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Online Reputation Management
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What is "Online Reputation Management"?
This is the description that is now used to describe a growing trend of managing either your individual professional profile or your company brand profile online. In relation to focusing on the individual this is also known as "Online Identity Management" (OIM).
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Search Engines have come to dominate the way we interact with the internet and broadband penetration has ensured the internet has become a mass market medium. We use the internet to research everything and the advent of social networking has produced an enormous amount of personal information that is available for all to see. Therefore increasingly people are using search engines to find information about individuals.
"Online Reputation Management" is initially an awareness that any personal information online can be used to research you. As search engines are the dominant tool to find this information this discipline can sometimes be referred to as Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM). However it is the proactive management of your information that is becoming essential for personal and professional reasons.
A survey by Execunet in August 2007 found that 83% of candidates seeking a job were being researched in search engines as part of the job application process. Initially you should be careful what information you make available online but secondly use services like "LookupPage" to produce a professional online profile that is highly visible in search engines. Easy control of the content and the fact that this will be the first page people will find when they search for your name is a key part of any online reputation management service.
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Other Reputation Management services include companies that provide monitoring of brands as a service. With the ability of any user to post a blog or comment in a forum about you or your brand it is becoming increasingly common to monitor any online activity. A comprehensive online reputation management service may include monitoring news alerts, social media web sites, blogs, forums and search engine listings.
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There are also an increasing number of companies that will offer "Online Reputation Management" services that include attempts to have damaging content removed. This is not an easy objective to achieve and most companies would advise you to firstly fix any issues you have with a disgruntled customer.
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However by proactively managing good content that represents you and or your company accurately and working with specialist companies that understand search engine marketing you can protect your self and importantly take advantage of many more opportunities as part of an ethical and cost effective "Online Reputation Management" strategy.
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