Online Identity Management

Reputation management advice articles usually boil down to a rudimentary set of instructions: According to most articles all you need in order to bring a positive result to the first page of results for your name or your company’s name on popular search engines, is to open a blog or two, promote them on a gazillion social media sites and link between them. That might do the job if your company name is not Coca Cola or you are not Steve Balmer or the negative articles you are seeking to replace are not featured on CNN’s homepage. However, no one tells you what not to do. What follows is a short list of those appealing actions, which you would be better off steering away from:

1. Death By Blogging

DON’T open 100 blogs on different social sites. No respectable business person has blogs on blogger and Wordpress and TypePad and hundreds of other available platforms. In case you are promoting a company, opening a multitude of blogs may be justified as a massive consumer reaction, but it will never look natural.

2. Face It - You’re Too Old

DON’T open a Myspace account. Myspace is targeting a young crowd. Having a corporate page there may backfire on you. It will be hard getting friends to your attorney profiled page on Myspace. Unless of course you are under the age of 25 love hip hop have 5238 friends on line and just happen to have an online reputation problem. and are convinced that some glitter on your company’s image is cool.

3. Face it - Your To Serious For Facebook

DON’T open your Facebook profile to search engines. For reasons, (see # 2) it’s nice for poking around, but does not provide value for reputation management. LinkedIn on the other hand is great for this purpose, but remember to add some friends. There is nothing sadder than an unpopular LinkedIn account. (Well except for a multibillion dollar company trying buy a search engine getting refused and then deciding to buy LinkedIn- pretty sad too…)

4. Neutral Is Fine - Just Ask The Swiss

DON’T assume that all of the top ten results need to be good, glittery and shinning. It is acceptable and even advisable to have some neutral content. If there is another person out there with the same name, maybe you should consider promoting them to the top 10. You want to present a natural set of results, not something that looks artificially altered.

5. Be Smart - Don’t Assume Anyone Else Is.

DON’T leave a negative article in SERPs, even if it is clear that the article is not about you. Not everyone is clever enough to discern that the negative posting is talking about the other Skyline Computer Co. (And if you are sniggering about the non-cleverness comment, just ask yourself how clever you are to be in this situation in the first place)

6. Don’t Go Godfather

DON’T try to pay off a blogger to remove a negative article, unless you are going to make an offer he can’t refuse. If your offer is too low, you have done nothing but to give a fame seeking blogger an idea about a brilliant post. Which will probably join the initial negative post in the SERPs. Only that the new post is going to be even juicier, since there is nothing more interesting than a company in trouble, except when that company tries to hide it. Remember what happened to Microsoft when they tried to pay a blogger to change the terms of “OpenDocument” and “OOXML” on Wikipedia.

7. Though Shalt Not Covert Another Mans Wife …

DON’T start a Wikipedia article for your name:

Google is married to Wikipedia, so the Wikipedia entry will probably rank rather high on the SERP and it is tempting. But here’s the thing, anybody can edit a Wikipedia page even an unhappy client! So even if the entry doesn’t get removed immediately it will probably not be a very good article for you after a while. And trust me, it will not be easy to get rid of.

8. You’re Just Not That Good…

DON’T try any black hat tricks to remove a result. If you don’t succeed it will be harder to get rid of. And with your luck this will be the only time the search engines didn’t catch your spam…

9. Location, Location, Location

DON’T expect to remove articles from SERPs. The most that can be done is pushing them down. Remember - after 20 it’s a desert anyway

10. Do It The Old Fashioned Way

And most import, run a clean ethical business. DON’T screw people over and chances are you won’t be in this pickle in the first place.