We here at ReputationDefender are big fans of the New York Times and Freakonomics, so we were delighted that they linked to us in their recent story about couch surfing.
The article goes on to show how AirBed&Breakfast, a web 2.0 social network is allowing people to meet one another and stay in guest houses, rather than hotels.
We’ve covered a lot of interesting internet stories here at the ReputationDefender Blog. Any readers have a favorite web 2.0 URL that changed the way you live, connect, share and think? Let us know in the comments below.
Wow! this is going to be big business in a few years. I would suggest that everyone working in search engine optimization today starts thinking about how this could positively impact their business.
One year out from this post, a lot has changed at ReputationDefender- for the better! We are growing steadily and are still the market leader for Online Identity Management. We recently launched our new MyEdge product that helps professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers and business people control their online presence. Whether you are looking to network, evangelize or gain visibility online, your personal brand deserves the best service available. Sign up for ReputationDefender’s MyEdge today for as little as $99 and control what people find when they search for you.
We’ll follow up in another year and keep you up to date with all the exciting news from ReputationDefender.
For some time there have been rumors around Silicon Valley and beyond about the magic that is the Google campus. It has been spoken of like some sort of Geek Nirvana or Coding Valhalla where you feast nightly in the Google cafeteria on any meal your heart desires as you guzzle Mountain Dew and debate Ruby on Rails with the ghost of Einstein. Some of this talk has turned out to be true. For instance, Google allows their engineers to take time in “nap pods” for a quick break during the day. It is without any surprise that I can see how they got their good reputation.
Which brings us to an important but often overlooked concept of reputation management. With the relatively new phenomena of social networks and blogging, a company’s brand name can be elevated to otherworldly heights with just a few keystrokes and clicks. Wikipedia defines reputation management as:
the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but that need not always be the case. Other examples of entities include animals, businesses, or even locations or materials. The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands of data points.
An important part of this process is understanding that social networks give consumers easy access to spreading news, and thus reputation management online is critical. A good place to start efforts in this vein is brand monitoring. You can track a company, brand, person, just about anything online.
Google itself has positioned itself in this space with its Google Alerts, automatic notifications that ping you when your search term is found online. ReputationDefender also offers personal brand monitoring with MyReputation. MyReputation from ReputationDefender goes beyond Google Alerts to search social networks, white papers, people search engines and the deep internet to return more information related to your person.
Monitoring a brand, whether corporate or personal, is a vital part of Online Reputation Management and, as the tale of the Googleplex shows, having a great online reputation reflects well on your brand and your business.
Besides the picture of MyReputation, there is not a lot of coherent copy to go on. To be clear, ReputationDefender and its management are certain that this article was a persuasive, concise, cogent and brilliantly argued piece of writing in its native language. Once the text was moved from Chinese to English though, it left us mildly puzzled. Here some highlights of the (mis)translated piece:
Besides made them to obtain good pouring out with the exchange, these behaviors also hatched each kind of organization, the association, the public relations website, the professionalism service, as well as new made money the way.
[SNIP]
This company chief executive officer Michael - Tike (Michael Fertik) said that because the lover bids good-bye the honorary question which initiates is they most often meets, “the people adopt enmity of the network incoming telegram sentiment.”
Regular readers of the ReputationDefender blog will remember this post which highlighted the Online Reputation Management inquiries ReputationDefender has received from across the globe. The post also highlighted RD employee Adam, who proudly wore his ReputationDefender shirt across Thailand in order to spread the word about Online Reputation Management.
Recently, another ReputationDefender employee, Michelle, returned from her European vacation with photos of her proudly evangelizing the RD brand in Paris and Italy. I’m sure the international fashionistas were in awe of those stylish threads.
Are there any international readers of this blog? We’d love to hear from you in the comments. Tell us how ReputationDefender defends your reputation and gives you an Edge across the globe.
There has been quite a bit of press about Online Reputation Management and how people are increasingly forming opinions based on what they find online.
The New York Post has a nice write up of ReputationDefender and the Online Reputation Management industry as a whole. Quoting from the piece:
“Whether you like it or not, your resume isn’t a piece of paper anymore. It’s your top 10 Google search results,” says Michael Fertik, CEO and founder of one such company, ReputationDefender.
[SNIP]
For fees ranging from 10 bucks for a credit-check-like comprehensive Web search to a $2,000 monthly charge for a full-frontal assault on demeaning content, reputation managers generally use two strategies: they either try to eliminate content altogether or conceal it in the bowels of a search engine’s results.
[Michael] Fertik’s firm will attempt to persuade owners of Web pages to remove humiliating posts or pictures for $30 per item. They use a process that tracks down Web hosts and contacts them in a “non-threatening” manner. The system works “nicely,” he says.
Now you can employ the services, for a fee, of course, of businesses that will keep an eye on your online reputation and help you keep it clean. One of the pioneers in this field, ReputationDefender, goes on a search-and-destroy mission. This organization scours the Internet to dig up every bit of information on you and then sets out to destroy (at your request) any negative information by getting it corrected or removed, whenever possible.
Sautter and Crompton encourage people — whether they’re job searching or not — to remember that everything they do online leaves a digital footprint. It’s up to each individual to determine whether those footprints take a step in the right — or wrong — direction in cyberspace.
And finally, Boston.com recently ran a piece that looked at the potential pitfalls that doctors face online. The article points out that while there are many safeguards in place to protect patient data, many doctors are exposed on the web.
“There may be slanderous information about a physician on the Web, published in a blog or on a Web page, by a vengeful patient, colleague, or ex-lover,” Dr. Tristan Gorrindo and Dr. James E. Groves write in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Equally vexing, there may be slanderous information published about someone with the same name as an unlucky physician.”
Medical professionals as well as other executives are urged to be proactive in claiming their webutation and controlling what people find when they are searched.
I am very excited about the new website, back-end, and functionality ReputationDefender just released (unleashed?!) this week. We are providing our members with greatly enhanced usability and many new and long-requested features.
One of my favorite features of the new system is the “quick action” buttons that allow users to ignore, remove, or add items within their reports with only a single click. Also we’ve launched a shopping cart for Destroy assistance, so you can order multiple items to be removed at once. And now you can add more family members to your account to give your people maximum control over their personal data.
Jennifer Leggio has quite the scoop over at ZDnet. They recently broke a story concerning ReputationDefender and Enterprise Level Online Reputation Management. The story itself is quite good and worth a read to get all the details.
“Our fully branded enterprise product will include many of the services we already offer but with more frequent reports,” Tripp said. “We’ll be able to do searches around the enterprise or executives and will track even how employees are publicly discussing the company. ”
The enterprise reputation management product was built on the same principles of the MyReputation product, which scrapes the open Web — and what ReputationDefender calls the “invisible Web” — and presents a report of all findings. With the personal services only, if the report shows the individual anything he or she finds to be libelous, damaging or untrue, ReputationDefender will then go into action to try to get the potentially defamatory information stricken from the Web. The company will not do destroys for enterprises or organizations.
Beyond monitoring and reporting, however, Tripp says that a key part of enterprise reputation management is proactively inserting a company’s desired image into every layer of the Web. Part of this service will include helping enterprises do just that — ensuring that the major search engines always show the desired results.
“The first 10 or 15 things we see on a search engine are going to help shape our perception of a company. Proactive enterprise reputation management is far beyond issuing press releases and it can’t be achieved with just standard SEO, either. It’s about figuring out key vulnerabilities in the way a firm is presented online and addressing them and managing them head on,” Tripp said.
“You can’t just look at the name of a firm and the name of the products or even just the names of the officers. In considering how your company strategy is presented, you need to look at who your officers are and what their roles are in how each of them are portrayed in all facets of the Web,” he said. “If you want your enterprise presence and message to be pervasive and part of your company lure you need to have it perfectly optimized.”
ReputationDefender looks forward to working with corporations in the future and bringing enterprise level online reputation management solutions to companies around the globe. And special thanks to the newshounds over at ZDNet, who got wind of this before anyone else.
eputationDefender has been the leader in worldwide Online Reputation Management since its founding a little over two years ago. ReputationDefender is pleased to have received inquiries from over 38 countries across the globe and has done business on every continent except Antarctica (If any of you south pole researchers are looking to spruce up your online presence, we would be happy to give you an Edge). From Africa to Europe and beyond, ReputationDefender has helped people around the world become anonymous online and help block unwanted email.
Our employees are also global citizens and frequently travel the world for both business and pleasure. Recently an RD worker named Adam wound up in Thailand for his summer vacation and proudly proselytized the ReputationDefender brand during his trip.
Nice work, Adam. Any other international RepDef fans out there? Whether you are south of the border or across the pond, we’d love to hear from you!
A story about ReputationDefender and the continual development of our MyPrivacy product made the front page of Digg this morning. If you want to keep your personally identifiable information off the Internet, you need to read the story about ReputationDefender in Forbes. Check out the Digg screen cap below:
Though our products are quite serious, we’re a fun-loving group here at ReputationDefender. Some of you may be even more surprised to learn that we don’t completely disavow the use of social networks; we love social media! To show our appreciation for social networks and our sense of humor, we’ve launched our very own Facebook Page.
What should you expect on ReputationDefender’s Facebook Page? Photos, links to videos we like, news and information about the company and team, exclusive announcements and offers, and input and fun stuff from our fans. (That’s the best part of the page, in our opinion.) You’ll also be able to read headlines from this blog on Facebook.
We’ll even treat you to your first month of ReputationDefender’s services for free, just for becoming a fan. Check us out on Facebook, become a fan, and tell all your friends!
MyEdge is the world’s first Personal PR service. Own your Google results. Establish yourself on the Internet. Make sure that your online “resume” looks the way it should.
We have worked hard to bring this offering from concept to private beta (check out these testimonials from real customers–my own favorite is the first one) and now to public beta.
This product will generate and publish profiles and bios for you around the Internet in such a way as to maximize their visibility and staying power on search engine results.
Our technology, product, business development, marketing, and customer service teams have worked hard to get this MyEdge product ready for you. We are proud to invite you to come on in and order it now!
About a year and a half ago two of us from ReputationDefender set out
from what was then our trusty office at the Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto to one of the first IIWs at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. We’re going back now, to the one to be held May 12-14.
This was one of those great conferences that was actually brainstormy,
creative, collaborative, etc., because it was actually a workshop, run
in the open space style that works so well in so many circumstances.
The IIW has got to be one of the more serious events on the identity
calendar, if not the most serious one. Phil Windley, who organizes it, is dedicated and knowledgeable, as are most of the people we met when we attended last
time. The tenor of the discussion is upbeat but serious, and there are
clearly some strong ideas that emerge from the discussions.
Greatly looking forward to attending, supporting the effort this year,
and learning from the collaboration.
