REGULAR RANTS

You wake up one morning and scan the net for your name, just on impulse.  Your jaw drops when you find the search engine top results show nice colorful articles about you, describing you as a sleazebag, or worse.  All these articles having been written about you by a former employee or business associate who just was out to destroy whatever good reputation you had.  Worse still, it was possible that what was said about you was not entirely untrue.  Man, this is bad for business.

What do you do?

You fight back.

1. Sue the ass off the chap for libel or defamation.  However as I mentioned earlier, if the claims were not entirely untrue you would have a bit of a problem there.
2. Counter these claims.  Employ an online reputation management firm.  If you have never heard of one, these are guys who are a combination of public relations experts and SEO (search engine optimisation) experts.  What they do is to get these negative reports about you off the search engine results by flooding the net with at least 15 good articles or good news releases which have been carefully crafted so that they get picked up and listed by search engines at the top of search results for your name, and thereby pushing the bad stuff off the cliff, so to speak.

That’s only the beginning.  What these guys do (after getting you to sign a maintenance contract that could land you in the poorhouse…. but nevermind, at least you get to go with a good reputation) after this is what they call a maintenance phase where the net continues being fed with some good stuff now and then.