Reputation Management 101: Reputation Defender

The easy access to the internet and freely available publishing tools offer wonderful opportunity to just about any one to get your word out there, to establish your brand, to grow your business, to promote your charity and even find your love.

These same tools combined with anonymity can become a real nightmare. A lie aimed at destroying your reputation can quickly, some times in days, propel to the top of the search engines for your own name. It takes much longer to clean up the mess. In fact, the vicious postings on Yahoo! Answers that I was subjected to back in February are still cached by search engines even though Yahoo! Answers had deleted them long time ago. Although they no longer appear on the first page of results for my own name.

So what can you do to protect your name and your reputation. Depending on your involvement with the Internet and how much time you have, you can probably learn how to make more difficult for your enemies to carry out their some times most evil attacks on your reputation. Following are few things that I have been doing lately, that may help you as well.

1. Join online communities and if possible link to your profile from your websites and blogs. It might be difficult for you to do if you are not particularly involved with any online communities. But if you are a member of MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, StumbleUpon, Facebook or even if you use Twitter build up your profiles and link to your profiles from your own blogs and websites. With the time, these pages will rank well for your name making harder for faceless creeps to propel pages that can damage your reputation to the top of the search engines.
2. If you happened to have more than one websites or blogs consider including (if possible) your name in the “about” page. Again these will be the pages to beat should any one tries to use the internet to attack you.
3. Set Google Alerts for your own name. This will allow you to catch the unwanted staff early on, before it would begin to appear in top results on the search engines.
4. You might want to befriend a lawyer who understands the nature of the internet. Some times you will be able to remove unwanted material by writing the the websites administration. However there will be cases that your attorney’s help might be required.

Depending on your popularity or how much your enemy hates you, this can easily become almost a full time job. Unfortunately not every one has time to be engaged in the above described activities. In fact during past 6 months, I have fallen behind on many projects precisely because of reputation management activities. And let me tell you, it can be disheartening.

For the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating to start using Reputation Defender. Below is the video from 20/20 about the case involving the death of Niki Catsouras and how the pictures of of the car crash had become a nightmare to Catsouras family. The Reputation Defender was involved in the case.