The Internet has drastically changed how a reputation is made or broken. In the real world offline, it used to take years to establish a reputation. If your reputation was challenged or impugned, you had rights. Professional journalists were the only ones with a means to distribute news, and they not only had a set of ethics to go by, but you could sue them for libel if freedom of speech crossed the line. In the online world of today, a reputation can be ruined forever instantaneously in the time that it takes to click a mouse. There are no rules, anyone can be a publisher, and can reach millions with their smear campaign in just a few seconds.
If you are looking for a job or to promote your business, prospective employers and clients now will “google” you and form the basis of their opinion from the first one to two pages of search results. Nobody at Google manages those search results. It’s all done by computer. Google’s algorithm doesn’t care about your reputation. Its function is to display the results of key words in your search and rank them according to the most popular sites – the sites with the most traffic. It doesn’t care if the information is accurate or false – it only cares about its popularity. And, human nature being the way it is, often the most popular sites are the ones that contain the most scandalous information. In this way, your reputation can be ruined by gossip in a few keystrokes. And this gossip doesn’t fade away with time like it did in the offline world. It stays online forever, and affects your life in the offline world as well.
It only takes one bully, ex-lover, or jealous co-worker to ruin your reputation, and they use the full power of Google and the worldwide web to do it. They steal and manipulate your photos, violate your right to privacy, plant rumors and false information, and ruin your good name. The Internet has become the primary source of information about all people, all services, and all companies and products. Unlike credit, in which you have some rights over your credit profiles under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have no recourse over most of these people, who trash your name behind a shield of anonymity that was once reserved for political discourse. The management of your online reputation will become more important than the management of your credit in the years to come. Credit controls the large purchases you make. Reputation controls your income. Without an income, your credit will mean nothing.
With effective reputation monitoring and aggressive reputation management, you can control how others see you on the Internet. By publishing positive and accurate information in the right places, you too can harness the power of Google to tell your own story about yourself, your product or your business instead of handing over your good name to a band of anonymous Internet thugs whose joy in life is to see other people suffer, according to Valentina Nesterova at Reputations R US, Inc. “Reputations R US was founded to help people take back their online reputation. We know that it takes years to build a reputation and only a few seconds to destroy it,” says Nesterova.
Reputations R US is one of several companies popping up on the web who offer affordable plans for online reputation repair and ongoing management. “You can choose from our affordable products, like “Name Erase” which erases information about you from spy sites and search sites, or “Reputation Cleaner” which creates positive information about you on the Internet, designed to push negative information down in online search results,” says Nesterova. “Or, for tough cases, we have comprehensive aggressive plans, and even attorney assistance.”
To find out more about Reputations R US, you can visit them on the worldwide web at: http://reputationsrus.net.