Repumatic is a service that allows users to handle their own online reputation management. They are able to do this thanks to the clever way in which Repumatic was designed and is run.

Repumatic was founded by Chris Martin, who is the CEO and Founder of Reputation Hawk LLC. He has been involved in the industry of Internet reputation management since 2007, when the field was still in its infancy.

His suit says prospective employers used the information to disqualify him from jobs he was seeking. He has, he says, effectively been blacklisted.

In his current lawsuit, Jason adds that filing this new case will only make the matter worse, because the same search engines now have another Jason Nieman lawsuit to feature when someone searches. He said he tried to avoid court this time too, sending polite letters to each company, asking for their help in removing that old case from their websites.

“A couple of keystrokes could eliminate this,” Jason told me. “But they won’t do it. You look and there’s nothing else negative about me on the Internet. Nothing.”

So why don’t the search engines remove it? Probably because if they begin removing certain listings for certain people, they might be legally liable for doing so for others. It’s also simply because there are literally thousands upon thousands of these cases.

Stop for a second and think about your reputation. How do your friends, family and co-workers see you?  Now what about your online reputation?  Think you don’t have one?

If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist or have ever sent an email, you’ve got one.  With all this technology at our fingertips it’s never been easier to hop online and update your status or post a picture to Facebook and it’s never been easier for someone to search you.

People are searching for your name, whether you want them to or not, and this means you have a reputation on the web, whether you want to or not.

The judge in the original lawsuit ordered the Indianapolis Business Journal and WRTV to identify online commenters, and although both parties disagreed, they complied with the judge’s order.Miller’s attorney, who has filed 19 separate lawsuits, said his client’s reputation has been damaged beyond repair.”He is in another city. I’m not at liberty to say where,” said attorney Kevin Betz. “He is no longer socially or professionally able to live in Indianapolis because of this campaign of smear against him on these websites that provided anonymity to those defamers.”

Websites are not liable for these comments–that is long established law, but whether they should protect those commenters in court is another matter altogether and one that will be interesting to see solved by the courts.

Web hosts and ISPs should be allowed to keep allegedly defamatory comments online as long as the author of the comment is identified and a notice of complaint is published alongside the comment, a Parliamentary committee has recommended.

Of course, the United Kingdom is not the same court system as the United States–but they are somewhat related. If you’re wondering “how does this help to protect my reputation?” Good question–I have no idea.

My company, online reputation management specialist BrandsEye, extensively monitored Tuesday’s conversation and discovered through our research that more than 5 000 people took online part in the conversation about the disciplinary across the country. Based on their respective levels of influence, this conversation reached an astonishing 8,4m people by our estimates.

The measurement in the article concerns a particular event in South Africa, but it serves as a microcosm, an experiment that is well worth observing and learning from. Think–how much would it cost to protect my reputation? Yours? Brad Pitt’s?

Without forcing it, try to optimize several pages on your site with your most important search phrase: your company name, Beal advises. Mention your company name on pages that describe your products or services, for instance. Make sure you have a page optimized with the name of your CEO or other top officials as well.

Here’s why: Google is likely to see your site as the ultimate authority on your company, and authoritativeness is an important signal Google uses when ranking content. With proper keyword optimization, your content will therefore surface to the top of search results. On the flip side, with proper optimization you’ll have a better chance of pushing down less-positive content that mentions your company by name.

Good advice, all. The entire article is well worth reading.

First of all, businesses should know that comments can come from anywhere, and may or may not be based in fact. Therefore, trying to logically address the situation online will usually only backfire.

This will only further spark the flame, as the irate party now knows that they have the attention of the business. If a business is on the receiving end of behavior such as this, that business should take the conversation private as soon as possible, and never address the remarks on the same forum as the flamer.

Also, a business may find itself in the middle of an unsavory situation that it had absolutely nothing to do with. However, association with unsavory agents can still affect the online reputation of a business. If nothing else, a business should set up an alert to be notified by the search engines whenever its name is used online.

Real time search, recently announced by Google, also means new pitfalls for the business world. People being able to search for results in real time and in social media means that monitoring what is said about a business online, also in real time, is especially important.

A business should also make sure to “grab” all of the instances of its name online, including a URL of the business with its name in it, URLs with different suffixes, vanity URLs on the major social media sites, local listings on the search engines, etc. This also has positive implications for search engine results, as the more pages that are kept active, the more the search engines will rank those pages highly within their results. This also helps to push down any negative results that may pop up in reference to a business, so the time spent to create and maintain these profiles is well worth it.

Below are further resources pertaining to protecting the online reputation of a business.

1. http://www.pcworld.com/article/188207/how_to_protect_your_reputation_online.html – an article from a top online publisher and computer review site about how to protect the online reputation of a business.
2. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/10/earlyshow/main4711988.shtml – a CBS news item about how to protect a business’ online reputation.
3. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/051407-online-reputation.html – an article which lists top ways to specifically protect the online reputation of a business online