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“Calling in the Pros to Refine Your Google

Image”

“Des cabinets de relations publiques restaurent

image écornée sur le net” [France]

“Google Yourself—And Enjoy It”

“Gut aussehen bei Google” [Germany]

“Empresas de RRPP restauran imágenes

dañadas en internet” [Spain]

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Who You Gonna Call?
by Megan Angelo | March 2009 Issue
If you’ve been smeared, an online-reputation
scrubber, who’s paid to clear the air (and
Google).
Forget your references, your -résumé, and the
degree on your wall. “Whatever’s in the top 10
-results of a search for your name on Google—
that’s your [professional] image,” says Chris
Martin, founder of the small internet company
Reputation Hawk, which is one of several outfits
that focus on keeping that top 10 clean for their
clients.
For victims of cyber-slurs, cleanup doesn’t
necessarily mean removing bad press.
Companies like eVisibility, Converseon, and
360i concentrate on generating -positive
content—but not too much at one time. If
Google detects a -sudden flood of suspicious
Web postings, it will assign them low trust
scores, preventing them from rising to the top of
search results.
Nino Kader, CEO of International Reputation
Management, uses a positive-content approach,
calling its strategy a mix of “old-school PR and
high tech.” The firm builds social profiles (on
MySpace or Facebook) for clients and promotes
them to blogs; it also drafts news releases and
© 2009 Condé Nast Inc.
solicits coverage from traditional press outlets.
Scrubbers generally work on retainer and charge
anywhere from $500 to $10,000 a month.
A handful of scrubbers do try to actually remove
negative content, using coercion, compromise,
and occasionally cash. A first step is to contact
the website and ask that the harmful post be
removed. “For us to pay the site for removal is
very uncommon, but less than 1 percent of the
time, we have to do it,” says
ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik, whose
company charges a monthly fee and $30 for
each item they persuade a website to remove. If
a site refuses to erase an offending post, the next
step is to negotiate a compromise. Ask the site
administrator to substitute a screenshot for the
actual text of the harmful post (a screenshot is an
image, so the words no longer register as text to
Google and won’t come up in a search).
When it comes to your online image, these
companies argue that no one can afford to shrug
off a slight. As Fertik says, “The people who are
reading stuff about you on the internet don’t
have to believe what they read about you beyond
a reasonable doubt.” They just have to believe it
enough to not hire you.
Obama Campaign Opens Anti-Smear Web Site
June 12, 2008 from All Things Considered
MICHELE NORRIS, host: From NPR News,
this ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele
Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The Internet has been Barack Obama's greatest
strength and perhaps his greatest weakness.
First, he's used it to mobilize young voters and
generate record donations. But the Internet has
also been home to viral campaigns attacking
him.
Now as NPR's David Folkenflik reports, the
Obama camp is turning to the Internet to fight
back against the Internet.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: It should be a scandal.
A new Web site set up by a prominent politician
is trafficking in devastating claims against
Democratic candidate Barack Obama, claims
that Obama lashed out against whites in his
book, that he won't say the Pledge of a
Allegiance, that his wife, Michelle, used the
word whitey in public. The politician behind the
site: Barack Obama. To figure out why, just
listen to him chastising a reporter on his
campaign plane last week for asking whether
there was such a tape of Michelle Obama saying
the word whitey.
Senator BARACK OBAMA (Democrat,
Illinois): There is dirt and lies that are circulated
in e-mail and they pump them out long enough
until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me
about them. And then that gives legs to the story.
FOLKENFLIK: So a few short days later the
candidate himself has a site about those rumors
and others. Fightthesmears.com. It uses video
clips to rebut allegations from hostile radio talk
show hosts and bloggers and e-mail campaigns.
Obama tried to laugh that off during a talk to the
pro-Israel public interest group AIPAC.
Sen. OBAMA: They're filled with tall tales and
dire warnings about a certain candidate for
president, and all I want to say is let me know if
you see this guy named Barack Obama because
he sounds pretty scary.
FOLKENFLIK: Pretty scary for Democrats who
recall failed presidential campaigns that ran
aground. First on the Willie Horton ads - that
would be Michael Dukakis; the merciless jokes
about Al Gore's inventing the Internet; and well,
you remember how much the Swift Vote
Veterans for Truth liked John Kerry.
(Soundbite of ad)
Unidentified Man #1: John Kerry is no war hero.
Unidentified Man #2: He betrayed all his
shipmates. He lied before the Senate.
FOLKENFLIK: Micah Sifry is a co-founder of
TechPresident.com, a blog looking at how
leading candidates are using the Web.
Mr. MICAH SIFRY (TechPresident.com): This
is different from four years ago when faced with
a similar kind of problem the Kerry campaign
laid back, and it didn't help them, it hurt them.
So you know, I think the Obama people have
taken a lesson from that.
FOLKENFLIK: Sifry's particularly taken with
the site's spread the word link.
Mr. SIFRY: You can't control your message
entirely anymore but you can give your
supporters lots of rich content to work with
online.
FOLKENFLIK: The site also accommodates
another one word reality, says sociologist
Christine Schiwietz, who created a consulting
group called International Reputation
Management. That word, she says, is Google.
Ms. CHRISTINE SCHIWIETZ (International
Reputation Management): Politicians, they need
to own their first page of Google results with
supportive sites, because people do not look
beyond the first or second page.
FOLKENFLIK: Schiwietz's company does that
by helping create positive content through
sympathetic stories or their own Web pages.
And Schiwietz says the Obama camp is
following her formula.
Ms. SCHIWIETZ: The people really want to
see the rumors. The key is to make those
disappear further down in the Google result
pages.
© 2008 National Public Radio
FOLKENFLIK: That development has forced
candidates to reconsider the conventional
wisdom about how to handle damaging rumors.
Michael Daubs writes the fact checker blog for
the Washington Post.
Mr. MICHAEL DAUBS (Washington Post):
You dignify something with a response, and if
you do then the response becomes the story. But
I think that most them are concluding that you
have to dignify even rumors with a response
because if the rumor goes unaddressed, people
will begin to believe in it.
FOLKENFLIK: Daubs warns the candidate's
own site maybe filled with political spin. But
Obama says the press corps is being spun too
readily. Here he was last week speaking to
reporters on that campaign plan.
Sen. OBAMA: Presumably the job of the press
is to not go around and spread scurrilous rumors
like this until there's actually anything, one iota
of substance or evidence that would substantiate
it.
FOLKENFLIK: That's the way it's supposed to
work, but for now the Obama campaign has
decided to take matters into its own hands,
publishing rumors on its own Web site and then
knocking them down.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
Google Yourself—And Enjoy It
By Lorraine Ali | NEWSWEEK | Feb 18, 2008
A Wall Street hopeful we'll call John didn't
expect to see much when he Googled his name,
but right there, at the top of the page, was an
old campus news blog detailing a bar brawl in
which John was arrested. Though accurate, the
story was posted before charges against the
otherwise model student were dropped. Now
the five-year-old blog is embedded in
cyberspace, with no follow-up piece to clear his
name. "It's the first thing that pops up," says
John, 25. "If potential employers type in my
name, they're going to hire the other guy."
Clearly, you no longer have to be a paparazzi-
plagued star to be misrepresented on a
worldwide stage. Anyone can say anything
online (it's estimated that 1.6 million blog posts
are created daily), and dozens of new gadgets,
as well as more-powerful search engines, give
us easy access to all those indiscriminate bits of
information. This convenient yet terrifying
reality has created a whole new brand of
damage control: Internet reputation repair.
ReputationHawk out of Baton Rouge, La.;
Washington, D.C.'s International Reputation
Management; ReputationDefender in northern
California, and Los Angeles's Done! SEO
specialize in managing your online legacy, and
business is booming. "Anyone can have their
image tarnished on the Internet, no matter how
good a person they are," says Jeff Henderson of
Done! SEO, a search-engine optimization
company that claims business increased tenfold
when it introduced reputation-management
services in 2006. "We're the next generation of
public relations. From here on out, you need to
own your first few Google pages."
For those of us who still don't know the
difference between megabytes and RAM,
"owning" online search results seems as elusive
as harnessing vapor. But these rep agents for
hire can push offending material down off the
first couple of pages—which is a page beyond
where most users venture. They do it by
creating hundreds, even thousands, of links
between third-party Web sites and positive
content about you or your business. The labor-
intensive service runs anywhere from $4,000 to
$30,000, and it takes about six months to see all
those negative hits clear off the first page.
There are no guarantees, but according to John,
who went with Done! SEO in November,
"things are already moving in a better
direction."
ReputationDefender of Menlo Park, Calif.,
offers a less-expensive and less-complicated
service: it hunts down the host of the offending
material and asks that the information be
removed. Clients say sites such as MySpace
have complied by pulling down defaming
pages, though MySpace did not confirm or
deny the claims and says it has no specific
policy regarding reputation-repair services.
ReputationDefender's services cost about $30
per item, plus a small monthly monitoring fee;
the company, which started in 2006, earned $2
million in revenue its first year. While it is
cheaper, this method has left clients vulnerable
to more-virulent cyber attacks by the very
bloggers they set out to silence.
Despite the risk, there just aren't a lot of other
options when it comes to clearing your name
online. Section 230 of the Communications
Decency Act of 1996 provides immunity to
sites so the hosts are not responsible for what
users post there, and it's often difficult, if not
impossible, to track down the anonymous
culprits behind the offending material. And
even if the libelous or defaming posts come
from the host himself, it can be costly to drag
these cases into court.
Reputation repairmen may be more effective in
cyberspace than attorneys, but how can we be
sure they're using their powers for good rather
than evil? Some bad reputations are well
deserved. Chris Martin, founder of
ReputationHawk, says he draws the line if
burying information would cause harm to
© 2008 Newsweek, Inc.
others. "We research each case and turn down
more clients than we take on," says Martin.
"Some people have made their bed and need to
sleep in it."
Goliaths such as Google are aware that these
online PR services are working the search
engine's algorithms for more-positive page
ranking. "If a person uses manipulative
techniques to get this positive content to rank
highly, we may take action on it," says Adam
Lasnik, search evangelist at Google. According
to Lasnik, Google has removed pages after its
guidelines were violated. "But there's no
problem in creating positive content to combat
negative content, if done within the guidelines."
The reputation-repair industry is already
looking toward the next step in image control:
forging your own online legacy before someone
else does. "We're now encouraging a proactive
approach, building a wall of positive content so
if negative stuff comes along, it has a harder
time rising to the top," says International
Reputation Management's Nino Kader. This
means publicizing your own positive news—
awards, community service, school honors—to
pre-empt bad news.
But in the end, should our online reputations
really matter, when we're all now subject to the
whims of search engines and the mood swings
of anonymous bloggers? "I shouldn't care what
others think," says John. "But do you know
anyone who can honestly say they don't care
what's said about them? I didn't think so."
Calling In Pros to Refine Your Google Image
By Susan Kinzie and Ellen Nakashima
Monday, July 2, 2007; A01
At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a
consultant to parents of troubled teens, would
type her name in a Google search box and brace
herself: Up would pop page after page of attack
postings.

Sue Scheff is destroying lives. She is a con. She

takes kickbacks. She is the biggest fraud there
ever was.

The stream of negative comments began in 2002

after a woman who had sought advice from
Scheff turned on her. The postings appeared on
PTA Web sites in Florida, where Scheff lives.
On bulletin boards and online forums. There
were even YouTube videos threatening her.
She sued for defamation and won an $11.3
million verdict, but the attacks only got worse.
In December, Scheff turned to
ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that
promised to help her cleanse her virtual
reputation. She no longer dreads a Google
search on her name. Most of the links on the all-
important first page are to her own Web site and
a half-dozen others created by
ReputationDefender to promote her work on
teen pregnancy and teen depression.
The proliferation of blogs and Web sites can
allow angry clients, jealous lovers or ruthless
competitors to define a person's identity.
Whether true or not, their words can have far-
reaching effects.
Charging anything from a few dollars to
thousands of dollars a month, companies such as
International Reputation Management, Naymz
and Reputation Defender don't promise to erase
the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure
their clients of better results on an Internet
search, pushing the positive items up on the first
page and burying the others deep.

"They created Sue-Scheff.net," she said. "They Still, Google is continually refining its search
created SueScheff.net. They created methods, which means that today's fix may not
SueScheff.org. . . . They created my MySpace work tomorrow.
account, for God's sake. I didn't know how to do
any of this stuff." "This is a game that nobody can completely
win," said Chris Dellarocas, a University of
Google's ubiquity as a research tool has given Maryland information systems professor.
rise to a new industry: online identity
management.
Dodging Mudballs
The e-mails from friends started showing up
three years ago in the Washington lobbyist's in-
basket: Have you seen this?
Over decades in the capital, she had developed a
thick skin. But after she took on a foreign
regime as a client, an online magazine bashed
her. The story was factual, but the tone nasty.
Then a blogger wrote that she slept with
someone to get a big contract. A political blog
posted an e-mail she had written about secret
campaign strategy. Truth mixed with rumor.
Rumor mixed with lies.
Concerned friends sent her the links. Potential
clients would say they had read about her on the
Web.
Like Scheff, she realized that the items that
made her cringe came up high on the Google
results page and stayed there, month after
month. Her firm depended on her reputation.
The lobbyist would speak only on condition of
anonymity because she did not want the attacks
to resume.
"There's no policing, no rules, no standards," she
said. Bloggers are "cowboys," she said. "It's the
wild, wild West."
Then one day she heard a talk by Nino Kader,
founder of International Reputation
Management (IRM) in Washington. His new
company, he said, could reshape a person's
online image.
She signed up.
IRM aims to get lots of information out there
about clients, in various places, so that a search
gives a more complete and nuanced profile of
who they are. Kader started with a printout of
the top 100 hits on a Google search and went
through them one by one, asking whether
individual results -- such as her campaign
contributions -- were good, bad or neutral.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
He asked what she wanted the world to know
about her. Then he started digging for good
things, like an op-ed piece she had written and
television interviews she had given that he could
post on YouTube. He pitched stories about her
to various publications. And he created links
from popular sites to those online stories to
entice the search engine.
Now her firm's Web site is the first result and
other good ones follow.
Still, a story she hates remains on the first page.
"I'm in the early stages," she said. "I've already
seen progress."
Companies like IRM try to outthink Google.
Search engines comb the Web with complex and
ever-shifting algorithms, evaluating relevance
and authority by looking at many factors: Is this
a government Web site? How many people have
linked to it? And so on.
The point is, said ReputationDefender founder
Michael Fertik, "Google's not in business to give
you the truth, it's in business to give what you
think is relevant."
The goal is to get Google and other search
engines to seize on relevant sites that contain
positive information on their clients and to
downplay the rest.
Google does not object in principle to people
adding positive content to outrank the negative.
But a spokeswoman said in an e-mail, "if you
use spammy and manipulative techniques to get
this positive content to rank highly, we may take
action on it."
Some companies create promotional Web pages
for their clients with coding that makes them
appealing to Google or create blog pages linking
to the client's own site, ensuring they'll rise to
the top.