Wal-Mart Stores Inc. agreed to pay about $12 million in back wages and damages as well as hire more female applicants for warehouse jobs to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency announced Tuesday.

Wal-Mart already suffers from a serious web libel problem. Simply plugging their name into Google will bring up a number of bad links on the first page–this is not good for a company that is international in scope.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704548604575098192684023802.html?mod=WSJ_business_whatsNews

Since 1984, Kathleen Hessert has run Charlotte-based Sports Media Challenge. A major part of her operation is crisis management.

“Over the years, crisis management has probably been 40 percent of our business, and at times it is 110 percent,” she said.

Hessert isn’t working for Tiger Woods, but has definite opinions on what he has and has not done.

“The lack of answering questions speaks volumes about where he is and about his psyche right now,” Hessert said.

Damage control is a huge deal in this case, just as reputation management services is when someone is slandered online.

http://www.wcnc.com/sports/Charlotte-Expert-In-Reputation-Management-Weighs-In-On-Tigers-Statement-84797162.html

“I had a good reputation before all this started,” Dallas plastic surgeon Dr. Jack Gunter told the magazine, explaining that he is the subject of the Website nosejobgonebad.com. “The person who started that Website never filed a malpractice suit because he knew it wasn’t malpractice; it was a complication,” the doctor said. But since the angry patient chose to post video and photos of his complications, the implication is that Dr. Gunter botched the surgery.

The medical industry is now in the process of understanding how detrimental online defamation can be to doctors and medical firms.

http://www.theplasticsurgerychannel.com/breaking-news/plastic-surgeons-fear-bad-online-buzz.html

It is a more direct form of marketing. Again, this point was made to manage the expectations of those who use social media marketing. If they expect the results to be similar to PPC performance based online advertising, they will be disappointed. Social media is not PPC, it is about relationship building, reputation management, and sharing of ideas and knowledge. Relationships, two-way communications channels, and reputation management are becoming more and more important in the business world today. Therefore the importance of building relationships is paramount.

The rest of the article is well-worth reading, but the point is that social media has been incredibly important.With the rise of social media, reputation management has increased in importance also.

http://technorati.com/business/article/some-common-concerns-about-social-media2/

The survey was conducted in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France. Outside the U.S., the impact of online information on hiring appears to be less significant. In the U.K., 41% of responding recruiters and HR professionals said they’d rejected candidates following the discovery of negative online information. In Germany and France, the rates were 16% and 14% respectively.

One reason for the disparity may be that 75% of recruiters and HR personnel in the U.S. report that their companies have formal policies requiring them to research job applicants online. In the U.K., only 48% of recruiting and HR respondents said their companies had policies of this sort. And in Germany and France, that number is 21%.

If these numbers seem high, then it should serve as a warning to be careful about social networking. Or, if the damage has been done, to utilize web reputation management.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600171

There is a fascinating post, pasted below, that describes how exactly a search engine works. The article covers with basics with incredibly clarity.

Long before you start to worry about actually ranking content, you need to get it into the index. And of course, to do that, your content needs to be found. In the world of information retrieval this is, appropriately enough, known as ‘discovery’. This in itself can be known as a few things including ‘data mining’ ‘knowledge discovery’ and so on. Regardless of the terminology, I thought it would be fun to get back to basics and look at how search engines might go about it…

The whole article is great and very instructive.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-search-engines-find-your-content/16809/

http://mashable.com/2009/12/16/community-engagement/

ComputerWorld, BusinessWeek, and TIME have all recognized that one of the leaders in the Online Reputation Management industry is Reputation Hawk. This company is one of the most respected and, pardon the pun, reputable, in the industry. Why? I have looked through a number of customer reviews and found that their services seem to work both better and faster than many of their competitors. So, what is it that an online reputation management company actually does?

Often the Internet is the source of anonymous attacks on both company’s and individual’s reputations. For commercial and personal reasons, a reputation is important. Companies value a reputation because it can effect branding, marketing, and advertising. Individuals value their online reputations because that often dictates what someone thinks of them. An online reputation largely consists of social networking profiles and search results. When people go out to a restaurant, make a major purchase, or go see a movie these days—they first look it up in a search engine, usually Google. The search engines reveals pages upon pages of results, but most people only look at the first one or two pages. This is what makes up a person or company’s online reputation.

So how does ReputationHAWK fit in? They are able to manipulate your search results and make them look how you want, given enough time. Although this isn’t an instant thing, it can take months, what company wouldn’t want to have their search results reflect a more positive outlook on their company?