I posted about ReputationDefender in November last year, a startup whose mission was to remove potentially embarassing content from the web so that you could protect your online reputation.
At the time the company launched their services were confined to asking companies to take down the offensive material but, it seems they have (in true Web 2.0 fashion) expanded their service offerings.
In order to protect you from your earlier indiscretions, RD are now in the business of
hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.
Forbes Magazine
Um, isn’t this just spamdexing?
So, you are foolish enough to publish something indiscreet or, according to Ars Technica, you are one of the 40% of bloggers that published damaging information about your organization on your blog, and then you panic and think, ‘what do I do?’ You call these spammers and they game the search engines to fill their pages with bogus content to bury your indiscretions. It’s like Gresham’s Law.
This service, called MyEdge, is described as “labour intensive” and fees start at US$10,000. So, it doesn’t really look like an option for us public service bloggers who have, as Che Tibby describes it, a hot-heated morning with too much coffee
.
It does, however, raise a couple of interesting questions about the practice of online reputation management. The dubious ethics of MyEdge aside, all of us (or certainly our organizations) are constantly building our online profiles. Every page published, article, photo or video posted is indexed and stored – possibly forever. What are we doing about that? Che and Colin McKay have some pretty good suggestions for public servants, but what about the way public sector communicators curate their agencies’ reputations?
How many of our agencies actually practice even a rudimentary form of search engine optimisation? Or have a social media strategy that actively manages online content to effectively curate that reputation?
I don’t have any easy answers, but it seems to me that public sector communicators cannot afford to assume that this space is solely the province of private sector marketers and is of no consequence to them or their organizations.
Photo: PartsnPieces
12 Comments
I was reading in the New York TImes, (I can’t find the original article) about a Canadian man who when traveling to the U.S. for business as he has done countless times, gets his name googled by border guards, and up comes an article that he wrote for a student magazine in the early 70’s that has just gone on line. In the article he talks about taking L.S.D., which of course is an admission of doing something illegal. And having admitted to doing something illegal he’s no longer allowed into the U.S.
Thanks Ian. It is even more bizarre than that. He is a 66 year old psychotherapist who was writing in an academic journal.
Perhaps predictably,
so… the thing is… you can write something completely scandalous in a book. but put it online, where it’s easily searchable by numnuts, and you’re in big trouble?
Of course Che, just to ramp up your paranoia, it is not just what you write and publish online. Your reputation can be impacted (or enhanced) by the links you save to del.icio.us, the people you link to in your blogroll or on LinkedIn, your flickr groups etc.
In short, it’s your whole online profile that has to be curated…
hmmm… i obviously need to stop looking at i can has cheeseburger.
Sorely tempted to delete that comment (for all our sakes)…
Excuse the length of this Jason and the slight derail but search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial part of any attempt to communicate using the web – and not limited to just reputation management. This cannot be overstated.
The lack of even rudimentary SEO is not limited to the public sector in New Zealand IMHO.
For example I have a competitor who does not even have the key words for the services they offer on the home page of their site at all. I suppose they assume that google will just guess what they offer… Don’t get me wrong their site looks lovely, but it is very hard to find with a search of the services they offer in google.
I am in the middle of a project to optimise NZPA’s current web content and this will be the fourth organisation I have led through this process. But once key words have been staked out, they get entrenched with inbound links and it becomes very difficult to unseat incumbents
The other important point about SEO for communication activities, is all content should be optimised for search engines, even for text sent via traditional post, or sound bytes given to radio stations as sooner or later, all content ends up on the web.
SEO 101 in five easy steps
1) Define who you are wanting to communicate with
2) Define key words those people would most likely use when looking for your information
3) Use those keywords on the title of the page, on the headline and twice in the first paragraph if possible.
4) If the communication is through a web page beg steal or borrow as many links to that page as you can and make sure the keywords appear between all of the <a> tags and in title element linking to that page (including the links to that page from other organisation’s sites). Extra for experts would be including the keywords in the URL for the page, separated by hyphens.
5) Go and have a cheeseburger (*looks despairingly at Che and shakes head*)
Government sites, because of what they are, have PageRanks that I can only dream of, and these immensely powerful tools need to be managed carefully.
Done properly a public sector organisation can obtain huge communication leverage from their web assets using SEO techniques.
I should get my own blog.
Thanks Sam: brilliantly put.
I completely agree about the importance of SEO, and I suspect that – because of their ‘default’ pageranks – most agencies either don’t care or feel they don’t need to…
It is important to look beyond SEO and to consider your whole profile as part of your online reputation; but maybe that is a concept that we will have to move a little more slowly towards?
Thanks Jason, and I agree that it will take time for organisations to accept the simple truth that increasingly its brand perception (i.e. reputation) is the sum total of the results of a google search.
I accept that SEO is only a part of a wider process. However, I feel it is much easier to manage reputations from the front of the queue, given the variance in natural traffic generated by the first result in a google search compared with the last.
I agree: but this comes back to the point about the tendency of agencies to take their page rank for granted — they are already dealing to the front of the queue (albeit inadvertently) as they see it. By broadening their approach, they can start curating their reputation with the people in the other queues, ie., those not coming in through Google or Yahoo etc.
I guess I am saying that if we keep seeing the trend towards social media powered referrals, then you should be actively managing that part of your profile.
I am not dismissing social media, and accept your point but I guess what I am saying is I don’t think social media will deliver as much of a tangible communication result as an awareness of how web traffic is served up to public sector web sites today.
Do public sector organisation have an appreciation of the key word searches of areas they are responsible for?
By way of an example: would specific public sector organisations want to use their massive sway (in terms of PageRank) to be first in the results for a search for information on:
benefit cheats
environmental devastation
public sector pay rates
I have gone searching for these results, but SEO techniques would make a real and tangible difference to the relevant agency’s web cut through in these areas.
Thanks Sam, I am thinking that this probably deserves a post in itself…
I agree that the bulk of the traffic will be search referrals, but I was trying to get across the idea (probably not very articulately) that an agency (or an individual, for that matter) reputation is not solely about what Google returns. It is also a function of your social media profile: your
reltags, your bookmarks, your networks — all of these things comprise your profile.I think the discussion about SEO is definitely one that needs to be expanded and shared.