You may have seen some commercial recently for reputation management consultants , and wondered what they were all about, and indeed we have had the odd question coming in from you guys wondering what companies like this do. Well hopefully I can shine a little light on that for you, as I have a good friend who works in this industry. Basically the job of these companies is to help people clean up their reputation online, and there are a number of reasons why someone may wish for that to take place. A positive online reputation is so incredibly important for many people and these are the types of people who will use these companies to help give them a better online appearance.

Professionals

Those men and women who are in their early 20s grew up with social media and as such they naively shared massive amounts of photos, videos and poorly thought out content online. Now what we are seeing is that many of these young men and women are looking at going for career jobs, and they are worried about their prospective employer finding such information online. More and more employers are carrying out online searches about their candidates, and the last thing that a buddy lawyer wants is their potential employer checking out those crazy photos from Los Cabos! Rep management companies will help ensure that this information isn’t found.

Mistaken Identity

Sometimes the internet can really play games with us, especially in the case of mistaken identity. My buddy told me a story about a CEO of a company, which shall remain nameless, and someone with the very same name as him was caught committing a pretty heinous crime. Naturally the internet was soon awash with the name of this criminal, and of course many assumed that it was the CEO. This case of mistaken identity actually took a few points off the stock price of his company on the first day that the story broke. What a reputation management company will do here is to aim to relegate the information written about the namesake, down the pages of the search engines so that the world and his wife aren’t reading it every time the CEO gets Googled.

Businesses

Businesses live and die by their online reputation and they generally make up the biggest portion of the client list at most rep management companies. In the case of most businesses this is a preemptive action which they make to ensure that their reputation is improved, and then maintained going forward. It only take s poor review or an ill timed tweet and the company’s reputation could turn to dust, this is why they will always ensure that they have the professionals on board to help make sure that their reputation is every bit as good as it should be.

These are the main reasons which we see as to why people will look to use this type of service.