ZDNet Journalist Impersonated on Twitter, Fights Back With ReputationDefender

Jennifer Leggio, a social media and online reputation expert at ZDNet, recently had her twitter account mimicked in an aggressive act of personal brand impersonation. She eventually resolved the issue, but in talking with her colleagues, she found out that anyone is at risk for personal brand attacks online:

I know I’m not alone. Chris Brogan told me this morning that this has happened to him a handful of times. But it’s not just people with large Twitter or social networking followings who need to be careful about character assassination via the Web — it’s anyone online. We all have something to lose.

Later, Leggio talks to Owen Tripp, COO of ReputationDefender and gets some expert insight on protecting her personal brand online. She even signs up for MyReputation to better protect her online identity.

I wrote last year about a great company called ReputationDefender, a personal reputation and privacy protection service. I reached out to co-founder and executive vice president Owen Tripp again today about this situation, and ask some questions that might help folks better protect their brands or their companies’ brands.

“The best protection is prevention or prophylaxis.  Claim your LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace identities before somebody else does it for you and starts to damage your reputation. By establishing accurate information on these key domains you will prevent others from hijacking them from you,” Tripp said. “Also, you need to stay in control of your online brand by monitoring proactively.  You will limit the damage of brand hijacking if you quick recognize that you are under attack.  In my experience, too few people know how to properly set up the personal searches they need to be able to run in order to fully control their identity.”

When I asked Tripp specifically about my situation, or monitoring my brand, he gave me some pretty good insight into how they do what they do:

“Our MyReputation search runs the equivalent of thousands of Google Alerts.  For example, we wouldn’t just scan for ‘Jennifer Leggio’ but ‘ J Leggio’ or ‘Jennifer ZDNet’ or ‘mediaphtyr’, etc. And then we’ll extract additional clues from the content we find (for example, maybe we learn the name of a spouse and then add then on to the cluster of recursive searches we are running for you each month),” Tripp said. “Finally, we make sure we go deeper, seeking mentions of your name and personal details on Web sites that Google can’t reach.  For example, we actively search over 40 social networks, most of which are not indexed by the search engines.”

After this experience, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and signing up for the MyReputation service.

ReputationDefender is committed to protecting privacy and identity online and encourages all online users to monitor and protect their digital reputation. Special thanks to Ms. Leggio for bringing this issue to her own security conscious following.