The internet is a powerful medium. One negative comment on a blog and your brand could be ruined in minutes. But there is help at hand. Claire Coleman talks to some of the PR companies offering online reputation management

When US blogger Oliver Starr decided to part company with British start-up BlogNation last month, he wrote a letter of resignation to the firm's founder, Sam Sethi. With their relationship in pieces over a wage dispute, it was a last opportunity for Starr to vent spleen at his former employer before moving on to pastures new. Even for a seasoned blogger it was a vitriolic attack—over 3,000 words of wrath and bile. Still more astonishing was Starr's choice of medium: he posted his letter live on the BlogNation website.

Sethi was quick to remove the offending post, but the blogosphere was quicker. Within minutes, Starr's letter was everywhere. Technology news site Techcrunch was inundated with posts—some in vociferous support for Sethi, many more backing Starr. Sethi even posted a couple of replies himself, further fanning the flames of the dispute. Conducting an argument in private is one thing, but a full-scale row on one of the industry's most important websites is quite another. From a public relations point of view, it was career suicide.

But BlogNation isn't a lone example. Every day, thousands of businesses are discussed, analysed, rated and slated on the internet, be it on blogs, forums or news sites. And the juicier the information, the more indelible the mark. Despite this, many are slow to recognise the benefits of managing their online presence, and the losses that can be inherent in not doing so.

Nicholine Hayward of Hayward Carbery, a company that specialises in online consultancy explains: "The way people use the internet has changed very quickly. It's often the first port of call for information, whether you're a consumer, an analyst, a potential client, potential staff or a journalist. But many brands that don't sell online don't realise quite how important it is to them. Just because nobody's buying [from you] online doesn't mean the internet doesn't affect you."

Indeed, your online presence could be more influential than your offline existence, because of the sheer number of internet users out there.
Angie Petkovic, managing director of APT Marketing and PR, is so concerned about the amount of "digital dirt" flying around the internet that she is helping clients to manage it. "It's not just about looking at the information they voluntarily put out there, but also monitoring what's said about them," she explains. "We hope to correct any information that's wrong, or ask for it to be removed." And she thinks individuals should be doing the same. "People should treat the internet as you would any other publication. You're within your rights to ask someone to remove factual inaccuracies; but deleting opinions, be they your own or someone else's, can be trickier."

Hayward Carbery has a similar service. "If a company takes us on," says Hayward, "we will look at their current position: whether their website is search-engine friendly, how they are perceived, what blogs and comparison sites have to say about them and their products. Then we'll look at what they need to do: whether that's setting up a corporate blog that gives them a place to respond, making changes to ensure their website moves up the rankings in search engines, or distributing press releases. We also encourage clients to think about what could go wrong—what's the worst-case scenario in terms of PR? For example, if Bernard Matthews had been one of our clients, we would have made sure we had a bird flu strategy."

She suggests that the turkey manufacturer could have bought up the relevant search terms in Google's AdWords programme, so that users typing in certain key phrases would see the company's "sponsored links" at the top of the search results. It could even have drafted a webpage in advance to be published in the event of a problem. "As it was, its online response was slow and, consequently, ineffective," says Hayward.

People use the internet to search negatively, but pre-emptive strikes can ensure they see the company perspective first. "BP does this very well," says Hayward. "Put 'BP' and 'climate change' into Google and many of the top hits are positive because they're BP's own site, or Friends of the Earth talking about BP. Conversely, put 'Nike' and 'sweatshop' into Google and there's no official Nike line on it—this makes it look arrogant and like it doesn't care."

Hayward's firm charges £3,000 a day and a typical project will cost around £25,000. But then, a negative campaign could cost a lot more. "When Jeff Jarvis started blogging about Dell computers, it caused such a riot that Dell was forced to issue a profits warning—that's the power of the internet," she says.

An increasing number of PR and consultancy firms are starting to offer this sort of service, but in June last year, Reputica, the UK's first company dedicated solely to reputation tracking and management, launched.
According to chairman Andrew Jordan: "Reputica trawls the online world, in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking for material that could change the reputation of a company, brand or individual. It then checks that it's got the right 'John Smith', from the right company, and gives the article a positive or negative score depending on how it could impact on reputation. This is the ReputicaRating."

In addition to telling you whether your reputation is improving or deteriorating, the company can help you predict where a story will be picked up, so that you can get involved and tell your side of things.
Reputica also offers a service for executive search agencies, providing background on candidates for CEO posts, gleaned from what is written about them on the Web. It's just one example of the implications for individuals of their own online presence. The huge growth in social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Friends Reunited, means individuals may be posting large amounts of information that they might not really want in the public domain. Those crazy pictures of you posing in head-to-toe PVC for a fancy-dress party might have been hilarious, but it's hardly the sort of image you'd send out on company stationery, or attach to a CV that you're mailing to a potential new employer. But by posting them on the internet, that's effectively what you're doing.

A recent Harris Interactive poll showed that 23 per cent of people search the names of business associates or colleagues on the Net before meeting them; and according to a survey by US website Recruiters World, 63 per cent of recruiters are googling job candidates.

Sean Fleming, managing director of Clarity PR, is not surprised. "When I was looking to hire a new employee last year, it struck me that we were taking on trust a lot of what we were being told by applicants," he says. "I used to be a journalist, so I'm into second sourcing and, as a company, when we pitch to new clients, we always research them on the internet first. Doing the same with our applicants seemed to make sense. I took a shortlist of 10 to 15 people and put their names into Friends Reunited, Google and MySpace. Obviously, when names are common, it's difficult to know if you've got the right person, but two of the candidates proved particularly interesting."

Fleming discovered "some slightly eye-popping pictures" of one candidate on a modelling website—a pitch for work that made him question her commitment to PR. But more worrying was another who said on her CV that she had a 2:1 degree, but on her Friends Reunited profile said she'd left university early to get a job. It transpired she had lied on her CV.

Fleming feels justified in this sort of cyber-snooping. "It levelled the playing field and I'd do it again. Seeing what people say about themselves is very revealing. People have to remember that these sites are in the public domain. They use them in a very informal way with a close circle of friends and forget that anybody could be reading what they write."

This type of reputation management is a new area and the potential for it to expand is huge. Michael Fertik is CEO of Reputation Defender, a US company based in Kentucky that launched in 2006 to help individuals monitor their online presence. "The internet provides a large forum for people to attack individuals by posting inaccurate information and, until now, there has been no way for them to defend themselves."

The firm is working on a new product for businesses. With a working title of MyEdge, the aim will be to improve online profile, from visibility in Web searches to brand management. "It would be an online proactive PR service, costing anything from £6,000 to £600,000-plus," says Fertik. "It's the sort of thing that can take time to gather momentum, but when it does, you'll really start seeing results."

This might sound a little Machiavellian and indeed, much has been made of "floggers"—people planted on public sites to stir up support for a product—but both Hayward and Fertik are against this sort of thing. "As a company, we will never lie for a client and we will never pretend to be someone we're not. But there are ways to accentuate the positive and play down the negative without lying," says Fertik.

Hayward's strategy is total honesty. "We advise our clients to be open and declare their interests, because things do get found out. When a blog about two people travelling across the US and camping out in Wal-Mart car parks was exposed as a PR stunt, there was a huge backlash. The online community accepts that certain things are commercially backed, but not being upfront about it will cause problems in the long run."