Not everyone who visits Curious Office also visits my personal site over at Kellysmith.com No matter. Sometimes I’ll post something over there that I realize might also be of interest to anyone that stops by the Office of Curiosity. Below is a recent post on Reputation Management.
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I bet that there really aren’t that many people that know that “Reputation Management” is a growing vertical software and services industry. The number of vendors who offer Reputation Management services is rapidly growing and I expect that growth to continue for several years. But what exactly is it? According to Wikipedia, Reputation Management is:
Reputation management is 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.
Search engine reputation management actually has it’s own acronym: SERM. SERM tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to pro actively shield their brands or reputations from damaging content brought to light through search engine queries. Some use these same tactics reactively, in attempts to minimize damage inflicted by inflammatory (or “flame”) websites (and weblogs) launched by consumers and, as some believe, competitors. An increasing number of wealthy individuals pay a good deal of money ($25,000 - $75,000 per year) to insure that search engines provide the correct “face” that these individuals believe most reflects their actual persona. For example, a former CEO of Boeing might decide that he is no longer interested in the first five links of Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) to reflect aerospace news and his role in it. Instead, that person may have long since retired and instead desires that the search engines more correctly reveal his full time work in philanthropy. Many times such individuals simply want to draw more attention to the good causes they believe in. More often than not they prefer to leave bad news behind and replace it with more timely, and appealing, SERPs which suggest a more palatable legacy.
Businesses are increasing realizing that the web reflects the very product or service sentiment that executives are trying to market, adjust and maintain. On the Internet, your business is vulnerable by what others are saying about you. Consumer reviews:
- influence consumer perception
- respond to / protect against negative reviews
- thwart competitor attacks and bogus reviews
- improve online brand / service awareness
For the most part, the major search engines actually do a pretty democratic job of revealing what people generally think. But they aren’t truly built to reflect sentiment very accurately. So, the first 10 SERPs for your name, business or product might not reflect your own view or interpretation. As more people decide they want to control SERP positioning and realize they can do so (to some extent) then the Reputation Management industry will continue to thrive. Online Reputation Management posits that you should discover both emerging opportunities and threats while you can still influence their outcome. With evolving reputation management solutions, you’ll uncover details buried deep within worldwide conversations found on billions of pages of the public Internet as well as in the millions of stories published in the mainstream press. Your ability to adjust what you see will fall to the SERM and SEO experts who will be more than happy to charge a fair share to get Google to align more closely with your own desire. Watch this space!
