Italian prosecuters have pointed to Silvio Scaglia, the billionaire founder of FastWeb SpA, as part of the ring of a tax-evaders and money launderers.

Scaglia, being held in Rome’s Rebibbia jail, said today during his questioning that FastWeb was the “victim” of a scam, his lawyer Pier Maria Corso told reporters in Rome. Scaglia should be recognized as “absolutely uninvolved with any wrongdoing, if it existed,” Corso said.

I always presume innocence, unless the facts clearly attest otherwise, but expect the Internet to have a field day with this one. The Italian blogosphere, possibly fueled by rivals, disgruntled former employees, and unsatisfied customers of FastWeb, will assume guilt as they always do–innocence doesn’t get as many hits. A bit of international reputation management could help him immensely right about now.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-02/fastweb-s-conduct-absolutely-correct-scaglia-says-update1-.html

Yelp! is a company that compiles reviews from customers about particular businesses. It has been so successful because people can literally log onto their iPhone at the restaurant and let off some steam about how their steak was medium, not medium rare. This sort of feedback from customers has created a major shift, putting the brand image in the hands of irritable and tech-savvy customers, rather than clever marketing executives. However, Yelp! appears to have been involved in some shady practices recently.

“When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like [the negative comments] have been moved,” a restaurant owner told East Bay Express. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant.” The owner said that a sales rep offered to remove negative reviews for $299 per month.

That’s not good. It’s things like this that cast a shadow on the industry of search reputation management, a legitimate industry which serves a productive and positive purpose.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/yelp-facing-class-action-suit-over-extortive-ad-sales.ars

The obvious is confirmed: employers look at your social networking pages. When an employer interviews you these days, you should assume that they either already have, or are going to, plug your name into a search engine and sift through the results.

The survey done by Microsoft found that 70 percent of HR professionals in the U.S. have rejected a job applicant based on what they found out about that individual by searching online (that number is lower in other countries).

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, though the number is a tad higher than most people assumed. The personal reputation management industry can, of course, prevent this from being such a major problem.

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/27/yes-virginia-hr-execs-check-your-facebook-page/

Was the Toyota recall an engineering problem? Definitely. But the reason it has become such a media feeding-frenzy is because of failures by the management and public relations people at Toyota. Professor Daniel Diermeier penned an excellent explanation of these failures for BusinessWeek last week.

This situation escalated because of what the company didn’t do early on—which was try to rebuild trust. And there are different aspects to that. Take transparency, for one. That it took 10 days for the president to deal with the issue and that it was originally in the hands of the U.S. head of sales sends the message that there isn’t the right level of accountability.

Toyota has to re-establish the belief among customers that quality is the most important thing for the company.

The whole article is good, I highly suggest reading it. Prof. Diermeier accurately pinpoints the problems Toyota has had, not with engineering, but with their reputation management strategies.

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca2010029_503075.htm

Social networking sites have recently become a focal point for individuals in the international reputation management industry. There has been a lot of excitement because social networking sites attract so much traffic, and therefore there exists a great opportunity for using social networking sites and profiles as tools in the international reputation management business.

Sounds easy enough, right? After all, there are more than a couple of social media sites to choose from. The question is, are they strong enough to be built up to the first page and maintain rank? Are they powerful enough to do what online reputation management (ORM) combined with search engine optimization (SEO) is often meant for, namely to keep a bad review, lawsuit filing, or anti-fan site off the first page where the majority of searchers get their first impressions?

The article linked below asks all the right questions regarding social media and international reputation management.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/go-beyond-the-default-social-profile-strategy/16798/

There are a host of reasons why every company or individual should engage in online reputation strategies. The ability to control your brand, or reputation, is of incalculable importance. Angry customers, disgruntled employees, and competitors will often go online to disparage companies and individuals, but the damage can be contained–or prevented–by a decent campaign of reputation management. The article below lists four of the “damn good” reasons that every company should utilize online reputation services.

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/43011.html

Reputations are important, especially to commercial enterprises. Even small businesses will often have several thousand dollars a year in order to earn a decent reputation in their community. Large companies, like Walmart, McDonalds, and Shell, spend millions of dollars per year proving that they are reputable companies who do good work. The Internet is quickly becoming the best way for companies to connect to customers, but it is also fraught with problems that do not exist in the real world. From within the anonymous confines of the web, dissatisfied customers, disgruntled former employees, and malicious pranksters can launch into tirades against certain businesses, services, individuals, or products, regardless of whether their claims have any truth to them whatsoever.

These anonymous attacks often get indexed by search engines and displayed in the search results of whatever company, individual, or product is being attacked. This can ruin their reputation with their customers, friends, or clients—through no fault of their own.

ReputationHAWK is a company that helps to decrease the effect of these online assailants by decreasing the importance of their negative comments in search engines. Their website is located at ReputationHawk.com, where you can look at how the company got started and learn all about the founder of the company, Chris Martin. The company is known for its highly effective strategy, whereby it displaces negative links and puts, in their stead, positive articles about the company or individual. This is the key to Reputation Hawk’s success, results. Their penchant for success has gotten them major media attention in TIME magazine, Businessweek, and ComputerWorld.

Companies spend months, sometimes years, building up decent reputations. However, all of that hard work and dedication can be virtually destroyed in a matter of hours by some blogger with an axe to grind. All he needs to do is put out some material on complaint boards and such and he can diminish your company’s reputation by making the search results reflect his complaints. Luckily, there are reputation management strategies that have been developed to put a stop to this.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html

This article on Yahoo Finance is absolutely correct about many aspects of the business reputation management industry. However, it is incorrect to state that the reputation management industry is not effective–some businesses certainly are. Like all industries, though, some of the firms are more effective than others in actually doing their jobs.
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/105009/Do-Reputation-Management-Services-Work

The industry of business reputation management just got a big sign of approval from the guys that everyone wants support from–Google. Their blog now boasts a post which explains how to personally manage your online reputation. This is likely due to increased pressure from people who want Google to remove certain listings.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-gives-a-thumbs-up-to-reputation-management.html