Let me first reveal that Abraham Harrison LLC, my employer and my company, is an online reputation management company — online reputation protection, promotion, defensive SEO, domain name strategy, and crisis management. That said, I could not be happier because online reputation management is apparently the new black, at least according to Techdirt, Forget Publicists, All The Cool Kids Have Online Reputation Managers:

It’s been well-documented that Google has become something of the mythical permanent record teachers warned you about as kids. There are plenty of stories about people losing jobs or discovering dubious information about dates using Google. A few years back, services popped up claiming that they could scrub your online record clean — though, how successful such services could be was certainly called into question. However, it appears that those services have morphed into a new, somewhat scary, category called online reputation management. While it’s to be expected that corporations might have people monitoring online reputations, it’s quite another thing to have individuals hire firms to do the same thing.

(Tip of the hat for the article to Scott Burns)

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Check out the article in last Thursday’s Times, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, that addresses how to handle consumers who develop a personal vendetta against your company. Well, you could send lawyers but legal cease-and-desists generally just make the customer madder than hell and it isn’t hard to just start yet another attack site.

I hate to say it, sucking less always helps. Start with treating your customers better. Also, be sure to register lots of domain names and work on your online reputation aggressively before it becomes a problem.

Online, the best defense is a good offense and an ounce of online promotion is worth a pound of cure. Here are some great commented-by-me excerpts from the article, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, so you can get a gist:

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There was an article in the The New York Times titled Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics. Many businesses, big and small, have customers that get upset and decide to take it to the net. They write negative things about you and ruin your reputation in the online realm.

Some people think this is nothing to be concerned with. But, the reality is that it can have a huge negative effect on your business. After all, the majority of people today turn to the internet to get a deeper look into a local business or any such business that they are looking at purchasing from.

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In a recent entry about the increasing value of site names I quoted Goldberger, an insider in the business, as saying, “Dot com is king. Dot net is worthless.” Where does this leave dot org? One company TIAA-CREF which offers financial services to people employed in professions such as teaching and health care believes that their dot org status could be beneficial. The New York Times article on the new advertising campaign pointed out that it came at just the right time. One print add asks, “Ever heard of a .org crash?” which with the current state of the market could prove to very a very comforting idea to the target audience.

This a step in the right direction. Previous campaigns have torn at the heart strings (I admit to even tearing up a few times). Recall the montage of hard working professors and doctors followed by some phrase like “For all the extra hours you dedicate to your students, we think you deserve extra credit”. Though these campaigns were flattering to the ego they did not necessarily flatter the target audience’s intelligence as consumers. To flaunt the dot org will presumably give a sense of security to the younger generations (Modernista which is handling the campaign is targeting people still in the prime of their careers). These younger people are the ones more apt to look at the site “suffix” and may like the feeling of putting their money into the hands of a nonprofit organization.

Is this something new that can be expected of others? Can pushing a site’s name (specifically .org/.com/…even .net) create a positive feeling in consumers?

Obviously quite a bit if “sex.com” can sell for 12 million dollars, according to Monte Cahn of Moniker.com as revealed in Hot Property–Web Domain Names and article released on CNN.com. Names such as “megayachts.com”, “stocks.com”, and “blogging.com” demand high prices at auctions ranging anywhere from 8 to 150 thousand dollars. But are these people who are paying the price of a small condo for a bit of online real estate really getting the bang that they want for their buck?

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