A while back I brought news about a company and website called Unvarnished. They were bringing forward this terrible idea forward that people should be able to anonymously review other people. Despite the chorus of boos they were met with, Unvarnished has captured the attention of the press and of bloggers, and raked in a reported $1.2 million in investments.

The self-described reputation management site, which allows professionals to anonymously submit reviews on their peers, has just renamed its site to “Honestly” and raised $1.2 million from several high-profile firms including First Round Capital,  Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and Charles River Ventures. The round also includes individual investors, like Joshua Schachter, Travis Kalanick, and Richard Chen.

An early round of investments like that could help Unvarnished/Honestly go a long way online. The idea, most online reputation management specialists maintain, is a bad one–but it continues to capture the attention of various investors and press outlets.

Online review sites have become a problem for many industries–including hospitality, restaurant, and virtually any other service industry. It is a good thing that when restaurants have bad service, they are outed–this is an appropriate use of reviewing sites.

However, there is certainly a different way that online review sites get utilized. Much of the time, an online review website is used as a weapon against a particular business. Reviews are often so scathing that they border on delusional or unreasonable. Things that people would never say in public, they are comfortable saying behind the shroud of anonymity. This is the ugly side of online review sites.

This, of course, has a major effect on the industry of reputation management–in which a company or person tries to shield their reputation, online, from nefarious comments from business rivals, disgruntled employees, or random online lurkers.

Is the concept of the online reputation dead? Certainly Mike Arrington at TechCrunch thinks so, and the author of the Telegraph article linked below agrees with him. However, the average person will see a negative comment about them on Google and will not shrug and say, “oh well, you know them Internets!” Rather, they will be concerned, frustrated, perhaps even outraged.

Any individual who is unfairly maligned onlineis going to want to fix the problem. They will want people to find positive commentary on them, not negative comments. With sites like Unvarnished out there–where individuals can comment on other individuals anonymously–this is not a trend that is likely to disappear anytime soon. Luckily, Search Engine Reputation Management is not going anywhere anytime soon, either.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7928259/The-internet-is-completely-useless-for-checking-out-people-and-businesses.html

Sepp Blatter is the new President of FIFA, the international committee in charge of futball/football/soccer, the sport known officially as association football. Blatter has been under scrutiny for the past two months or so because of a number of blown calls in the 2010 World Cup. What does this have to do with Google reputation management?

So you may have heard about Sepp Blatter’s inauspicious arrival on Twitter. If you haven’t, here’s a summary: The FIFA president signed up in June. He tweeted. He promptly got over 20,000 followers, many of whom sent @replies stating how much they disapproved of him and his organisation.

The rest of the article is well worth a read, even for people who could care less about Sepp Blatter or the International Soccer scene. The author derives four lessons from the story, all of which are well stated.

http://www.heavychef.com/4-lessons-sepp-blatter-taught-us-about-online-reputation-management-on-twitter/

Facebook is a word that is likely to be added to the dictionary at some point, and will almost certainly be included in most people’s list of synonyms for words like social, friends, and network. Make no mistake, Facebook is massive and even the continuous threats of poor security and hacked accounts have done little to stem the wave of people registering as Mark Zuckerberg announced that it has now reached the 500 million registered users milestone.

If you have a business or are attempting to manage your online reputation then you should be aware that many individuals, both professionally and as a consumer, use the site to research products and companies. Even if you’re looking for a job you should also consider that prospective employers are now more likely than ever to search for your name on the social network to gain more information about you as a person. The bottom line here is that if you don’t Facebook then not only are you quite unusual among your circle of friends and colleagues but you may be missing out.

If you are a business or website owner then you can even set up a company fan page and use it to attract new potential customers or stay in contact with existing ones. However you choose to use the site you should most definitely choose to use it in some way.

Is Facebook your world?

Do you spend entire days nevermind hours waiting for friends to post on your wall?

This post at SearchEngineJournal is a good one. It analyzes British Petroleum’s online reputation management problem from the vantage point of an experienced professional who knows the ins and outs of the industry.

So BP’s reputation is obviously on the line. Well, “on the line” is a gross understatement, but you know what I’m saying. And in the search engine marketing world, many have taken notice of their aggressive efforts to manage their reputation online.  According to a recent Search Engine Watch article, estimates near $1M a month in spend between Google AdWords and YouTube advertising. BP has also contracted for $50 million worth of television advertising to help manage their reputation throughout the fiasco. Finally, BP has been quite active in the social media sphere, with a Facebook fan page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and Flickr profile.

To be truthful, the search engine marketer in me can’t help but be somewhat impressed and surprised by their proactive and progressive online approach. I’m used to most companies being so far behind the curve when it comes to online reputation management (ORM), and they really have it dialed. But with that said, as an average American, I’m completely offended.

The company has been very proactive in attacking their newfound online reputation management problem. The larger question, which the author raises in the rest of the article, is whether they are being smart about their activity. That remains to be seen, but the author of the article, and many industry professionals, think BP is doing more harm than good with their online campaign.

Concerns about Facebook’s privacy controls have led many people to leave the site and form their own social networks through services like SocialGo and Ning. These are template sites through which users can create their own social networks, no matter how large or small that network is.

June 28, 2010 — More than 60 percent of Facebook users have considered quitting the site because of privacy concerns, according to a recent survey by web security site Sophos. With people slowly losing trust in the social networking site because of its constant, and somewhat sneaky, changes to its security settings, maybe it’s time to look at a new model.

Instead of reluctantly conforming to what Facebook has laid out, thousands of people haven taken their interests and concerns in their own hands and have built their own safe social networking site to keep in touch with a select group of friends, colleagues and people of shared interests.

With services like SocialGO, anyone can customize a site in minutes, selecting from a variety of templates and adding features like messaging and status updates, much like Facebook. Yet unlike behemoth social networking sites, each group can choose their own privacy settings, permissions and a personal URL, along with hosting the site on their very own domain, making it a good white label social network platform for businesses that want to use their own solution. The SocialGO platform allows groups to also create blogs, discussion forums and video chats with its members as well as share photos and events calendars. The site also has a feature known as “concierge”, where they will design the social network site for you and provide full support as you build and integrate the network further.

Thousands of groups are already using SocialGO’s services for professional and personal reasons, including fan clubs, business associations, eCommerce retailers, organisations and a vast number of special interest groups – from pet lovers to video gaming insiders.

With dissatisfaction in Facebook only increasing, last month, “Quit Facebook Day” got more than 34,000 to jump ship – the business of customizing social networking sites will surely grow, as more people branch off to design sites to fit their own needs.

Lack of privacy controls can be a real problem for those clients who already have online reputation management concerns.

Whether you’re an avid microblogger or you’re looking for more sites to include in your online reputation management program, you might be surprised to learn that Twitter isn’t the only such platform on the Internet although it is witbout doubt the most popular and widely used of its kind. Here are three more to get your teeth into:

12 Seconds used to essentially be a Twitter application but has now attempted to branch out on its own. It’s really a micro video blogging platform and rather than providing users with 140 characters of text it encourages users to post video updates that are 12 seconds or less in length. Great for video blogging regulars that are up to a serious challenge.

Posterous is an ideal choice for those that believe micro-blogging should be made as simple as possible. Sign up using nothing more than your active email address and then you can simply email your most recent updates to the increasingly popular website. It even lets you integrate your Posterous updates into social networks like Facebook and even Twitter.

If you’re looking for a single microblogging platform that enables you to do virtually everything you can with other social networking websites FriendFeed gives you all that and more. You can add just about everything from your Facebook updates to your Tweets to your video blogs and display them all in your FriendFeed feed. The problem with this amount of information is that it may well lead to information overload for you and your followers.

Very few people these days comprehend how important Google reputation management can be to a company’s overall success in a public relations campaign. However, if you want evidence of the important of Google reputation management, simply look to what the big companies do when they mess up.

British Petroleum, which is currently facing a lot of heat over their oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is, according to recent reports, buying up Google AdWords related to the spill. They hope to reroute many searchers to webpages which explains BP’s cleanup and restitution initiatives rather than to websites which explain how bad the spill is and how bad it is being handled. Regardless of how one feels about the spill, this news explains exactly how important Google reputation management is.

With thousands of social networks in just about every conceivable category and many of them boasting millions of users from every country, businesses of every size are realising the benefits that they have to offer. One of the simplest and most effective uses of sites like Twitter, for example, is as a customer relations tool but social networks have other uses too.

1 – Job Hunting

Job boards have been overtaken by sites like LinkedIn and Naymz because these social networks are less expensive for the recruiter to use. For the job hunter they can give greater exposure to more jobs and allow a more personal introduction to prospective employers.

2 – Event Promotion

Local businesses and major corporations can get the word out about upcoming events quickly and easily. Join local groups, connect with customers and encourage your customers to let others know. The viral nature of social networking makes it a massive benefit in organising and promoting an event.

3 – Customer Retention

Winning new business is a big challenge for any business, but so too is customer retention. Effective communication is just one aspect of customer retention and by encouraging your customers to become a part of your Facebook, Twitter, or other social network you can engage them using media that they feel comfortable with.

4 – Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re attempting to build or repair a reputation, social networks are highly effective reputation management tools. Many people use search engines as well as social networks to research a company or individual so creating profiles on various networks can help you to improve or bolster your online reputation.