Is Online Profile Cleaning the Better Solution?

Published on Friday, 03 June 2011 08:45

 

By Jayde Phillips

From resentful laid-off employees to unsatisfied clients and vengeful ex’s, your best kept secrets are just a click of a mouse away.

The internet means there are permanent listings of everything said about companies and private individuals, both good and bad.

But now hundreds of dedicated online reputation companies promise to clean up your unflattering records on the web.

The 21^st Century’s equivalent to PR agents, their job is to suppress the negative listings that are hurting a person or a company and to promote positive ones.

Reputation firms monitor what is written about companies or individuals and inoculate negative listings by introducing positive authoritative content, which outrank and push down negative ones.

CLEANING EVIDENCE

Clients are usually private individuals or companies who want to ensure that potential clients get a good first impression of them or a company when they do an online search or people who want to clean-up their online personas when going for a job.

However, the rise in social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook has helped create the perfect environment for people to communicate easily and more openly together. This means that individuals and companies have seen a recent rise in more negative comments, which are potentially damaging to their reputation and may have lose them potential business everyday. Those creating these unfavourable opinions could be vengeful laid-off employees or competitors trying eliminate competition.

Posts are usually written anonymously and hosts are not legally responsible for material written on their sites. Therefore high-ranking negative listings will become stronger over time and many of them are full of user-generated content submitted anonymously (and therefore protected from deletion).

Reputation Management, a leading reputation company first set up in America explains the importance of online-profile cleaning on their website:

“We understand the online reputation problems you may face and we offer cost-effective results that contain long-term solutions,” published on their website.

“First impressions count and we understand how important it is for potential clients to see truthful and positive things about you or your company. Our unique, time-tested Online Reputation Repair service- ‘Inoculation’- will help you get your name back under your ongoing control so that you can focus on running your online business.”

HOW IT WORKS

Most reputation organisations work by filtering out all the negative listings that hurt the credibility of an individual or company.

This is done by inoculating the first pages of Search Engine Results against negative listings by introducing more authoritative positive listings, which will naturally outrank and push down the negative ones.

Reputation Management inoculates keyphrases by creating blogs and various social media sites to manage the individual’s or company’s image.

Other profile-cleaning companies like Mu:Kaumedia help their clients by rebuilding their image.

They promise to build their popularity by “creating a credible and appropriate body of highly Google-visible content about your business across a range of free and low-cost channels. And implementing other strategies for getting positive customer feedback across various media channels.”

Although monitoring and controlling what people see or say can stop a company or person being systematically destroyed, is it an expensive solution and not a permanent one.

The damaging aspects are that some reputation management and repair companies will only commit to short contracts. This means that the individual or company image will suffer in the long run if they do not have sustained results. To avoid this setback means continually paying reputation firms to stop new negative listings from appearing.

The other issue is the rights of employers or potential customers to see all information regardless of its content. Manipulating potential customers by publishing what you want them to see can be obstructing their rights, particularly if truthful but unflattering information is being hidden. The proactive approach would be to make offline customer contact to amend the problem. Or apologise publicly for what has happened if there is any truth in the negative comment and introduce new measures to prevent the problem.

IS ONLINE PROFILING THE BETTER SOLUTION?

Suppressing negative listings by surrounding them with positive authoritative listings could be a short-term solution to managing and repairing an individual’s or brand’s image.

However, a permanent and cheaper solution would be to seek legal action if a particular person continues to upload negative comments. Another would be to acknowledge the problem privately and publicly and attempt to solve the problem if it is true. Then begin to put down foundations for a stronger online presence as an insurance policy against future reputation attacks.

Relevant Links

Reputation Management

Mu:Kaumedia