Online Reputation ManagementRumblings of discomfort are being felt by some web users who have found to their cost that someone, somewhere sees what you do online. The social media sites are great networking tools, and can be useful for business. But if you don’t take steps to guard your reputation there can be repercussions.

Most recently Twitter has come in for some close scrutiny because every micro-post by members can potentially be indexed by the search engines, and therefore could appear in a search. From reading the ‘tweets’ posted by members, I can imagine that some could find their twitter activity potentially embarrassing, and even a threat to their business credibility.

Another social media site that has been exposed for serious security gaps exposing users to all kinds of private leaks is MySpace. Here’s a Google search of just some of the ways MySpace has been in the news recently for privacy issues.

Although personal interaction does not go out for public consumption on most social media sites, your profile is indexed by many, including Facebook, Flikr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, LinkedIn, Xing, FriendFeed and as we mentioned, Twitter.

Here’s a list of what NOT to do if you value your online reputation:

  • Never insult, accuse, or otherwise denigrate anyone on a social media site of any kind, unless you don’t care if it comes back to bite you.
  • Never write anything about yourself anywhere online that you wouldn’t want your boss, mother, husband or friend to know about you. Someone is bound to draw their attention to it sooner or later.
  • Never announce your intention to divorce your husband, fire your boss, crash your car to claim the insurance, or set fire to your neighbor’s cat anywhere online either, for the same reasons noted above.
  • Unless you feel it won’t make a difference, don’t use bad language that could affect how other people think about you.
  • Think very carefully before indulging in online venting of your feelings about someone who has done something bad to you, because they might decide to repay the compliment.

On the other hand, you can also use these same mechanisms for avoiding bad situations and even turning them to your advantage. It is relatively easy to create a good reputation or a positive effect using your everyday online activities. For example, let’s suppose you want to get promoted. First you want to start posting flattering comments (make them believable–no obvious boot-licking here) about your boss or your superiors. Make it conversational. You may, or may not, want to mention somewhere your ambitions: depends on the job and the situation. Then make sure that the existence of these posts is ‘discovered’ by at least one critical person who you think might take the bait and pass it on.

This won’t work by itself of course. You have to have done your homework in the real world too.

Managing Your Online Reputation When Things Have Gone Bad

Now supposing someone has written something really bad about you online, or you’ve done the deed to yourself in a moment of weakness. How then do you make this nastiness go away? The first thing to do is the most obvious: go to whoever is in charge of the website and ask them nicely to please take it down.

If that doesn’t work, and chances are it won’t, then you’ll have to go the long route. You need to make sure that lots of positive information about you is posted on the web, and that it appears on pages that are considered an ‘authority.’ The idea is to produce lots of other Google entries mentioning you in a positive light, so that the bad stuff gets buried deep within a search. The deeper the better.

One quick and easy way is to sign up with all the social media sites you can find and make sure that all the good stuff is included. The professional networking site, LinkedIn is particularly good for getting a positive profile indexed. Your own website (if possible with your name in the URL) is a perfect medium for controlling what gets said about you. If you have a blog, that’s good too. But you need to work hard to get it noticed. Commenting on other good blogs is a fast way to get your information indexed.

An alternative to this (it can be pretty time-consuming) is to hire someone to do it for you. It won’t be cheap–but how much is your reputation worth? Some celebrities are rumored to have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure bad news is buried. The good news is that reputation management for the average Joe Bloggs will probably be a lot less expensive!

Here are a few celebrities who have recently paid to make bad news about them ‘go away.’ Kate Moss Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Madonna, and many, many more.

Some high profile companies who have found reputation management a dire necessity include Halliburton, Enron, and Hewlett Packard. Note that these results don’t come up in a straightforward search for the company name. Type into a search (for example) ‘Halliburton accused.’

But for the most part you won’t read about this kind of reputation management online or in the news. Quite simply, most SEOs and reputation management experts sign non-disclosure agreements with their clients so they don’t spill the beans. After all, no matter how deep dirt is buried, if they know it’s there, lots of people will dig for it (no pun intended).

A word of consolation if something unpleasant has surfaced about you on the Internet: Most of us are nowhere near as interesting as celebrities or big-name companies, so not only is it easy to bury negative information, not many people will be interested or notice it while it’s coming at the top of a search. If you proactively employ reputation management strategies as outlined, you can very quickly forget about bad publicity.