How to Manage Your Online Reputation

Reputation management is the practice of monitoring, addressing, and controlling the public perception of an individual or organization. It is a combination of strategies and tactics used to influence what and how people think of a brand or person when viewed online. It includes monitoring reputation, addressing any customer content or feedback that could harm the brand, and using strategies to prevent and resolve issues that could damage an entity's reputation. The growth of the Internet and social media has led to the growth of reputation management companies, with search results as a fundamental part of a customer's reputation.

Online reputation management, sometimes abbreviated as ORM, focuses on managing search engine results for products and services. Ethical gray areas include police photo removal sites, astroturfing customer review sites, complaint censorship and use of optimization tactics of search engines to influence results. In other cases, ethical lines are clear; some reputation management companies are closely connected to websites that publish defamatory and unverified statements about individuals. Reputation management is essential because anyone can say anything online anonymously, posing as an expert or as someone else. It is important for companies as well as individuals to maintain a positive online reputation.

A reputation management company can help improve your reputation faster and more efficiently than if you did it alone. As you begin to “own your online identity”, you protect yourself from many forms of damage to your online reputation. Before you get into online reputation management, you should first know what constitutes your “online reputation”. To date, there is no online reputation management service or software on the market that can handle the human decision making necessary to create and maintain a positive online reputation. If your online reputation is already positive, it's great, though you'll need to make sure you keep that reputation positive. Recruiters and HR professionals say positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions, at least to some extent. We develop, amplify, manage and repair the digital brands of CEOs, business leaders, emerging stars, VIPs and their organizations.

The internet is incredibly powerful; so read on to learn more about how you can make your online reputation work for you, not against you.