The search engines have become the essential research tool for due diligence. Whether its a potential overseas manufacturing partner, an executive hire, or a catering company bidding on your corporate event, you'd be remiss not to type their name in Google and see what comes up. And people do the same with your company, employees, products and services.
With the proliferation of blogs, one negative incident can result in dozens of blog posts, cluttering the search engine results with accusations of your incompetence, poor customer service, unethical business practices and more. The following excerpt from Wired Magazine (April 2007: The See-Through CEO) demonstrates how you can influence your reputation online by business blogging:
"Online is where reputations are made now," says Leslie Gaines Ross, chief reputation strategist - yes, that's her actual title - with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. She regularly speaks to companies that realize a single Google search determines more about how they're perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. "It used to be that you'd look only at your reputation in newspapers and broadcast media, positive and negative. But now the blogosphere is equally powerful, and it has different rules. Public relations used to be about having stuff taken down, and you can't do that with the Internet."
But here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.