Many individuals are interested in the world of Internet reputation management, but they have no idea whether they should pay attention to the things being said about them or their company online. They have seen negative comments, but do not know what the right course of action is.

If a negative review or comment is hurting your ability to function or in any way limiting your business opportunities, then it is worth tackling. The long term damage of these sorts of comments cannot be underestimated on the Internet. As everything else on the Internet, negative comments spread like wildfire.

If your company has been reviewed or commented on negatively, though, do not reply to it. This will only serve to boost the Google ranking of that page. This means that you secure that page’s important to Google and make it more difficult to knock out of the top ten or twenty links.

The example of the month for Internet reputation management problems is British Petroleum. Their massive oil spill off the coast of New Orleans, an already-embattled city in a struggling state, has caused a reputation problem the likes of which have not been seen since Enron.

Live video feeds of the spill and constant, accurate updates have created a maelstrom of anti-BP commentators and a staunch base of concerned citizens. The brand has taken a beating from angry individuals, influential opinion leaders and, notably, the satirical spoof Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, whose administrator offers gems such as: “Free speech is an American thing. We’re a British company. You do the math.”

That this spoof account has almost 184 000 followers, which is more than 10 times those following the real BP Twitter account, @BP_America, is an apt illustration of the power of the speeding bullet that is social media. This bullet seems to have pierced the heart of BP’s share price, which has plummeted by tens of billions of US dollars. The cost of responding to the crisis promises to generate similar losses.

All of this instant-reaction style social media means one thing: That an online reputation crisis can spread to a global scale in a matter of hours.

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/18/49744.html

Unless you’re an avid mobile Internet user or are seriously into the social networking scene then you may not have heard of FourSquare and nor may you have heard of the craze that is called geo-tagging. Don’t scoff at it just because you’ve never heard of it because the majority of us had no idea what micro-blogging was until Twitter erupted into our browsers.

FourSquare is the epitome of geo-tagging, the granddaddy of such applications. Visit a new location, tag it as visited using your mobile and the FourSquare site and you will be rewarded with points and other rewards. You can also leave a comment and even review the place you visit.

As you can imagine once the site began to gain in popularity having achieved something of a cult following, small local businesses really started to sit up and pay attention. Their business could be listed on the FourSquare site and users were then actively encouraged to visit and tag it. Small businesses, and especially local bars and cafes, were among the first to leap on the idea but bigger organisations soon followed.

FourSquare now boasts more than 2m users which is a very impressive total for a service that is predominantly used on mobile phones with internet access. What’s more, if you own a business and are looking for inspiration to get involved then look no further than pizza company Domino’s. Having beaten analyst predictions and returned a decent profit in very difficult market conditions, the company put a lot of their success down to their FourSquare initiative.

If it’s good enough for Domino’s then surely it’s good enough for your business isn’t it?

I read an article recently at one of the Chicago Tribune’s news blogs, about facebook and how to protect against online defamation. It would be enlightening to many people, I think. Judging by how I’ve seen many people use social networking sites, they need to read this.

Using Facebook is a little like being in a relationship. When things are going well (people are “liking” your status updates and commenting on your photos), you couldn’t be happier with it, but if, for whatever reason, you decide to part ways, you realize it knows way more about you than you wish it did.Once your information is out there, it’s out there.

Seventy percent of America’s hiring managers have rejected job candidates based on what they found when researching candidates’ social networking profiles, according to a Dec. 2009 Microsoft survey.

“Some job seekers are turning to Online Reputation Management (ORM) firms to help them improve their digital personas,” according to a press release from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a non-profit consumer information, privacy protection, and advocacy program.

But ORMs cannot permanently remove embarrassing content from the Internet any better than you can, so why pay for their services? Privacyrights.org offers job seekers several helpful (and free) methods to clean up their online profiles:

Continue reading the rest of the article in order to find out what the methods are. They’re well worth reading.

This article at the New York Times is an excellent example of the sort of problems that are occurring these days because of the rise of the Internet and, particularly, the rise of social networking sites. This is not the fault of the Internet, of course, it is simply due to the fact that we have not yet encountered these problems and thus have no idea how to handle them.

Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.

Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges.

Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry, alarmed by recent adolescent suicides linked to bullying.

Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself.

Nonetheless, administrators who decide they should help their cornered students often face daunting pragmatic and legal constraints.

The entire article is well worth a read. It brings up some very good questions in regards to how the law should or should not be changing and evolving in order to meet the new challenge of the Internet.

On the face of it, Jaiku is really a pretty basic Twitter type social networking website. It offers micro-blogging like Twitter does except it does have its differences and the fact that Google bough the site a few years ago means that any changes are likely to be done in order to further benefit the community. It offers users the chance to post slightly shorter micro-posts than offered on Twitter’s platform but each post is given its own page that includes any discussion that has started around that post as well.

The appearance of Jaiku is a little more web 2.0 still and signing up is easy enough. It also features ome pretty nifty location based features but only if you have a compatible mobile phone. With all of that said, it isn’t likely to really hold a candle to Twitter in terms of the number of users or the amount of coverage that it gets but if you like all things Google and you want another avenue to post content on the wek then this could be it.

One of the better features of Jaiku is that you are basically given a micro-blog rather than a single home page. Not only does each post receive its own page and its own URL but you can also add RSS feeds of posts and comments taken from your main blog and integrate other social networking and social media features on your Jaiku page. As it doesn’t require all that much commitment to post a micro-blog every few days it could be worth a try if you have a little extra time on social networking hands.

News broke amongst the online reputation management industry yesterday that British Petroleum, the oil company that is currently dealing with a major media fiasco because of an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, has begun buying up search words through Google AdWords. Every news article guesses that the ad-campaign they are waging is quite large and quite expensive, but few people have ventured a guess as to how expensive it could be. Over at SearchEngineWatch, one of the best blogs for information about the industry, there is an article which attempts to estimate the costs of the campaign.

They lay out the math really well and have obviously done their homework. They estimate that BP has spent around $1 million on ads through Google AdWords and Youtube thus far, a fairly hefty amount and probably one of the largest buys this year. Industry experts suggest that down the line British Petroleum will likely be paying big money for an extensive Internet Reputation Management campaign too, though certainly not yet.

The social check-in site is an even more modern take on the social network. It uses computers and handheld devices, which make it popular with a demographic of younger, tech savvy people on the move that access the Internet using mobile phones and other mobile devices. The user can create a profile and then log in using a GPS enabled device when they visit a new location. This information is then updated on their profile so that other users and even the establishments they visited can see the buzz.

While some local businesses have taken to social media optimisation with aplomb others have found it to be too time consuming or costly in order to generate decent results. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Find some of the more popular social check-in sites, register the details of your business or establishment and then monitor and react to the buzz that this creates on the Internet. Not only is it a great way to build kudos around your venue letting visitors inform the world as to how great their experience was but it can also encourage others from a local area to pop in and give it a try.

Another beneficial use of social check-in sites is in a reputation management campaign. This means having some semblance of control over the top positions in search results and on social networks so that if potential customers search for your name or the name of your business then they will be presented with the information that you want them to see first.

Social networking websites aren’t just a great platform for staying in touch with friends and colleagues or making new connections. They can also be used as a highly beneficial tool in promoting a website or business. Here are 4 ways of using social networks to the benefit of your business.

1 – SMO for SEO

SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, can be used to improve search rankings for your main pages. Set up profiles, add bookmarks, and blog frequently about your services or products and include links to your main website or web pages. Get others, including your readers, to post, blog, and retweet in order to help results further.

2 – Online Reputation Management

A negative review or story can really hold a business back. Ensure that when people search for your business name or your individual name that they see results that you want them to. Develop profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, as well as more specific networks for your business and for you personally.

3 – Make Connections

With so many businesses and consumers on social networking websites, they are a great way to make connections for your own professional use too. For instance, biznik is a social networking websites developed to bring small business owners together so that they can develop synergous relationships.

4 – Communicate With Existing Customers

Many people use feed readers or subscribe to blogs, pages, and people that they like. Encourage your own customers to do this and use the opportunity to occasionally send details of promotions, special offers, and new product details.

Thus far the reputation management failure of the year has been a tossup between Toyota, Goldman Sachs, and British Petroleum. All of the companies have done horribly with their reputations, likely because none of them envisioned having to tackle such an incredible failure by their business. Online reputation is key to preparing for the overall media onslaught that accompanies problems like this.

Company crisis leaves many workers facing insecurity, a loss of control and disillusionment in a corporation that they were once proud of, management experts said. And that is a recipe for even more disaster because employee morale suffers.

Unfortunately, many employers facing adversity forget about its impact on the rank-and-file.

“In a crisis situation, many companies focus externally only” on things such as public relations and a firm’s stock price, said Christine Probett, a management and human resource professor at San Diego State University.

“If there is no internal communication, employees expect the worst and productivity drops significantly while employees speculate on what might happen,” she said.

Surviving a major mistake can be tough for a company, especially if that company is large enough, or the mistake is bad enough, to attract the attention of major media. Online reputation management is one way to get out ahead of such problems.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/breaking/Surviving_your_company_s_mistakes-93898294.html

Updated 7:45 PM PDT, Sun, May 16, 2010

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Company calamities like the ones playing out at firms such as BP, Goldman Sachs and Toyota do more than just impact a firm’s reputation and bottom line. They also do a number on employees.

It’s been nearly a decade, but Shirley Green still remembers vividly the pain and anguish she felt when her former employer Qwest Communications faced disaster.

The company announced sweeping layoffs in 2000, the stock plummeted in 2001, and CEO Joseph Nacchio soon resigned amid allegations of fraud. He was convicted of insider trading in 2007.

“It was really upsetting,” said Green, who was a process analyst for the telecommunications company at the time. “At baby showers, networking groups, even when I went to the doctor’s office and filled out forms, I didn’t want to say where I worked.”

Green, who lives in Denver and spent more than two decades with Qwest until she was laid off, describes herself as a “peon” who had no direct connection with the goings on at the top at the beleaguered company. “The people at the bottom of the food chain are the ones who get hit the worst.”

Company crisis leaves many workers facing insecurity, a loss of control and disillusionment in a corporation that they were once proud of, management experts said. And that is a recipe for even more disaster because employee morale suffers.

Unfortunately, many employers facing adversity forget about its impact on the rank-and-file.

“In a crisis situation, many companies focus externally only” on things such as public relations and a firm’s stock price, said Christine Probett, a management and human resource professor at San Diego State University.

“If there is no internal communication, employees expect the worst and productivity drops significantly while employees speculate on what might happen,” she said.