The online reputation management industry is new because it has not been a long time that online reputations have actually mattered in the real world. For years, of course, Internet aficionados cared about their online reputations, but it is only recently that online reputations have become important offline. These days, businesses will Google you before they hire you, blind dates will put your name into search engines in order to dig up dirt, etc. This leads people to want to be more protective of their online reputations.

Online reputation management began mostly in developed countries like the United States, United Kingdom, France, etc. It has since expanded to many of the less developed and developing countries. The industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. It has developed niche sectors over the years, for celebrities, famous athletes, businessmen, etc.

There are few people or businesses that could not benefit from some type of online reputation management or another. Everyone from the most famous world icons (read: David Beckham or President Obama) to the most normal individuals (e.g., me or you) needs to look after their online reputations and there is no better way to do it than that.

Ebay was one of the first companies to deal in online reputations. They created a system whereby users would rate and leave comments about other users who sold things on their website. This crowd-sourced ratings system turned out to be immensely popular and very helpful to buyers, who quickly learned who they could trust, as a community, and who they could not. This ability to have some users aid others in their buying or selling preferences would become a popular model, mimicked by Yelp and other review websites. Eventually the method would expand to include businesses and people who never signed up for this ratings system, and thus exercised no control over how they were perceived. In many cases, there were not even ways to rectify or appeal the bad ratings or comments. This is how online reputation management first came onto the scene. The industry is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, with firms handling all different types of online reputation management issues. As the Internet changes and evolves, so will the online reputation management industry.

This is the Wikipedia page for Online Reputation Management. It isn’t exactly chocked full of information, but it’s a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Reputation_Management

This is a relevant article about online identity/reputation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity

This is an excellent New York Times profile of the industry. It is by no means all-encompassing, but it’s a good piece:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/the-growing-business-of-online-reputation-management/

Reppler, a month-old firm that markets online reputation management tools, released Monday the results of a survey of 30,000 users. The data show that 47% of those users have profanity on their Facebook wall. Of those users, 80% have at least one post or comment with profanity from a friend. Posts and comments with profanity on a user’s Facebook wall come from friends 56% of the time.

This is a shockingly high number, isn’t it? With so many people out of work, you would think more of them would be concerned about professionalism and networking. The truth is that most people simply don’t think about it until after the damage has been done. This is a shame, because it’s such an easy problem to fix.

For example, a user searching for a restaurant may see comments from his or her Facebook friends who went to that restaurant and liked it.

This recommendation is a strong social signal and one that Google failed to provide with its own Google Social Search earlier this year.

Of course, this social search system that Bing plans to build will take time to be made more successful. In the beginning, at least, the system will not work perfectly. As of right now, Bing only has about 11% of the search engine market share, but that number could go up after this measure.

It does not take much to ruin the career of a doctor. The fact that they handle important health issues means that people need to be able to trust them. If complaints, even obviously untrue ones, or baseless assertions are to be found online, then most doctors will lose business as a result.

Physicians have very little recourse for these sorts of problems. One of the only ways to solve this problem is through use of reputation management services. This will not erase the negative listings, it will simply replace them with more positive ones in search results. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can work wonders.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.