Online reputation
management evolved in the past two or three years in response to
the explosion of social media that amplified the voices of
individual Internet users. There are no data on how big the market
is. "It's kind of a fast-emerging field as more and more companies
become aware of the need to have some sort of tracking," says
Michael Greene, an analyst at JupiterResearch who authored a
report in January about responding to negative buzz online.
Reputation management
companies describe typical small-business clients such as a pet
store targeted by animal rights activists or a stockbroker linked
to decades-old Securities & Exchange Commission violations. (Two
different firms independently volunteered both as examples.) It's
almost impossible to get such pages taken down, but placing enough
positive references above to push them off the first page or two
of Google results is where reputation management comes in.
But altering search
results isn't cheap. Several companies said the typical cost for a
small business client starts at $1,000 a month. More extensive
services marketed to large corporations run into the tens of
thousands of dollars. ReputationDefender, a two-year-old Menlo
Park (Calif.) company that mainly markets to individuals, plans to
introduce a service for companies that would cost a one-time fee
of a few hundred dollars, according to founder Michael Fertik.
Fertik and others are
establishing a trade group, the Online Reputation Management
Assn., to certify members and promote best practices, because no
clear standards exist for what is and is not acceptable. "We feel
that a lot of ethical shadiness is happening in this business,"
Fertik says. Most companies set their own boundaries about what's
appropriate: Beal says he won't take clients who appear to be a
habitual offenders, and Fertik says he won't lie for clients or
impersonate customers.
Hired Guns?
But there's little
agreement on where the line is drawn. For example, one company,
Internet Reputation Management, founded last year by three
partners in the New York area, recruits bloggers to write about
clients on third-party sites, without necessarily disclosing that
they're paid, according to partner Carl Sgro.
"We ask bloggers to be
truthful," Sgro says. "We don't want anything to be
overembellished." Chris Martin, founder of two-year-old
ReputationHawk in Baton Rouge, La., says his company runs blogs
that promote his clients, but he doesn't pay bloggers to post on
outside sites. Other companies warn against surreptitiously
promoting clients on blogs, not least because if it comes to
light, the damage is hard to control.
Trying to spin search
results is a tough game. For evidence, simply Google
ReputationDefender. A recent search turned up in the fourth result
a critical post from the Consumerist blog blasting the company for
attempting to have a post removed. (Fertik says that taking down
negative content, a service ReputationDefender markets to
individuals, is not available for businesses.) Other bad press is
not hard to find.
Google, for its part,
says there is nothing inherently wrong with reputation services,
but "if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this
positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it," a
spokeswoman writes in an e-mail. (With two-thirds of U.S. search
volume in April, according to Hitwise, Google is clearly
reputation companies' biggest target.) The company refers to its
Webmaster Guidelines, for violations that can get sites banished,
such as using hidden links or creating "cookie-cutter" affiliate
pages just to boost page rank.
