In any industry these days one must be careful about their reputation. Social networking profiles have become extremely important to the job search and application process. HR managers have indicated that they pay a great deal of attention to what an applicant’s social networking profiles look like.

A global poll of 2,000 HR professionals and consumers by IT giant Microsoft found that 41% of UK HR managers had turned an applicant down simply because of their online profile.

This is not a new development, employers of all types have been known to look to social networking sites for cues as to how their applicants behave outside of job interviews. However, the study confirms what has been an obvious trend recently. Brand reputation management can handle problems like these, of course, that is why the industry exists.

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2010/01/29/53869/online-profiles-cause-job-applicants-to-be-rejected.html

Certainly reputation management is a difficult subject to tackle, but it can take quite a long time to get a handle on. The video on the link below is quite instructive in many ways about the needs of clients in the online reputation management industry, as well as of people who want to attempt to do their own search reputation management. The video is pretty informative in a number of ways and includes two experts in Internet marketing.

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Wilson, then I suspect you’ve entered your marketing career in just past the few years–Dr. Wilson is the grandfather of internet marketing advice. Hopefully, he’ll take that as a compliment

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/12/talking-online-reputation-management-with-dr-ralph-wilson.html

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

News has surfaced in the past couple of days that both Google and Bing are going to be indexing and utilizing Twitter’s public information. This is not a totally unacceptable move, but it is another example of the increasing importance of reputation management strategies. The growing inter-connectivity of the Internet demands that you be in control of your image.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091021-172032

CopyBright runs a fantastic blog on brand reputation management which I browse from time to time. They have an excellent post on the blog right now concerning social networking sites and a wonderful tool you can use to moniter your social networking profiles. I would suggest, as they do, not to overload on social networking sites for online reputation management uses.
http://copybrighter.com/blog/a-handy-online-identity-management-tool

Answer: Yes. But this article asks all the right questions–and the answer is not the same for every company. For most firms, the answer is no–they simply do not offer the services needed to actually fix a damaged internet defamation. However, some companies are able to offer the correct their services in a way that actually effects the changes that clients want to see.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb20080430_356835.htm

Naming products is a complicated process which involves lots of factors. However, this article brings up a very good point–which is that companies and entrepreneurs should consider search engines when naming products. This will allow them to corner the market because they have the opportunity to participate in brand reputation management!
http://searchengineland.com/think-search-before-you-name-your-next-product-26606

Rocky Mountain Bank sent out some information to the wrong people somehow. Now the confidential files of 1,325 people are in the Gmail account of some random guy. The bank tried asking Google for the name of the individual who owns the account, but Google naturally refused. Now the bank is sueing Google for access to that information–a suit which has recieved some media attention. I’d bet Rocky Mountain Bank could use some online reputation management right about now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/google_sued_for_gmail_user_identity/