You know those embarrassing drunk pictures you posted on Facebook once? Or those bad reviews someone who doesn’t like you left about your business? You may be worried that someone who looks you up will find that hideous picture that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Our lives are almost fully online now, and this is a positive thing. But it also has significant negative issues associated with it, because people share and overshare our personal details, which means we have lost control. Online reputation management services are there to help you regain control, however.
What Is an Online Reputation Consultant?
These consultants are a little bit of everything, tech expert, PR gurus, marketers, and more. Their role is to find and identify negative opinions about you and bury them deep into the search engine results. They also focus on lifting positive mentions about you up, ensuring they are easy to be found.
The customer of a reputation management consultant can be anyone from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to an individual who wants to turn their life around. All of them, however, want one thing: control over what is seen about them on the internet. This includes having control over what should not be seen, like private details or those embarrassing college photographs.
Why Online Reputation Consultants Are Needed
Thanks to the internet, we are now able to access a wealth of positive things. But there is always a flipside, and that is true for the internet as well. Essentially, your name and reputation is in the hands of complete strangers. You don’t know who they are, you don’t know where they are, and you don’t know what they want to do. Perhaps, for example, someone still remembers that time you argued in high school and they want to remind people of that, even if it is 30 years ago. While this shouldn’t matter anymore now, someone who looks you up and comes across that would immediately get a negative opinion of you and walk away. On the other hand, if you have lots of positive things being said about you online, you will start to attract people to you as well. Reputation management consultants try to achieve just that: positive reports about you and who you are.
Can’t I Just Do it Myself?
We live in a digital age, and we live in an age where people want to economize as much as possible. Hence, paying for the services of an online reputation management consultant may seem frivolous. There are certainly things that you can do yourself, common sense things. For instance, if you have a dog walking business, you shouldn’t have a Twitter handle that is @ILoveBurgers, because that wouldn’t make sense. You also have to make sure people have reason to say positive things about you. But the rest of online reputation management is a full time job that requires specific skills and expertise and, unless you have those, in which case you would probably be in the business of reputation management, you need to leave this to the professionals.