Just ask the New York City teacher who recently divorced his wife of five years. Drop his name into Google, and his ex-wife appears in pictures of vacations and Christmas parties. “It’s difficult when you’re trying to date and your ex is still in the picture, so to speak,” said the teacher, who didn’t want to make matters worse by having his name in a newspaper.
The same goes for Bryan, an advertising executive in New York City. He is an accomplished online marketer and New York University professor, but search his name, and one of the first Web results is a press release from the United States attorney’s office. Eight years earlier, he was charged with wrongfully receiving 9/11 grant money. “Even after all these years,” those links remained, said Bryan, who paid a $2,000 fine.
And then there is the Philadelphia physiologist who became unwittingly linked to a consumer advocacy site, when it listed him as a graduate of a distance learning school that was shut down. “I felt totally victimized because there was nothing I could do,” said the physiologist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want added attention. “My case load started to dry up.”
At first, some tried manipulating the Web results on their own, by doing things like manually deleting photos from Flickr, revising Facebook pages and asking bloggers to remove offending posts. But like a metastasized cancer, the incriminating data had embedded itself into the nether reaches of cyberspace, etched into archives, algorithms and a web of hyperlinks.
After failing to rid the negative sites on their own, most turned to a new breed of Web specialists known as online reputation managers, who offer to expunge negative posts, bury unfavorable search results and monitor a client’s virtual image.
Now when they perform a Web search of themselves, the negative links are harder to find. “It took a couple of months, but now when you Google my name, the negative sites are buried about six or seven pages in,” the physiologist said. “My clientele has dramatically improved, and when people call to make inquires, they always say they got my name from the Internet.”
The company he used, Reputation.com, is among a growing corps of online reputation managers that promise to make clients look better online. In an age when a person’s reputation is increasingly defined by Google, Facebook and Twitter, these services offer what is essentially an online makeover, improving how someone appears on the Internet, usually by spotlighting flattering features and concealing negative ones.
“The Internet has become the go-to resources to destroy someone’s life online, which in turn means their offline life gets turned upside, too,” said Michael Fertik, the chief executive of Reputation.com, which is in Redwood City, Calif., and is among the largest in this field. “We’ve reached a point where the Internet has become so complicated, vast and fast-paced, that people can’t control it by themselves anymore. They now need an army of technologists to back them up online.”
ONLINE image fixers are not entirely new. For years now, big corporations and those with financial stakes in their Web presence have employed handlers to edit their online reputation — often as part of the array of services offered by a large public relations firm, lawyers or image consultants.
During the economic collapse in 2008, Wall Street bankers hired online specialists to protect their good names. “Some of these bankers were paying upwards of $10,000 a month to try hide their names online as they began appearing in the press,” said one image manager in New York City, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity to protect his high-profile clients.
Celebrities, too, have employed reputation companies, to fend off hurtful gossip items and negative articles in the news media.
But as everyday people began living more of their lives online, whether it’s blogging about dinner or posting vacation photos on Facebook, the downside to oversharing online began to catch up.
“It’s been a relatively nascent industry for a while, but fast forward to today and it’s become more mainstream,” said Bryce Tom, the former director of online reputation management at Rubenstein Communications, a major public relations firm in New York. So mainstream, in fact, that Mr. Tom left the firm last year to start Metal Rabbit Media, a reputation management company.
Mr. Tom divides his clients into two camps: “reactive” clients, who want to remove a specific item from the Web, and “proactive” clients, who want to monitor their image. His clients are evenly split between the two.
While Mr. Tom’s firm attracts a more affluent clientele, other companies report a broad customer base. It includes college students trying to delete drunken party photos before corporate recruiters find them, a corporate lawyer who wanted to remove non-work-related photos of himself from the Web as he tried to become a partner within his law firm and a real estate agent in Miami whose listings were obscured by blog posts that chronicled an arrest for driving under the influence.
“Social networks, online comments and oversharing online have created a threat to everyone’s reputation and privacy,” said Mr. Fertik of Reputation.com. “Now people are trying to figure out how to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.”
ONCE something is online, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to delete. So tweaking one’s online reputation usually boils down to gaming the search engines. Image-conscious people with an understanding of the Web’s architecture can try doing it themselves, by populating the Web with favorable content. That might involve setting up their own Web site or blog, or signing up for popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
With any luck, those sites will appear first on a Web search, and push down any offending material. But these tactics have their limits, especially when the Web sites in question are popular and optimized for search engines.
One such site would be Gawker, the New York media blog, which had been known to pluck characters out of relative obscurity and turn them into villains. Starting in 2009, Gawker published a series of snarky items about Julia Allison, a former sex columnist for Time Out New York magazine and a self-described social media expert. Readers were soon acquainted with her videos of her publicly arguing with a boyfriend at the time, personal e-mails sent to Gawker editors and photos of Ms. Allison in lingerie that were posted on her blog.
Ms. Allison tried tinkering with the search result herself, but became so fed up that she once announced that she was “quitting” the Internet. “It’s more like whack-a-mole than anything else,” said Ms. Allison, who has been in talks with Reputation.com to work or online presence. “Hit one, and another pops up. I have spent hours and hours attempting to solve the nearly impossible problem of a maligned online reputation.”
That’s when the experts are called in. Online reputation managers go further by exploiting how search engines like Google and Bing work, which is to rank Web pages based on how often they are linked from other sites. To trick the search engines, these managers employ programmers who create dummy Web sites that link to a client’s approved list of search results. The more links, the higher the approved sites rank.
They may also contact the Webmaster or blogger directly, especially with smaller sites, and ask that the specific items be removed, usually by appealing to their sense of fairness. Some sites are more challenging than others. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. Erasing an image from Google has so far eluded Mr. Tom and others.
While Reputation.com has more than 120 employees, the same service can be offered by a single savvy programmer. Mr. Tom’s Metal Rabbit Media is currently housed in his sunny two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, where he spends his day in front of two computers, writing code that tries to circumvent search engines. The company has one employee and two freelancers.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, he was preparing a briefing for a new client, describing how he would “fix” Wikipedia and the top search results on various search engines. On the walls of his office were framed copies of Google search results and Wikipedia entries of clients: a reality television star, a movie actress and a chief executive officer. Mr. Tom calls it his “wall of fame.”
The price of looking good online varies widely. Reputation.com charges $120 to $600 a year for run-of-the-mill cases. “Celebrities, politicians and high-level executives aren’t so lucky,” Mr. Tom said. “Their programs typically average between $5,000 and $10,000 a month due to the higher level of finesse necessary and because the stakes are much higher.”
“The hardest thing is when you have a very unique name,” added Don Sorenson, the founder of Big Blue Robot, an online reputation management company in Orem, Utah, that works with corporations. “If you have a last name like Smith or Brown, you’re going to be better off, but if you have a unique name you will definitely have your work cut out for you.”
At that point, some people have been known to legally change their name.
It hasn’t become that bad for Ms. Allison. She compares the scar to her online reputation to a large tattoo: “Technically, it’s possible to remove it, but it’s painful and expensive. Plus, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever remove it 100 percent.”
The entire experience has made her more cautious about what she shares. “I swore too much and there are a few lingerie photos I wish were private now, but they are the relatively average mistakes of youth,” she said. “Unfortunately, they are now mistakes that will follow me in perpetuity.”
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