Reputation.comA fair and balanced review

Reputation.com

• Reputation.com (formerly ReputationDefender) is a private online reputation management (ORM) company based in Redwood City, California.

• It provides software and services intended to push down or remove negative information and create higher-ranking content from a company or individual.

Social Media Presence

• Twitter

• YouTube

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

Reputation.com Reviews and Information

• Reputation.com Company Information on Crunchbase - http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reputation-com

• Reputation.com Services Review on Profyling.com - http://www.profyling.com/reputation-management/reputation-com

• Get detailed information on the company’s background and services on it’s Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation.com

Corporate history

• Reputation.com was founded as Reputation Defender by a lawyer, Michael Fertik, in 2006.

• According to Fertik, it was intended to help parents after their children reveal too much online, but most of his clients were young job-seekers. By 2007 it had grown to 55 employees and $2 million in revenue.

Services

• Reputation.com is the most well-known online reputation management company.

• Its tactics and services vary from one client to another and there are separate sets of products for consumers and businesses respectively.

• Get more info on the company’s services, submit feedback and browse customer reviews of Reputation.com services here

The monthly reports

• It may generate monthly reports noting changes in search results or ask websites to remove private information.

• In other cases it will generate websites and social media profiles that are intended to rank higher in searches than negative results. It may also refer some clients to lawyers

Don't make threats

• The company often begins by writing to the operators of websites hosting negative content about the client, asking them to remove the information.

• According to the Wall Street Journal, the letters "don't make threats... but instead try to appeal to recipients' sense of fairness."

Newspapers records

• It generally cannot remove newspapers or court records.

• The company charges its customers at least $1000 a year for its services. In 2007 it introduced a $10,000 service for executives.

Patents

• Reputation.com holds a number of patents. "Detailed sentiment analysis" describes the automated interpretation of a statement such as "Highly acclaimed surgeon John Smith was arrested last night in a prostitution sting."

• Such a sentence may be interpreted by software as positive using a business profile, negative using a legal or vice profile, and neutral using a malfunction profile.

Monitoring for individuals

• Applications described include reputation monitoring for individuals, review of job candidates, or detection of unprofessional speech.

• "Follow-up determination" describes the identification of potential reviewers who have not reviewed a product, and facilitating the transmission of a review request to them.

Targeting review placement

• "Targeting review placement" describes analysis of reviews on several sites, yielding

• "An indication of at least one review site on which the placement of at least one additional review should be targeted

Patented software

• Some of the company’s patented software includes scoring systems used to identify consumer information and generate reputation scores for individuals.

• It has software that locates websites where an individual’s personal data is unknowingly listed and attempt to get it de-listed.

Company Reception

• According to The New York Times, Reputation.com is popular, but controversial, due to its efforts to remove negative information that may be of public interest.

• According to Susan Crawford, a cyberlaw specialist from Cardozo Law School, most websites will remove negative content when contacted to avoid litigation.

Un-intended consequences

• The Wall Street Journal noted that in some cases writing a letter to a detractor can have un-intended consequences.

• Though the company makes an effort to avoid writing to certain website operators that are likely to respond negatively

First Amendment

• The company's CEO says it respects the First Amendment and does not try to remove "genuinely newsworthy speech."

• It generally cannot remove major news stories from established publications or court records.

The harassment of women

• In a 2009 paper in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, law professor Ann Bartow said ReputationDefender was exploiting the harassment of women on the internet for media attention.

• BusinessWeek noted that "Reputation.com scam" was an autocompleted when typing in the company name in Google and that many negative search results were on page 2.

Notable work

• Two months after the company was founded, ReputationDefender was hired to remove online images of 18-year old Nikki Catsouras's lethal car accident, which police said was leaked by an officer.

• The company was able to get the images taken down on about 300 out of 400 websites

Surprisingly effective!

• The New York Post said their effort was "surprisingly effective" but raised concerns that its polite letters were resulting in censorship of material offensive to their clients.

• Newsweek said it was in-effective. ReputationDefender said removing the images was an "unwinnable battle".

Competitors

• BrandYourself – Founded in 2010, BrandYourself is a New York based online reputation management company that specializes in personal branding and DIY approaches to reputation management.

• InternetReputation.com – Online reputation management and internet privacy firm based out of Denver, Colorado. Read and submit customer reviews here.

See a complete listing of Reputation.com competitors here.

To sum it up!

• In a nutshell, online reputation management, or ORM as it's known, is the practice of making people and businesses look their best on the Internet.

• To accomplish that, people need to control their online search results because they frequently contain inaccurate, misleading, or outdated material which can adversely influence how web searchers view them.

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