It is a fact of life that people are out there who will try to get ahead by pushing others down. In the real world, this desire to get ahead by subverting others is kept in check by reputation. For example, if Guy A wants to be the most successful real-estate agent, but he does it by sabotaging others, then his personal and commercial reputation will suffer as a result. Most people care about their reputations, and are therefore quite unlikely to do anything subversive to anyone else.

On the Internet, this incentive to compete honestly disappears. The Internet allows for competitors to undercut other businesses and keep their reputations in tact. They can do this because of the anonymity of the Internet, where you can post under any, or no, name and your opinion is just as respected as someone who posted under their own name. This leads to a great deal of what we call the “swimming” school of advertising. When you swim, you survive by pushing water down in order to float. In the swimming school of business, you float by subverting others’ businesses.

Traditionally, there has been no source of recourse for those businesses who were harmed by this underhanded style of competitiveness–but that has recently changed. ReputationHawk is a company that decreases the importance of these negative comments or links in search results. They do this by boosting the amount, and rank, of positive links in a company or individual’s search results. Negative links and comments are not likely to be removed, but RepuationHAWK can combat them with positive publicity.

The best part about the article I just read is the quote by Warren Buffet at the very beginning. ““It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. The article is all too right about the nature of online defamation, it often comes from vengeful people or malcontents on the Internet. To protect a company’s image or a person’s reputation, online reputation management firms can help them publicize themselves positively to combat this sort of anonymous sniping on the Internet.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/internet-reputation-management.html

This article is right in that the Internet revolutionized the way companies manage their online reputation. Search engines made it so that any blogger, commenter, or customer can make negative comments about a business or corporation. Companies exercise far less control over their images than they did in the past.
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=38965562BED491B8EE9A527378D0BEB3?contentType=Article&contentId=1524171