Honest review sites are an important and valuable part of the information ecosystem. Yet often search engines amplify what should be a whisper to a scream. Who are the players in the bad news ecosystem? Reputation X studied 1000 people and companies with online reputation problems and here's what we learned.

You've written great content (or someone else has written it), now what do you do? Just post it and pray for traffic? That's not good enough. Instead, schedule multiple social postings and then syndicate your content. Here is how to do it in two 'sort of easy' steps. 

Summary

On May 30th, 2003 it was reported that Barbra Streisand sued a man claiming an invasion of her privacy because he shared aerial pictures of her Malibu home. Streisand inadvertently attracted more attention to her home by trying to suppress the images. The Streisand Effect is when the action of suppressing something to reduce or remove visibility it causes the opposite to happen. Similar terms include blowback and astroturfing. 

Online identity management is a subset of online reputation management in that it deals with the management of who a person appears to be online. One example of online identity management is the use of different personas for various online interactions in an attempt to mask personal identity exposure. Another is the use of a persons true persona online, but in a carefully managed way using search engine marketing, content management and public relations strategies.

Here's a question we get a lot from clients: What is a guest post? How is it different than a regular blog post? A Guest Post is a an article written and posted on someone else's blog. When you write something on your own blog its just a "post", but on someone elses blog the writer is a ‘guest’. Guest posts are valuable tools for reputation marketing for a number reasons like getting your brand mentioned or occupying branded search query results. But most people use them to embed backlinks. Guest posts are abused though, and we'll get to that later in this article. 

This is article four in a series of five that discusses the nuts and bolts of bespoke online reputation management services intended to either push down bad search results, or move good ones up.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a business or an individual: If you’re you asking, “how can I fix my reputation online?” you’re not alone.

Reputation management isn’t rocket science but, to be effective, it must be governed by a process that adapts to every campaign’s unique aspects. For most campaigns, this process consists of these five steps: