Are Rumors of Your Demise Exaggerated on the Web?
The Importance of Online Reputation Management for Your Small Business

By Steve Melberg

You never know when you’re going to die on the Internet. Never! Someone could come from behind and – bam! - your reputation is ruined!

Mark Twain said, “ Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. “ Nowhere is this more likely to be true than on today’s Internet.

If web 1.0 was all about collecting information, web 2.0 is all about sharing it and it doesn’t have to be true to be shared.

Something one of our clients recently experienced illustrates this well. As a successful construction contractor, our client hires many people to work in his company. Unfortunately, one of them was stealing from him, so our client fried him.

The employee is an avid blogger and uses social media sites frequently as well. The employee began blogging negatively about our client and sharing slanderous stories about him in social media sites online. The result was when you Googled our client’s name all this negative information appeared in the search results (even though it’s untrue). Nowadays if it’s on Google, it’s gospel!

So how can you prevent something like this from happening to you?

• Write articles in your field or specialty and post to article directories online.
• Start your own blog and post to it regularly.
• Register with social media sites such as: Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, etc. and participate by posting your stories from your blog.
• Register with social bookmarking sites such as: Stumbleupon or Delicious and bookmark or vote on other’s content. Then post your own content and others will vote on it, increasing the popularity of your content.
• Optimize your website so it ranks well in the search engines. Add fresh content on a regular basis so the search engines have something to rank when they list your site.

Most importantly, be proactive. Take the above steps now to establish your online reputation. Then, should anyone post negatively about you (regardless of how untrue it is), the negative will be drowned out by the sea of positive information you’ve already created about yourself online.