The following article (linked to here) goes over some ideas for how to monitor your internet reputation from PR Daily.  This article in particular, focuses strictly on business, and we’d like to take a minute here at The Reputation Management Way to draw a distinction between the sorts of strategies suggested in the link, and the kinds that individuals would use to monitor their online reputation.  First off, the article suggests using automated monitoring software to keep tabs on who’s talking about you and who’s saying what on the internet about the particulars of a business.  For an organization that reaches a certain size, this can be quite effective and even necessary.  Imagine if you’re a company that has a thousand employees (or much more) and many departments.  It may be quite challenging to keep tabs on who’s saying what about you online (especially if you haven’t hired another company to help).

But for individuals who wish to keep tabs on how they appear online, or for certain kinds of companies of certain configurations or sizes, monitoring software may be overkill, and may not be necessary. One should keep in mind the business case and the specific circumstance they’re dealing with in a given instance.  The article also has some very good strategies on how to deal with negative reviews, and even some ideas on how to stop negative reviews on sites like Yelp, and Urban Spoon.  Specifically, they suggest asking customers to write reviews ahead of time, before any negative reviews are written independently by disgruntled customers or patrons, but we have one suggestion on top of what the article says.  If you want to go that route, and you certainly can, you should create business cards that suggest where to go on the internet to write a positive review, but hand those cards only out to those customers whom you like, or get along with, and are confident in general will write positive reviews about your business, you should NEVER hand them out to people whom you have any reason to believe will write a negative review of your company.

We can see that when it comes to ORM, there are many strategies and paths you can take, the article linked to above certainly describes some of them, but no one path is right for everyone, or every situation.  Check out our other articles and postings for more on how to make your internet search results pages look better then ever.

The answer is yes, absolutely; question and answer sites are theoretically quite similar to social media sites in certain ways, specifically in that they tend to rank very highly on search engines (though it depends which specific site you’re talking about in a given instance). Therefore they really can be used to improve one’s Online Reputation. Quora.com is an example of one such site where users can create a profile, log on, and answer questions that (at least on that particular site) tend to be quite intellectual. Other sites however differ in the manner in which questions are asked, what types of questions are asked, how the answers are presented, and even if different users can communicate with each other via the questions themselves. Therefore, if someone doesn’t like Quora, they should not assume that it is the only question and answer site available to them.

However, question and answer sites can (for ORM purposes) have the same problem social media platforms sometimes do when it comes to Reputation Management. The user (or business) in question has to know how to set up the site(s) so they are most effective and influence google results in the way that the user wants. If anyone needs help with this (as we’ve said before) we recommend HopLite as, in our opinion, they are uniquely qualified to answer these sorts of questions, most of the time, even more effectively than we can, and we know a lot about ORM.

So don’t count out question and answer sites as an effective method when it comes to dealing with search engine results. If bad search engine results pages have you down, then don’t be afraid to ask about how to deal with them, and after any questions — feel free to answer away…

WordPress is by far, in the utmost and absolute sense, the most commonly used option for choice of Content Management System. And since we’re writing articles here at The Reputation Management Way about said systems, we just couldn’t leave wordpress out (doing so would not make any sense). While there are options out there besides it (specifically Drupal and Joomla, which we covered in previous articles) wordpress tends to stand alone. That’s not to say no one uses the other options, for example, the White House famously stands by their choice of Drupal (since it’s the most secure and most well-coded), and The New York Times and Rolling Stone are quite happy with their choice of Joomla as well, but other than that pretty much everyone out there uses WordPress.

WordPress famously has both a hosted and self-hosted version. The hosted version can be accessed via the “.com” version of their website, the self-hosted version via the “.org” version. WordPress is second to none when it comes to both themes and plug-ins, as almost all of the ones that are created in the first place are created specifically for WordPress. If you’re going to make use of the “self-hosted” route, it’s quite likely that you’ll need some knowledge of the PHP programming language. WordPress is written in PHP and uses a SQL database to store entries (and other relevant information), and it can be modified and changed to your liking using the PHP language (the database can also be changed using SQL).

When it comes to Online Reputation Management Services (and we’ve included a link to HopLite at left if anyone specifically would like help with the previous, they can help a bit more than we can if anyone has a very specific question) blogging can be a very effective tool, though not the only tool. Users should select a CMS that will help them the most and also keep in mind the technical differences between them (as well as level of difficulty in terms of use, programming experience needed, etc.). Dealing with reputation problems on the web is possible, and the techniques used as such are very effective, but one should still keep in mind all the different options available.

Have you ever tried “googling” yourself before a date? Most of the time, on online dating sites, two people don’t exchange full names before meeting up and attempting (awkwardly or no) to get to know each other, but sometimes, before any sort of first meeting, full names are in fact exchanged or both parties are already aware of what they are ahead of time.

When this is case, one party (or sometimes both) might use a search engine like google and look for untoward information about a person before going on the date. The problem is, for some people, things that happened in the past can make them look bad unnecessarily. Imagine if you were busted for a minor crime like disturbing the peace a decade ago, and information is now coming up on google (on page one no less) about what happened even though it was so long ago. Or a person who was accused of a crime even though they were not guilty of it, and was never convicted (yes, this does happen, we hear about it all the time), and is now having that information displayed openly to everyone. Or even a person who got a DUI by accident many years ago, for (again by accident) only being slightly over the legal limit, as part of a legitimate mistake.

We would like to believe in society, that these things never happen, and when they do, they are the fault in entirety of the person who was directly involved. The fact of the matter is, neither of those two things are true, and if many years later someone is doing a google search before a first date and sees these things, it can unnecessarily bring back problems of the past to the “front page” of a person’s life. In some cases (though not all) this can be unfair. That’s one reason Online Reputation Management can help, it can “push” negative listings far down in the rankings. And studies show that once they are much lower on search engines, the chances can be as low as 2% (or sometimes much lower believe it or not) that anyone will ever see them again. HopLite Online Reputation Management is a company that we believe can be of assistance when it comes to dealing with this, and we argue should be highly considered as a choice. There is a link at left to their homepage (and again, another one right here); and we think anyone who’s having trouble with their results should consider contacting them.

So the next time you go on a blind date, try putting your name into google and other popular search engines (like yahoo and bing), and see what comes up. Or, you don’t have to wait that long, give it a try right now. Anything negative you find can be dealt with, and that’s what ORM is all about.