Online Reputation

That’s the thought behind Darren Slatten’s post on an SEOMoz and it’s a valid point to consider.  If an individual is so good at what they do that they are constantly turning down new clients anyway, does it matter if the #2 result for your name says, Darren Slatten Sucks – Don’t Ever Hire Him?

Darren’s point is that as long as you come through for your clients, you will always be in demand and they will dismiss any negative information they find while searching for you.  In essence, Darren is saying that word of mouth and a referral from a trusted friend holds more weight than the Internet.   Assuming business is great and will stay that way, I’d say he’s right.

The trouble is, at some point, someday, business may not be as plentiful and easy to come by.  SEO is a huge topic and thousands of websites are clamoring for good people to help them rank higher in the search engines – and there aren’t enough people who can deliver real results to go around.  But at some point, either the need for SEO help will diminish or the number of good SEO experts will grow, making it more difficult to rely entirely on referrals to build a business.  That’s when your online reputation could start to hurt you rather than help.

You may not need Google now, but do you really want to risk the chance of losing business when you need it 5 or 10 years from now?  Seems like the quintessential “burning of bridges” to me.  Darren’s got cajones – I’ll give him that.

Tony Adam, in a rebuttal post, has some good points.

Online reputation also becomes an important consideration for family businesses.  Anyone who has plans of passing their company on to the next generation has an obligation to them as well to ensure they benefit from a solid reputation we have left behind for them online.  We die, but the bits and bytes we leave behind never do.

Update: Darren was right – his post is ranking at #2 on Google.  Yikes!

Darren Slatten

Tim Online Reputation, Online Reputation Management

Do you accept “friend” requests from everyone who asks for it through your Facebook and LinkedIn account?  I do.  Even people I’ve met just once at a conference. But lately I’ve started to think it may not be a good idea.  Consider the case of Bernie Madoff, the $50 billion dollar ponzi scheme mastermind.  There were probably, dozens, if not hundreds of investment professionals that worked  in the industry who now have to work backward to separate themselves from Madoff’s firm.  They took photos with him at events and probably sent business his way on more than one occasion.  And all thought they knew him as a friend.  Certainly they thought they knew his reputation better than a person they met one time at a conference.

Some people may argue that they way they use social networks is to connect with people – regardless of how thin those connections may be.  But keep in mind that there is no degree of friend designation on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn.  That person I met once at a conference is the same type of “friend” as my college roommate whom I’ve known for 20 years on Facebook.  It would be interesting to be able to categorize people as “friends” or “acquaintances” for people we don’t know very well.

I consider “friends” to be people I would trust to babysit my daughter.  Yet I have over 600 “friends” on Facebook that I probably wouldn’t even recognize if they walked into my office at this very moment.  And yet I “friend” them without a second thought – connecting them, if in just a small way, to my own online reputation. Heaven forbid they should do something awful, I might have some explaining to do when asked why they are my friend on Facebook.

Offline, you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep.  Why should online be any different?

Tim Online Reputation, Online Reputation Monitoring Online Reputation, Online Reputation Management

The ability to control your corporate or individual online reputation is now largely a matter of learning effective search engine optimization.  The ability to push favorable articles, blog posts and message board threads higher in the search results and thereby pushing the unwanted links further down is the most efficient way of controlling what users see.   In other words, whoever is better at search engine optimization will win the battle of online reputation management.

Although there’s recently been a heavy emphasis on making corporate websites search engine friendly, most company websites still don’t do a terrific job and therein lies the rub.  These days blog and message board software that can be installed by just about anyone automatically “search-engine-optimizes” every single post and message thread – making them powerful information sources in all the search engines. It’s ironic, but the gaudy and unattractive free WordPress template blog will often blow away the the million-dollar website of a corporation in Google simply because it’s installed from the beginning with all the right tips and tricks to make it quickly searchable and available worldwide.  And the blog owner may not even realize it.

The next time you’re trying to convince the boss to hire an in-house or outsourced SEO expert for the website, be sure to remind them that is no longer just about brand marketing – it’s about being able to compete in a world where anyone can install a simple SEO blog and shoot straight to the first page of the search engine results using your own company name – without knowing a single SEO strategy themselves.

Tim Online Reputation, Online Reputation Monitoring Online Reputation, Online Reputation Management

A few years ago, Emile and I briefly worked on the idea of creating a dating reputation site, whereby you’d be able to search our engine for the name of your date and read comments left by people who had previously been on a date with that person.  As you can imagine, there were a host of problems right from the start that made the site difficult to execute.  The obvious issue of trying to ensure the comments you were viewing were for the right “John Smith” you had a date with that evening was just one of the many, many issues we tried to tackle.  Privacy issues were another.

But there were also a number of interesting things we came across that we didn’t expect.  When we floated the idea to several people in the digital identity industry as well as several people who study online ethics, one person’s comments struck us as odd.  She stated that such a site should include the ability to control every piece of information about the person being commented on.  In fact, she truly believed that everyone should have full control of their own reputation online.  This made no sense to me.  In the offline world, a person does not have control over their reputation.  Sure, you can act in a way that improves your reputation, but ultimately your reputation is controlled by everyone who knows you.  It’s something that can be tweaked and adjusted based on your own behavior, but full control?  I don’t think so.

So why should the online world be any different? Just as a poor reputation can cause you to lose out on a job opportunity (or a date) in the offline world, the online world can have the same affect.  With one exception – there is no central database of “reputation” that people in the offline world can go to.  Prior to the world wide web, you had to connect to someone who knew a person to get their opinion – and then it was just one person’s opinion.  Today, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and more offer a central database of information on people.  And it is a database that doesn’t forget, forgive or die.  That old friendship that soured five years ago could be forgotten as lives moved in different directions.  But the nasty comment you left on your blog and later regretted – Google never forgets that thanks to the magic of caching – even if you delete it.

It would be interesting to have two types of search results that I could view when I was searching a person – what they wanted me to see, and what the search engine thought was the best overall represenation of that person.  When I search for John Doe, another button perhaps would be added to Google’s home page under the search box: Google Search, I’m Feeling Lucky, and….”John Doe’s Results”, where I see the results that John wants the world to see when they search on him.

In the end, the online world operates a lot like the offline world when it comes to reputation.  Just like an offline jerk can begin to improve his reputation by being kinder to his fellow human beings, you can massage your online reputation by adding connections and content that pushes the past further into the past (and in this case, further down in the search engine results).

You do have control over your online reputation – to a point.  A recent article by Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin is a good example of how a person can do just that.

By the way, we never launched the dating reputation site.  In the end, we felt that unless we required everyone who left a comment on their date to use their verified real identity, it wouldn’t be of much use.  Unless the goal was to ruin your date’s reputation.

Tim Online Reputation Online Reputation