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This article from entrepreneur.com lists six different strategies for dealing with online reputation problems. Here at Online Reputation Tracker, we would like to use our expertise to weigh in on this article — while there’s nothing wrong with using ANY of these tools to help manage how you look on the internet, and how you […]
Do you recall reading the following story in the news? While it never made the national news, here at Online Reputation Tracker we absolutely found a copy of this story in the local papers. It’s about a couple who got really kinky one evening with handcuffs, but lost the key to said handcuffs in the middle of “the act” (so to speak); of course, not having any way to release the individual in question from the handcuffs, they decided to call the police to have them do it for them. This may have sounded like a good idea; in other words, it passed the “reasonable man test” since it’s absolutely true that police stations and police officers have master keys that can open handcuffs; but it was not the best option to deal with this exact situation perhaps, because one of the individuals in question had an active warrant out for their arrest. When the officers finally arrived and did a standard check for this in regards to both individuals, one of them was arrested.
You’ll notice we have not given out their names, though the story is true, nor have we linked to any article in the news about it. This is because instances such as that, can be a disaster for Online Reputation Management. That’s because since the story is true, their names ended up in the newspapers due to this event, and the newspapers gave an accounting of the sex act (but did not directly describe it) plus the handcuffs (and the arrest and the warrant) and newspapers always keep online archives of their articles; this is embarrassing to say the least, but also, it is the case that if someone does a google search for those people’s names, now or ten years later, the incident in question would come up on page one. So, even after the person has handled the legal side of it (and even if the incident doesn’t show up on a background check a decade or so after the fact, as is the law in many US states) what comes up on a google search has the very serious potential of preventing that person from getting a job or any sort of employment at all. So it has potential to ruin their prospects for a very long time or even for life.
This is what makes Online Reputation Management so important, in fact, it is possible to deal with problems such as that should they arise, by driving negative search results far down in the rankings, so it becomes very unlikely anyone will see them at all – employers or anyone else. Studies show, that once listings are past page two on a google search, the probability of no one ever seeing them becomes higher than 98 percent (yes, you heard that right). So is it possible to drive negative search results to a place where they can no longer cause any further harm? Indeed, that’s what ORM is all about, and it’s not just for individuals. Check out more of our articles on how it can help businesses too. Indeed, we’ll cover all this here at Online Reputation Tracker.