Reputation Management Online

Have you ever wondered what to do when something shows up online that you wish would just go away? You know - like when you blasted that person's blog comment. Or the time you were being interviewed by the press and said something they took out of context and published online.

In case you hadn't noticed, things have a way of lingering around on the Internet -- and in fact -- they never go away. They just get pushed back to the earlier pages of the search engines like Google -- and if you are lucky -- when it's something you want to just forget about, it will eventually be replaced. The bad news that it's always searchable, and findable. There is even one website where you can find stuff on the very first initial Internet. Internet acrchives - if you will. (I forgot the website address for that.)

The first and MOST important thing is to remember that ANYTHING you post online, anywhere, will remain there, visable for all to see. So be careful what you say in forums, and on other people's blogs in the comment sections.

I do many press releases, if you search for my name on Google, you will find a number of old press releases that I have written and posted. They go back for years. And there is a novelist (romance novels) named Kristin Gabriel, but it's not me. I spoke to her once and asked her if that was her real name. Nope she just invented it for her writing. Now I can't use my name for the book I am writing. It will have to have my niddle name associated with it.

A couple of years ago MarCom had the pleasure of helping one former client with this problem, and it seems that he's not the only one, because we are getting more new business calls regarding this topic. It took about 6-9 months to clean up the mess that was online. We actually used one cool trick. we created a special website only in his name. And we posted a ton of content there that was bout all the good things he has been doing - like charity events, etc. That site was optimized properly, and then we started adding content articles in other spots on the Internet, and built links to his website. It really helped push his negative posts down off page one.

In some cases, when there's a live link on a website with negative content that you want to disassociate from - it may be necessary to approach the person who posted the info, and ask them to remove it.

Another place to be careful - and my associate Mike Keesling would be happy to talk in depth about it - is Wikipedia.com. Another client of ours, T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol, has had an ongoing challenge with an adversary group. All contributions are subject to Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and only adminstrators have special privileges, however, updates can become more than definitions, but online arguments. It's not very productive, and at some point can become fodor for legal disputes, especially when companies are concerned. The point here is that some people can use tools like this to try to succeed with smear campaigns. Wikipedia does allow the posting -- "This is a controversial topic and may be under dispute. Please read this talk page and discuss substantial changes here before making them." But in the end, using Wikipedia this way requires a huge amount of monitoring.

When doing reputation management strategies for hte web, we use many of the same tools we use for online marekting campaigns -- such as blogs, article submissions, and PR Web releases. It's all about pushing the negative listings down and replacing them with positive links.