There has been considerable concern about online privacy for all of this year and that concern is not going away. The Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles pointing out the literally lack of privacy for visitors to virtually any site. It has also positioned those taking information from visitors as spies. A little harsh? Maybe but we have entered an age where this kind of assessment will be common.
To go the to the next level though, the New York Times has pointed out in their article on the online space and reputations that
Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.
To a degree this is true but on other levels it is a bit over the top. There are things you can do to at least manage your online reputation. Having complete control is practically impossible but being able to control how your reputation is presented, especially in the search engines is achievable. How you ask?
- Listen – You can’t do anything about anything that you simply are clueless about. If you find yourself a month or a year from now discovering something that has been on your ‘digital record’ for an extended period of time don’t cry foul. What’s foul is the fact that by not listening to the online buzz about whatever it is you want to protect (brand, person etc) YOU allowed something to sit in the engines and rot your online reputation. Nobody’s fault but yours at that point.
- SEO – Once something appears in the SERP’s (search engine results pages) that is negative you need to give the engines something to feed on that they can put ahead of the undesired results in the rankings. Develop other properties like a Flickr account, YouTube channel, blog etc to generate interest from the engines. At this point, these properties can be seen as better options for ranking of results than the negative ones that you are less than happy with.
- Create content – In the end it’s a war of attrition. If there is one or two negative results around certain keywords that are important to your online reputation you need to create content to fill the properties mentioned above. Don’t do this in a half-assed manner either. Have a plan and generate considerable content that will appease the search engines and help move the undesired results out of the SERP’s.
- Behave – If you have done nothing wrong and you are just the victim of someone who is bitter, vindictive or just an outright liar, those things will eventually take care of themselves. All we can do is conduct ourselves in business and life in a way that would make any negative online ‘concern’ look so out of place that the person or entity that is creating the disturbance will be viewed as some kind of online miscreant which, in many cases, they are.
Here at Trackur we help you shorten the time between when something happens to the time that you are aware of it. The sooner you get on top of an ORM concern the better your chances are of managing the situation to your advantage.
Contact us today for more information about how trackur will help you get some semblance of control over something that spin out of control very quickly: your online reputation.
