you put out on the internet can always find a way back to you will go a long way with most people’s online reputations.

Search Engine Reputation Management {SERM} helps people with online reputation issues such as negative journalism, bad reviews, untruths, complaint boards and forums. Disgruntled ex-employees, partners, signfigant others and often competitors try to damage anothers person’s representation on the web. Unfortunately very few companies have strategies related to managing their online reputation. If used properly (not spamming) SERM is a process that can be introduced to a marketing plan to actively protect their brands from being tarnished on the web. Outside of social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook a few other problem websites that often include negative information are the RipOffReport.com, Complaints.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and newspapers that get published online.

You probably haven’t noticed that I don’t list my clients names in my portfolio or online here at this blog. Your secret is safe. My client list is completely confidential. Last year a Lawyer friend of mine called upon me to help their law firm clean up a local Portland business’s online reputation. There were some negative search engine listings where someone had used the business owners name for fake online profiles. Negative publicity. Using search engine optimization {seo} we were able to push the not-so-good listings deep into the search engine results. How deep? Between 50 to 100 pages deep where people if ever, rarely search. It all depends on the degree of how bad an online reputation is tarnished. Sometimes it only takes 60 days where more often it takes many months. The investment required ranges from $500 - $5000 per month for very difficult cases. I only take on projects when I sincerely believe we can help.

For more information about Search Engine Reputation Management and Online Reputation Management Solutions in Portland, Oregon - Call 503.381.5553 for a free confidential consultation or contact me at webfu.design (at) gmail.com