My colleague, Blake Cahill, asked that I offer some thoughts and follow-up on the John Bell at Ogilvy PR’s ideas about Search Reputation Management.

Many people have been blogging about the value and methods for implementing search reputation management over the past few months. Even the major media have begun running stories about it.

Your visibility in the search engines, as John points out, begins with you: what you do, what you say, and in some ways where you say it. Whether you need several domains to work with is really open to discussion. One person can be very visible across multiple domains without having to control them. That is also true of corporations.

Before you run out and buy 10 domains for your reputation management campaign, assess where you have already achieved online visibility. Maybe you can leverage that existing visibility into helping with your reputation management.

John also suggests you create a profile in “all the major social networks”. This is a standard tip being offered in many places. It’s a very good idea for people who have developed little to no visibility on the Web. But for people who have already blown the gates off the visibility race track — especially those people who are now experiencing some hostile negativity — social media profiles rarely do the trick. These pages by themselves don’t have much value to the search engines. Major blogs, news stories, and even specialty stop-the-guys-i-dislike Web sites often prove to be much more visible than profile pages.

If you already participate in online discussion groups, help people find your profile pages by linking to them in obtrusively from time to time. Use your name when you do. This helps people find pages where you can tell them a little about yourself without raising sensitive issues. It also helps the search engines decide the profile pages may be worth promoting. But don’t expect to knock the New York Times out of the search results with a social media profile page.

John also suggests you “get social publish”. I agree. If you are establishing a reputation, you need to share your passions and/or your expertise in a way that will encourage people to interact with you. You should treat people with respect and dignity, even though some of them won’t return the favor. Always be courteous and professional because that one angry response may not only come back to haunt you, it may launch a long, emotionally draining battle you’re not really interested in.

Be honest. Show integrity. Share the best side of yourself. People will support the good things you do, often by linking to your Web sites and what you write.

Finally, John suggests “stop doing bad things”. Of course, not everyone feels they are doing “bad things”. Different points of view may present both sides of an argument as “the right thing to do” or “vital for the needs of humanity”. If you cannot avoid provoking people you need to accept that you’ll be in a constant state of defense until the prevailing winds change in your favor. That may be a long time.

Reputation management begins before there is a problem.

Michael

Visible Technologies