ReputationDefender Adds MyEdge

A few months back I wrote a piece involving online reputation tracking. One of the companies I discovered at the time was ReputationDefender, a company that would monitor your online reputation for a monthly fee, and then help eliminated any invasive or defamatory information, if found, for an additional fee.

What happens, however, if the information that ReputationDefender is neither unfair nor something you can legally force someone to remove? After all, with search engine caching and services like the Wayback Machine, some information, even from years ago, that may be true yet something you'd hope a prospective client wouldn't see, is available in near perpetuity in searches. So how do you keep people from finding that information?

ReputationDefender is also offering a premium service designed mainly for business clients who would like to change their online image called MyEdge. This premium service is, essentially, online spin, countering any negative or unflattering information with positive information, and doing so in such a way that the first information anyone finds in a search engine like Google is the positive information.

The fee for this service starts at a reported $10,000, pricing it out of the range of the average small business person, but obviously worth it, since MyEdge already claims a client list of over 25 clients.

The Forbes article I linked above almost insinuates that MyEdge somehow games the Google ranking system, but it's more likely an inundation of positive spin coupled with some decent SMO techniques.

Quotes from the EFF indicate that this is a better solution than getting lawyers involved in online flaps, but all I could think of when I read the article on the heels of my interview with Aaron Newman was how well the PR services of Reputation Defender would work with the enterprise-level searching of Social Compliance Manager. There is still the anarchist in me who likes the Wild West approach to information on the Web, but the realist acknowledges the need to manage the public image of corporations as well as regular folks.

Additional Source: ReutersUK