Following on from my post last week on cleansing your reputation, last Sunday’s UK Times has a follow up written by Rosie Millard on her personal travails with someone hijacking her online reputation.
Rosie goes and talks to some "online reputation management" experts.
Seriously folks, this shouldn’t be a standalone business.
Online reputation management (clear, above board, no shady practices) should be a standard service offered by Public Relations consultants everywhere. If you’re not convinced… according to the article the daily rate for these services is £900.
I rarely hear PR folks talking about this issue and we should be.
“Sometimes this happens to reasonably high-profile people because there are those out there who will buy the domain, put up a site and then snag any casual traffic associated with your name to get ad revenue,” says Michael Fertik, 29, who runs Reputation Defender in California. “And this one looks like a strong site. More than 30,000 people have already visited it, and the longer it stays up, the stronger it gets, because Google prefers legacy over immediacy. We see cases like yours all the time.”
The article references some interesting resources:
- World Intellectual Property Organization Guidelines on Domain Name Dispute Resolution
- Attenalert – keyword monitoring
- Trackur – online reputation montitoring
- Nominet – UK domain dispute resolution
- IEDR – Irish domain dispute resolution
Murphy's Law 