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Keeping Up On Your Brand Reputation with Firefox Extensions

Tracking your brand reputation on search engines, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites is an integral part of good reputation management. To be truly effective, however, you’ll want to check in regularly to see what’s changed, and how you can best get everything back on track. This can be greatly expedited through a liberal use of appropriate Firefox Extensions, which can speed up mundane tasks, and give you data that otherwise would take a great deal more time to work out on your own. These extensions are some of the most useful and affordable tools to help you build your online presence and manage your reputation effectively. 

Of course, one of the best Firefox Extensions for managing your reputation is the simple search widget included with Firefox – you can use it to search not only Google, but almost any site you might find yourself referenced on, without having to directly visit the site and find the search, saving you a step or two each time you search.

UpdateScanner

This is a convenient, free, and easy-to-use Firefox Extension that helps you track when updates are made to a webpage. While some sites have RSS feeds that can do this task for you, many do not. If one of these sites mentions you regularly, or if you anticipate data about you being changed there, you can use UpdateScanner to be immediately informed when the information changes.

coComment

Perhaps one of the most useful reputation management tools available, coComment is a way to track all of your various online discussions in one convenient place. The Firefox Extension keeps track of every site you post a comment on. When people respond to your comments, you are immediately informed. You can choose to be informed via the extension, by RSS feed, by a Google Gadget, or by email alerts. This makes it much easier to remain on top of hundreds of diverse conversations, ensuring you respond in a timely manner to anything that needs your attention, improving your online reputation and helping to interconnect you with large communities. The extension works with virtually any site, including all of the major blog platforms, YouTube, Flickr, the NYTimes, and many others.

EchoFon

There are a myriad of Twitter Firefox Extensions, but EchoFon is one of the most robust and least intrusive. It sits as a small icon on your bottom bar, and when you receive a new message or are referenced in a Tweet a small box appears and tells you what was said. You can also use EchoFon to post new updates, to save yourself from moving out of your browser. EchoFon pops up a chat-like display when you click its icon, giving you full Twitter functionality.

Facebook Toolbar

The Facebook Toolbar extension is exactly what it sounds like: an extension that adds Facebook functionality to any open Firefox tab. You can post updates, as well as see Friend activity. This will let you seamlessly stay integrated in conversations with your follower base, without having to constantly be checking Facebook to check for new updates.

Manage Your Social Media Reputation

As you become more involved in managing your reputation via social media sites, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of time spent going from site to site every time you want to make an update. It is in your best interest to have the highest visibility you can by being present on as many sites as possible, but with each one adding another few minutes of update time, that might not seem viable. You may find yourself wondering how so many successful internet businesspeople are able to post updates to fifty or a hundred sites every few hours. The answer is simple: ping.fm.

Ping is a tool that allows you to send a single update to dozens of sites where you want to establish an online presence. This includes major sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, and Delicious, as well as lesser-known presences like Koornk, Diigo, Ning, FriendFeed, Brightkite, Posterous, hi5, and Xanga. To use Ping, you simply make a free account, and go through and add each service you want to be updated through Ping. It takes less than a minute to add each site, and you’ll only need to do it once.

Once you have the sites added, you’ll have a dashboard that allows you to update your various profiles all at once. And this isn’t good only for status updates – you can add pictures, songs, and links as well. You can choose which sites you want updated, or can just update them all at once. Ping also allows you to make updates via virtually any mode of transport you can image, from your cell phone to email to various IM clients to Skype. With a robust application development community, Ping is always adding new features and plugins as well, all designed to make it easier for you to manage your online identity in whatever ways the new web demands.

Strengthen Your Link Reputation and Brand

Inbound links, or links that direct people to your site from other sites, are one of the cornerstones of a strong online brand. Not only do they drive traffic directly, they also influence how much weight your site carries with search engines, helping to bolster your online reputation. Many people take a passive approach to inbound links – if they appear, great, if they don’t, they don’t worry. Others work hard at getting new links, but are only aware of the links they directly solicit.

Build Your Link Reputation

Most people don’t realize that by failing to monitor inbound links, you’re actually missing a great opportunity to reach out to supporters, increase traffic to your site and build your Google CV. The internet is built on a model of reciprocity, and many people regularly check their outbound links to see if the link is reciprocated. If it isn’t, they may cull those links to make more room for people who will link back to them. Knowing when a site links to you allows you to decide whether it is a link you want to pursue keeping, and gives you the chance to take the steps necessary to keep it. Knowing when new links come in also gives you the opportunity to reach out to those people and, if necessary, ask them to improve the link text to best help your search engine relevance.

Collect Data About Your Links

There are two main classes of inbound link monitors: standalone software and web services. Both has their merits and flaws, but as both have costs associated with them, most people choose to opt for free web services. Using a web service gives you portability, and ensure you will never have downtime – rather than having to remember to open a program to check your links, it is done for you every day and you receive an email giving you an overview of new links gained and lost.

Develop a Linking Strategy

You can then use this data to develop a weekly strategy. Look at the new links you’ve gained, and visit the sites they came from. Decide whether you think that site has search engine relevance or traffic relevance for you, and if so how valuable it is. Find the context in which your link appears, and see if you think there is anything that could be improved – maybe it should go to a different page on your site, or have different link text. Then find contact information for the site operator and write them an email thanking them for the link to your site, informing them you have put up a reciprocal link (if you felt it was worth it), and if necessary asking them politely if they would mind updating your link information slightly.

You will also be informed when links to your site have disappeared. In these cases, if the inbound link was from a source you cared about, you’ll want to send an email and ask why they removed the link to your site, and whether there is anything you could do to reconcile the situation. If they decide to leave your link removed, you may wish to remove any outbound links you have to their site, as these one-way links may negatively impact your search engine rankings.

Use LookupPage Services

At some point, you may want to hire a team of professionals to manage your link reputation. LookupPage has a team of advanced SEO and linking professionals who know exactly which content to promote and how, greatly improving your link reputation. LookupPage also helps individauls and businesses get first page rankings on major search engines, under unique domain names.To start benefiting from our expertise, upgrade to our plan for professionals and follow these simple steps:

1. Sign into your account (or create a new one).
2. Click the "My Account" tab.
3. Click the "Upgrade / Renew your subscription" link.
4. Chose the "Pro" package and purchase.

We look forward to helping you manage your online image and reputation to ensure a safer and fully enriched online future.

Top Blog Monitoring Services

One of the most important parts of online reputation management is the ability to know when and where a conversation is occurring that relates to your brand – and ideally to know it right away, so you can positively engage in the conversation. With many next-generation tools, such as Twitter, this process is made seamless and simple through search services offered by the tools themselves. Blogs, however, are another matter entirely. Although blogs are often interconnected, and some reside on central services, for the most part they are independent entities, so there is no integrated search feature.

Luckily, a number of services have arisen to fill this niche. These services allow you to monitor the vast majority of blogs online for any buzz about your personal brand or keywords related to your brand. This way you can pop in to comment on a new post, pull positive quotes to use in your own materials, or arrange link trades to help boost your visibility.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the most popular ways to keep up on your personal brand, not only in blogs but also in news items, general web searches, Google Groups, and videos. The search allows you to decide which areas you want searched for your terms, how often you want them searched, and how many results you want displayed. You then enter an email address and Google Alerts will send you regular updates telling you where your brand has been discussed on the internet.

Technorati

Technorati is arguably the most used, and most powerful way to search blogs and receive updates on key phrases in new blog posts. The service indexes hundreds of thousands of blogs, as well as keeping up on news clippings. This enormous database can then be quickly searched for appearances of your brand name. From that search you can generate an RSS feed, which will give you immediate updates when a new blog post appears anywhere in the blogosphere that mentions your brand.

WatchThatPage

If you’re interested in watching only a select few blogs, rather than the entire blogosphere, a service like WatchThatPage may prove to be more useful. This site allows you to create a list of pages that you want to monitor. You can then receive updates whenever the page is updated, or only when specific changes have been made to the change. For example, you could compile a list of your competitors’ blogs and business pages, and set it to alert you whenever your brand is mentioned on any of those pages, to keep appraised of negative spin they may be attempting to generate.

Rollyo

An alternative to WatchThatPage, Rollyo lets you create a dynamic search based on a search string that checks anything from the entire internet to specified list of sites. This search can then be turned into an RSS feed to give you regular updates. Although newer than WatchThatPage, Rollyo offers a number of additional tools, including a Firefox extension and other widgets to help keep you up to date more seamlessly.

How to Deal with a Bad Review

With the growing importance of consumer-based reviews, it has never been more important to have the proper toolkit to manage your reputation online. Sites like Yelp!, UrbanSpoon, and Epinions all give users an immense power over your brand. When potential customers do a search for your brand, they may read some of the positive reviews – but primarily they will be looking out for the negative reviews. As a result, when a bad review is written, you absolutely need to deal with it one way or another.

Let’s consider a pretty typical negative review, and look at how a company might address it. The reviewer of a coffee shop says, “Perhaps I just came here on the wrong day. I found the staff to be rude and slow in preparing my coffee. The decor is cute but this coffee shop was slightly on the small side for me. Not a place I would frequent during peak hours.”

A review like this (a two-star out of five review on Yelp!) shows some unhappiness, but the problems seem relatively superficial and not too damaging. The reviewer seems like a rational person, and mostly just seems dissatisfied with their experience.

The first step should therefore be to reach out to the customer and try to resolve the issue. Many review sites now allow businesses to respond directly to the customer, either publicly or privately. In this case, responding publicly would be the best option. Most people writing negative reviews are mostly just frustrated, and even receiving a bit of personal attention can fix the entire problem for them. At the same time, potential customers browsing the reviews will see your response and know that your business is one that reaches out to customers to try to fix problems that arise, which will increase their trust immensely.

A response might look something like, “I’m sorry to hear you were dissatisfied with your experience! We pride ourselves on our friendly staff, so it may just be that the staff member in question was having a particularly bad day. If you’d like to stop in again for a complementary cup of coffee, we’d appreciate the opportunity to show you the excellent quality and service that have made us so popular.”

If the person does take you up on your offer, they will be predisposed to have a positive experience, and hopefully will. In that case, they can post a follow-up review to mitigate their original negative review. If they don’t, you will still have done your part in showing how caring your company is, and you can take the further step of trying to bury the review.

Both review sites and search engines have a strong preference for fresher content – and for good reason. A four year old review doesn’t do much to tell people what sort of experience they can expect from a business in the present. As a result, one strategy for dealing with bad reviews, if reconciliation fails, is to simply create enough new material that the bad review is buried deep in search results. In the case of a review site, this will mean soliciting positive reviews from patrons, which will both increase the overall average rating for your business, and put the negative review on a deeper page. In the case of search engines that may scour review sites, this means providing a number of alternate pages for your brand, which will come up earlier in search results than the negative review.

Online Reputation Management in 2009

The truth is, online reputation management has been important for some time. But it’s really in the last year that people have caught on to how truly crucial it is to landing and keeping a good job, and to keeping a brand untarnished. In 2009 a wide range of new applications appeared to better assist people in managing their online reputation – not coincidentally, 2009 was also the year that the social networking platform went truly mainstream. While in 2008 these platforms were still to some extent the province of the highly tech-literate, by 2009 it had become virtually unheard of for people not to have an account at least on Facebook, and sites like Twitter also became pervasive parts of the business world.

Even before this sea change, however, online reputation management was already critical. In 2007 the Ponemon Institute performed a comprehensive survey of businesses, and discovered that more than half of the businesses polled used the internet to screen potential employees. A similar study reported a third of all businesses used a basic web search to see what information came up first on applicants. These numbers have continued to grow. 

At the same time technologies like Twitter and Facebook continue to encourage people to share more and more information about themselves. While these technologies offer some great opportunities for online reputation management, they also have the danger of allowing people to share information that would not be appropriate for a potential or current employer to discover. Uploading pictures of a wild night, posting angry missives about a past employer, or demonstrating undesirable viewpoints in a blog post might all seem perfectly reasonable in the moment, but in the long run they can damage career prospects, and even result in a lost job.

There is a growing awareness that what is said on the internet does not, in fact, stay on the internet. There is a dawning understanding that things posted are permanent, and can be found by anyone. These realizations have provoked the need for some way to deal with lapses in judgment, the innocence of youth, or simply changing desires and expectations. If things cannot be easily removed or shut off from a public search, some alternative measure is needed to minimize the chances that someone important will stumble upon them, or discover them while searching.

Online reputation management attempts to solve the problem using the tools at hand. By maximizing the visibility of positive materials, either pre-existing or contrived for this sole purpose, less desirable material is buried deep in search results, far beyond where most employers will ever look. It is a simple and elegant solution, and one that is becoming more and more necessary as more employers turn to Google and other search engines to vet candidates.

So while the need for such tools certainly existed prior to 2009, the understanding was not yet fully there. 2009 was less the year online reputation management was discovered, and more the year most people caught on to how critical it is to securing a good job, and maintaining positive reviews at an existing job.

How to Manage Your Reputation from Your Phone

Managing your online reputation is critical to maintaining a strong internet brand, but it does require a certain level of vigilance and commitment. One way to make this a bit easier is to build into your workflow a number of regular updates and check-ins, which can be greatly assisted by using a number of phone-based applications. This allows you to manage your reputation on the go, helping you to always keep on top of things.

There are three types of phone software that will best help you manage your reputation: Twitter clients, blog software, and RSS feeders. For the most part these applications are free, although some may have a nominal fee to download them.

Manage Your Twitter

Your Twitter presence is one of the most important reputation management tools you have, and a number of programs exist to facilitate Twitter interactions via your phone. The most popular Twitter client, by far, is TweetDeck, which allows users to easily update their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and regularly refresh complex searches that can help you track what is being said about your brand. Although TweetDeck does not have support for many smartphones, it does have an iPhone app, available free.

BlackBerry users have a number of strong options, including UberTwitter and Seesmic, both of which offer thread searching to help you look after your reputation, and the forthcoming official Twitter client from RIM. Android users have more and more users each day, but the most robust client currently available is Twitroid.

Manage Your Blog
 
Updating your blog is another aspect of managing your brand that can be managed via your phone. Although any type of blog can be updated via a built-in browser, WordPress blogs are most conducive to integrated updating. In fact, WordPress makes an iPhone app, a BlackBerry app, and an Android app, all designed exclusively to streamline updating, maintaining, and editing your blog on the go. Many BlackBerry users also use Viigo, which features integrated blogging capabilities, as well as Twitter support.

Track Your Reputation on RSS

Finally, one often overlooked tool to help in tracking and managing your reputation is the RSS feeder. RSS feeds can be built on virtually any parameters, and it’s relatively easy to set up an RSS feed to update when a Google search for your brand name changes, using a service like FeedMySearch. By using an integrated RSS feeder like Manifesto for the iPhone, NewsGator or Viigo for the BlackBerry, or the built-in feeder on an Android, you can ensure you are immediately informed any time the first few pages of searches for your brand name change.

The current trend in app design is towards more robust, full-featured programs that bring together features of multiple programs. As a result, it is likely that over the next year new programs will be rolled out for all three major smartphone systems that will integrate Twitter tracking and updating, Facebook support, blog editing, and RSS feeds. For now, though, a combination of TweetDeck, the official WordPress software, and Manifesto will give iPhone users everything they need; BlackBerry users can rely exclusively on Viigo, or supplement its somewhat clunky Twitter support with UberTwitter; and Android users can meet their needs with Twitroid, WordPress, and the built in RSS feeder.

The Importance of Online Branding for Politicians

While the new marketing space of the internet has repercussions for all sorts of personal branding, it is perhaps most important for politicians. By their very nature, political figures are expected to be in touch with their constituents, are discussed frequently, and are held to a higher standard than virtually any other brand. At the same time, they are generally facing a very active force trying to tarnish their brand, in the form of their opposition. As a result, online brand management is a crucial part of achieving and maintaining success as a political figure.

It is a truth of politics that if an opponent is utilizing a form of media that a politician isn’t, then they control the discourse absolutely. Nowhere is that more true than on the internet. If a political brand is left unattended, it is certain that eventually the opposition will become aware of this and have a field day with it. Public perception is shaped more and more by what is read online, and without careful brand management the online space can become quickly inundated with negative spin.

One of the most important tools to managing an online political brand is simply being fully available through as many means as is possible. Politicians should have a Twitter presence, a blog, and pages on every major social networking platform, like LinkedIn, LookupPage and other niche networks. This allows them to stay in touch with their constituency whenever a problem or concern arises, to tap into massive numbers of supporters for projects, and to undertake spin control when necessary. It also limits the opposition from dominating those spaces and having free rein to say whatever they choose.

Controlling search results for the political brand is also crucial. The first page of search results in any major search engine should lead to sources friendly to the politician, or at the very worst neutral. Having a weak Google and search engine strategy can result in opposition candidates and parties creating pages that outline perceived faults in the politician, to undermine their credibility.

More and more people turn to the internet for primary information about a political candidate, and it is imperative that this information be controlled to prevent damage to the brand. The tools used to manage a political brand are much the same as those used to manage any personal brand, and rely primarily on creating high-relevance pages that show up as first page results for the brand. Free services such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr can all be used to provide landing pages that give information about the politician and outline their stances on key issues. Services with a nominal fee, such as LookupPage, can also be used to help ensure first page visibility.

If the worst does happen and the political opposition ends up on the first page of results, it is important to realize that this can be changed by building up inbound links, adding more high-value landing pages, and rallying supporters, negative sites can be buried on page three or four, far past where most people browse.

Review of the Best Twitter Monitoring Software

Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool not only for getting the word out about your personal brand, but also for tracking discussion about your brand, be it your business or yourself, online. Millions of users are constantly tweeting away about everything imaginable, and sometimes their tweets will be about you or  your business. Learning to track Twitter can not only help you understand what your clients are looking for, but also identify any problems they might be having. Recognizing and fixing these problems immediately, without even having to be contacted, is an incredible strength.

Twitter Monitoring Services

There are many different Twitter monitoring services out there, but one of the most effective, and completely free, services is Monitter. The interface for Monitter is robust, but can be used simply by entering your brand name into one of the three search bars. A long list of every tweet using that phrase will then appear, and it will auto-refresh roughly in real time. 

Using Monitter to the Max

To truly leverage Monitter, however, you’ll want to take advantage of the fact that it has a built in RSS feed for every search. This means that you can integrate Monitter with an RSS feeder to effectively be updated every 90 seconds on any new tweets that reference your brand. This is an incredibly effective way to manage your online reputation, as it allows you to catch problems as they arise and address them quickly and efficiently.

Monitter has many other features as well, including widgets that you can embed into your site. This means that any tweets that reference your brand will be immediately replicated on your own site, giving your customers a central place to view information about you as it comes in off the wire. And while Monitter is free, it still offers a wide range of robust features.

CoTweet Advanced Keyword Monitoring

A more extensive Twitter monitoring suite can be found in CoTweet, a platform built for businesses to interact with their customer bases. CoTweet allows you to build an account that constantly tracks a large number of keywords and phrases, so that you can catch every possible mention of your brand. CoTweet can then send you updates in many different ways, and at the frequency you request. CoTweet can be used with multiple accounts, and in addition to Twitter monitoring features it includes the ability to schedule tweets, thread conversations, and a number of other functions to help you more seamlessly manage your Twitter reputation. 

Successful Brand Monitoring

By using one of these, or any of the other free Twitter monitor services available, you will be able to keep a close eye on your presence on Twitter. This is important for everyone from the small personal brand to the manager of a large company, as it allows you to take care of small problems before they become large, and to shape your online reputation actively.

Interacting with your users, clients, and potential customers via Twitter means more than just waiting for them to tweet you directly, it means being proactive in solving their issues and reaching out to contact them after they express an interest in your brand. With a good Twitter monitor service and reputation management sites like LookUpPage, you will have the tools you need to always be well informed and to continue improving your reputation online.

Will Users Forgive Google for Exposing Their Identities?

Image by Getty Images 

One of the most influential companies in the world is the search-engine and information technology giant, Google. Although users around the world love Google for the many tools it offers to make their lives easier, recently Google has rolled out a number of services which people see as violations of privacy. These technologies include Google Buzz, Google Streetview, Google Mail, and even the core search engine.

When Google Buzz rolled out in February, Google Buzz users had their Gmail contact history revealed on their public Google profile. Every email sent and chat message exchange was available for the public to see. A boss could see an employee emailing competitors, a partner could see their significant other emailing an ex, and any number of other revealing situations.

Since many people did not know how, or did not realize that they need to opt out of this Google Buzz feature, it has led to cries that Google is showing sensitive information without explicit user consent. A related concern is with the mobile version of Google Buzz, which by default reveals the exact location a person was at when they made a post.

In response to a recent outcry over privacy concerns, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in The Register saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This cavalier attitude towards privacy has led some Google users to question whether they can simply forgive Google pushing Google isto an ever growing  reputation management crisis.

Analyzing The Crisis Response

However, Google, for its part, has been quick to respond to their reputation management crisis. The company has integrated features allowing users to turn off updates about their location, and to stop information about their contacts from being shared by default. While many people feel this is too little too late – and indeed, that the fact they made these changes is tantamount to admitting wrongdoing – others believe the company is making a genuine effort to correct an error in judgment.

Whether the public ultimately accepts Google’s attempts at reconciliation remains to be seen, but in similar cases in the past the company has shown themselves to be adept at addressing concerns, explaining their logic, and making amends for any damage that was done.

Three High Ranking Online Reputation Management Tools

While there are many different tools one can use to manage their online reputation, there are a handful that stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. These three, particularly, have a great deal of clout, and can be used in almost any situation to improve an online brand.

WordPress Website

WordPress is the premiere blogging platform used in the world, with more than 200 million blogs running on the software. It is built with user interaction in mind, and features an incredibly-intuitive backend that anyone can learn to use in a short period of time. Running a blog on Wordpress is one of the best ways to be featured near the top of search results, because the very nature of blogs lends itself quite well to having a great deal of search engine relevant content

Search engines are occupied with many things, but one of the most important factors in determining relevance is the freshness of content. Because blogs encourage their users to update frequently, search engines such as Google look at them regularly to see that the content has changed. And tools like WordPress actually include built in features that let a number of different websites and services know whenever new content is posted, so that each new post is echoed around the web, offering many hooks for search engines to pick up your content.

LookupPage

LookupPage is an incredibly high-ranking business directory that gives members an inside view of who exactly is viewing their profile on the web. Businesses and personalities can use LookupPage to quickly establish a presence on the web with no hassle at all. When members sign up with sign up with LookupPage they create a basic profile for themselves, putting down important information about their business, uploading a logo, and generally creating a business-card style presence on the web.

The reason LookupPage is powerful is that 95% of LookupPage Pro users are featured on Google’s first page. This gives a business or personality a place for information that they input and have total control over, presented in a professional manner. The LookupPage pro offering has no ads, and keeps close track of who is viewing the profile, so that businesses can analyze who is landing there, what they searched for to arrive there, and other key data.

Twitter

Because of Twitter’s very strong web presence, a Twitter username will very often show up in the first page of search results for that term. As a result, setting up a free Twitter account using a personal name or a business name can be an easy, quick, and effective way to establish a first page listing. Twitter allows information to be personalized, a custom icon to be uploaded, which may be a photograph or company logo, and the background to be customized.

Additionally, a Twitter account can be used to publish occasional updates promoting positive aspect of one’s business. These updates will then be displayed on the highly-ranked profile page. This is a great way to manage one’s brand and reach out to potential and existing customers for free, and with very little time investment.

"Can I Quote You?" Managing Your Online Reputation in the Age of the Internet Reporter

In days of yore, when reporters were writing articles they had to make dozens of telephone calls to track down celebrities and their public relations representatives to get contextual quotes. However today, reporters have started taking quotes for their articles directly from the web--making it more important than ever that high profile individuals know how to craft their online reputation and use social media to their advantage. 

While it’s easy to imagine how this new type of reporting could get out of hand--tweets taken out of context and facebook posts altered for articles--these powerful new online publishing platforms also have the ability to help set the record straight and be effective crisis management tools.

Take the case of celebrity Lindsay Lohan and her x-girlfriend Sam for example. When RadarOnline, an online celebrity gossip magazine, published an article about Lindsay’s x-girlfriend beating and chocking her, Lindsey took the web. She tweeted, "This is become a bit much...Samantha R never raised a hand to me. I've never said she did. Enough is Enough. Focus on more important world issues." Shortly after publishing this tweet, a more popular news source, US Magazine, picked the story up and published her tweets online--allowing Lindsey to set the record straight.

By having an established presence online, Lindsay Lohan was able to communicate directly with her fans and the reporters always following her every move. She no longer has to wait for someone to contact her and write a favorable story because she can use twitter, facebook and other social media to connect directly with her fans and set the record straight. In addition, Lindsay’s tweets also created the space for Sam, her x-girlfriend, to respond publicly and now the two have a unified public presence denouncing RaderOnline’s accusations.

While it is possible to manage your own online reputation, as Lindsay did in this case, their are also many services that help celebrities and high profile business people set the record straight. For example, by registering for LookupPage, users have the ability to create a webpage with positive content and track who views their profile online. In addition, LookupPage has one of the highest rankings on Google, so every user that signs up can be sure that their positive profile will be at the top of their Google CV, an accessible place for internet reporters and followers.