The Final Word on Reputation Management Ethics

With a recent flurry of blog posts on the subject of Reputation Management Ethics, I thought we would have to take a look on this subject in our own unique, detailed way and try to ‘wrap up the discussions’. Lots of top bloggers have covered it, many in response to an article from Computer World, some with issues of their own regarding an actual product.

The reason a lot of people are asking whether reputation management is ethical, is because one of the ‘processes’ of the service is cleaning up negative search results. However, if those search results had of shown the company in a true light (which is negative for whatever reason) is it wrong to try and make them look good?

Examples - And What We Would Do

1. Zicam - Zicam has a few negative results when you search for Zicam tastebuds in Google, which you would probably do if you lost your sense of taste like Tamar. Even with a simple search for Zicam, results 4 and 5 cover loss of taste and lawsuits against them, but would it be ethical to help push them down and possibly have more people facing the issue?

What We Would Do - First of all, we would not try to create a ton of pages around the term Zicam so they can start ranking positively for simple information about their brand online, that is unethical.

What we would do is advise them to blog about the issues in an open manner, offer tips on how to resolve the issues or how Zicam can help you if you have been affected. This will probably get linked too by a lot of people, still show that they have issues but help searchers see how to deal with the issue, but let it all be on the Zicam site where they can ‘control the conversation’.

2. People that have been Convicted of a Crime - Not everything that people want ‘cleaning up’ is in regards to brands or corporations, many times it’s personal. A lot of people that want to clean up results for their name have been involved in some form of a crime that has been written about on multiple sources online.

What We Would Do - To be honest it depends on the type of crime, if someone is convicted of rape or murder then we certainly wouldn’t go near it. However, if someone is released after being found innocent to what they were originally reported it would often be a task of trying to increase the rankings of the updated news articles which document this.

We would probably also create 1 page that documents the whole situation and try to get that ranking as high as possible for the persons name.

3. Using Profile Sites for Positive Rankings - This is one thing that I have suggested to do in the past, although some people can use them wrongly. It involves creating articles or profiles on user-generated content websites in order to rank for certain terms.

What We Would Do - As stated this is something we do but some think of it as unethical so I want to make things a little clearer here. Although I’ve never created forum profiles for rankings, if I ever did I would make sure to contribute some very useful information to the forum and try to offer something back. Regarding content sites like Hubpages and Squidoo which we do use, I wouldn’t put together some small little page that offered nothing.

We make sure to use a large amount of quality information, and make use of any ‘modules’ such as Flickr photos or Poll’s where necessary to make it an interesting page no matter who lands on it.

To Summarise

We can’t guarantee that other companies are going to ever give completely ethical services, especially when it comes to helping ’shift’ negative search engine results. However, here are a few things we promise:

• Always advise companies to be open and honest about their practices. One of the best ways to start cleaning an online reputation is to simply be a more transparent company.
• Don’t help hide things that show dishonesty or things that people should be able to find. If you were a murderer and have just been released after a 30 year sentence and are looking for a job, google should probably be ‘allowed’ to tell people that
• We won’t take on a job when these aren’t met. Sure it can mean more money, and at the end of the day that is why people are in business but if it is against our ethics then it’s not worth it.
• Help our clients become real. Offering advice on such things like starting blog by giving advice to an actual staff member, get staff members conversing in the areas online where they can offer their expertise to known problems…don’t be the company for them.

There are many more examples of reputation management where ethics can come into play, but if theres something you would like our thoughts on directly, just leave a comment below.

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