BusinessReport.com

Chris Martin doesn’t have to worry about his online reputation as much as some people. If you Google his name, you get pages and pages of results about the lead singer of the band Coldplay.

Other people aren’t quite as lucky.

Thanks in part to technology like blogs, wikis and social networking Web sites, someone can say something about someone else and post it for the world to see. Online search engines make accessing this information a snap. And this can spell trouble for anyone whose livelihood depends on projecting a flawless image.

But those with online enemies need not despair. A new industry has emerged— online reputation management—and a number of companies are cashing in on the opportunity to help people who are upset with their online search results.

Take Terence Banich, a Chicago lawyer who found himself the subject of a Chicago Tribune article after his name appeared on the Web site bitterwaitress.com.

A bartender at a local steakhouse posted a complaint alleging that Banich left a $3 tip on a $200 bill. It was an honest mistake, he says—he meant to leave $30—but he had no means of recourse and was at the mercy of the posting and the press that followed.

Even though the matter eventually blew over, Banich’s cyber image took a beating. He says if he had known of a way to make the articles disappear in March 2006, he would have definitely looked into it.

And that’s part of the reason why the lesser-known Chris Martin founded the Baton Rouge-based online reputation management firm, ReputationHawk. Through its own brand of content and link-building, his company can make negative Web content virtually disappear—or at least fall low enough in the search results that it is unlikely the average person will see it.

“What we do is kind of a mixture of PR and SEO,” Martin says, referring to public relations and search engine optimization, or the process of improving traffic to Web sites by using keywords and creating links.

Clients—usually other companies—turn to ReputationHawk after a negative report or article has been written about them or when a former employee posts harmful information on the Internet.

In order to effectively push down results like these in a search engine such as Google, Martin and his team “post a lot of content that is positive and truthful,” he says.

This means procuring “15 really strong pieces of content” like news releases or articles about the company or person to counteract the negative information on the Web. ReputationHawk creates this material and links to existing content.

“Sometimes we have to create everything,” Martin says. “But in a lot of cases, [clients] do have positive stuff out there.”

Once ReputationHawk has the positive content, the search engine optimization process begins and the company builds links to the sites it wants to highlight. Time takes care of the rest.

“Say you have a negative Web site in the top ten [search results], when we build positive content, it starts to put a lot of pressure on [the results],” Martin says. “So, naturally, over a few months or something like that, you see the negative publicity move down and down.”

The process has two phases: aggressive and maintenance. The extent of the negative publicity determines how long the initial aggressive phase lasts, but it’s usually several months.

ReputationHawk caters to a wide range of clients whose names are kept in the strictest confidence—including celebrities, surgeons, lawyers and Wall Street types—but it deals primarily with companies concerned with their bottom line. It is typically too expensive for individuals to hire them. The aggressive phase costs about $1,200 to $2,000 a month; the maintenance phase is about $500 a month.

But Martin also says he has seen a new type of client emerge: teachers. That’s because of Web sites that allow students to rate their instructors and write whether they liked or disliked a particular class.

Martin works with 20 to 40 clients at a given time, although he says that number could easily reach the hundreds if he took on every client that approached him. This is where an ethical component of online reputation management comes in. Martin says he only takes on about one in eight people who come to him looking for help.

“In some situations, they deserve the negative publicity,” Martin says. “But a lot of people are victimized. [Those are the guys] we go in and take care of, so to speak.”

So it’s up to Martin to play God to a certain extent and decide who deserves help and who doesn’t.

“It’s usually easy to tell when companies have bad business practices and are trying to sweep it under the rug,” he says.

But ultimately it’s his call. Some consumer rights advocates take issue with this—and the industry as a whole.

Ed Magedson, the founder and editor of Ripoff Report, an anti-fraud Web site where consumers can post reports when they feel they have been wronged, is one such advocate. He says companies only hire reputation management firms when they have something to hide.

A lot of what ReputationHawk does is to counteract the information in Ripoff Report.

“The honest companies just make things right with their customers and file a rebuttal to the Ripoff Report filed about them,” Magedson wrote in an e-mail. “Bad companies hide them.”

Magedson concedes people who post a report on his Web site will sometimes obscure identifying details about themselves, but he insists the very fact that they were angry enough to file a report means that they were wronged in some way. “People on the Internet BS about a lot of things,” he adds.

According to Magedson, Ripoff Report receives more than 1,000 submissions a day and has been sued dozens of times, but it has never lost a case.

Ripoff Report has a policy to never remove content. On its Web site, the company explains this is the only way to effectively expose a pattern of bad business practices and to eliminate incentives to pressure the authors of the reports or the company itself.

Magedson also says search engines hate reputation management companies. But that’s not necessarily so—at least according to Google.

A Google spokesperson says there is nothing wrong with adding positive content to outrank negative content. But they also say, “If you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it.”

What’s more, technology experts say there are many reputation management Web sites like ReputationHawk out there, but it is hard to guarantee that any of the tricks will work because technology is constantly evolving.

Martin insists it’s a matter of being proactive and working to ensure an online reputation remains squeaky clean before damage is done and requires aggressive action. This is an issue borne of necessity in today’s climate. Whether it’s a business or personal matter, Martin says, “It’s becoming second nature to go to Google or Yahoo and type in a name to see the results.”