Reputation management has been considered an important part of business for decades, and it has recently come to the fore again thanks to the number of businesses and consumers that now use the Internet. What’s more, when we search for information about a company, product, or person, we are still more likely to use search engines than any other method of searching and finding information.

This combination makes it very important that we consider our search engine reputation. While the search engines themselves do not directly post a positive or negative spin on businesses or websites, they do display pages and websites that are relevant to specific search phrases. If, when people search for your business name, they find negative press at the top of the results they will not be inclined to deal with your or the company that you represent.

Search engine reputation management offers a means to bury any negative posts that appear in the results. Burying posts means consigning them to page 2 and beyond in Google and the other major search engines.

Ensuring that your site appears at the top of the results should be the first step. If you have your own blog then this should feature prominently too.

Following these personally owned sites, it is possible to have social networking profiles, articles, press releases, social bookmarks, and positive reviews feature in search results.

Search engine reputation management isn’t just about recovering from bad press either. It also means ensuring that when people do search for you or your company, they are faced with positive or informative results.

LinkedIn is one of many social networking platforms, but it is certainly the most popular one for business needs. Now, LinkedIn is enhancing the social networking experience by offering the ability to control who sees what information.

One of the most useful parts of Facebook has always been the ability to control which members of your network have access to which information. For example, you could set your filters so that your family and professional contacts were seeing different items and updates. LinkedIn has finally adopted this feature, giving users’ complete control over who sees which updates – whether it’s everyone, specific connections, a group you belong to or a specific user. Depending on how you use your LinkedIn statuses, this can be a really powerful way to target individual pieces of content toward the right audience. It gets rid of that firehouse effect that we often get trying to share information in social networking and ciphers directly into the group you’re most interested in reaching.

This is a smart move on LinkedIn’s part, it prevents prospective employers from Googling you and seeing information you do not want them to find (though you shouldn’t be putting that info on LinkedIn anyway). Basically, they’re offering individuals a chance to engage in their own personal web reputation management campaign.

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/04/linkedin-increases-social-sharing-options.html

Unvarnished is a new site that purports to be like social networking site Yelp–but for individuals instead of businesses. The site has been roughly criticized in the press this past week because of concerns that the site will basically just turn into a place for misanthropes to participate in online defamation.

However, people won’t have the choice as to whether they’re reviewed or have the power to get reviews deleted. They may not even know others are writing about them, unless they seek out the site or the person reviewing chooses to have a courtesy email sent.

It’s not a total free for all though, with Unvarnished claiming they’ve introduced safeguards like an internal reviewer rating system, so people know which reviews to give weight to. People will also have the ability to respond to reviews.

I’m glad there is a system set up to safeguard against online defamation, I just hope its enough. Even Yelp has become an environment which allows for a good deal of online libel.

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/04/06/2010-04-06_getunvarnishedcom_allows_users_to_anonymously_review_coworkers.html

Hotels are more dependent upon online reviews than most industries. TripAdvisor is the most respect online review website for that industry, and thus swings a lot of weight around on these issues. With 32 million unique monthly visitors and 15 million members, TripAdvisor is capable of making or destroying any Hotel’s online reputation. HotelInteractive has a great interview on the subject.

Social media is all about managing your hotel’s online reputation, and no platform wields more influence on travel decisions than TripAdvisor. Recently, I interviewed April Robb, TripAdvisor’s Social Media Program Manager, responsible for social media outreach, brand monitoring, and blogger relations. She offered up some great advice to hoteliers for managing online reviews.

Unlike most of the Internet and most review-sites, TripAdvisor also has a system to check fraudulent reviews.

http://www.hotelinteractive.com/article.aspx?articleid=16602