In its early days the Internet was often referred to as “the wild West” due to the lack of standards governing it. Though the Internet is somewhat more uniform these days, one thing still harkens back to the days of cattle ranchers and train robbers is reputation. In the age of Google, reputations can be ruined by those with genuine grievances and those with grudges alike. Would you know how to defend your reputation or that of your institution should it come under fire? Join Kimberley Barker for a closer look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of life in the reputation economy, and learn about practical steps that you can take to safeguard your good name.

1. The Reputation Economy
MANAGING YOUR ONLINE IDENTITY
IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE
Kimberley R. Barker, MLIS
Manager for Technology Education & Computing
Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
University of Virginia

2. Note
 Though I used lots of resources when doing research
for this presentation, I am especially indebted to
Fertik & Thompson’s Wild West 2.0: How to Protect
and Restore your Online Reputation on the Untamed
Social Frontier

3. In this presentation:
 Background on this class
 Defining the “reputation economy”
 What is “Google Truth”?
 How does Google work?
 Defining online reputation management services
 Individual
 Corporate
 Establishing a reputation management plan
 Understanding the real-life ramifications of reputation
damage
 Reputation restoration
 Further resources

4. Background
 Way back in 2009…
 There was a Facebook class taught by Library faculty
 In 2010…
 I created a class called “Your Online Identity”
 Focused on
 Privacy/security
 What info was available (freely & for a price) about you
• Physical
• Financial
• Arrests
 How to find this information
 How to remove this information

5. Background
 In 2011…
 Updated the Online Identity class
 More info on the “deep web”
In 2012…
Updated the Online Identity class
• More info on reputation management
• In 2013…
Created the Reputation Economy class

6. What is the “reputation economy”?
 Refers to the way in which the standing of a
product/person/institution/business is shaped by
the contributions of end users.
 “wisdom of crowds”
 Nothing new to humans
 Changes in technology mean that we use computers instead of
the telephone or writing letters

7. Your own habits
 How many of you Google the following?
 Job candidates
 Dates
 Children’s friends/counselors/teachers
 Doctors
 Products
 Hotels
 Restaurants
• How much are you influenced by what you find?

8. How would you react to an attack
on your reputation?
Toni & Candace respond to a bad review on Yelp

9. Incidentally…
 Recent report on Yelp ratings by Harvard Business
School assistant professor Michael Luca:
a one-star increase in the rating of an
independent restaurant leads to a 5 to 9 percent
increase in revenue.
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Fi
les/12-016.pdf

10. Google is King
Data from Hitwise,
1/21/2012

11. “Google Truth”
 Defined as the automatic acceptance of Google
results as an accurate representation of reality
Well…
“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet”
- Abraham Lincoln

12. How Google works (1 of 7)
 Google is comprised of three distinct parts
 Googlebot
 Indexer
 Query processor
• Each part has its own specific and unique function.

13. How Google works (2 of 7)
 Googlebot
 Composed of 1000’s of computers engaged in
parallel processing:
 Requests & retrieves 1000’s of different pages
simultaneously; does this two ways
 “Add URL” forms
 Find links via web crawling
• Fresh crawls
• Deep crawls

14. How Google works (3 of 7)
 Indexer
 Receives full texts of pages from Googlebot;
stores them in databases
 Index sorts search terms alphabetically
 Ignores“stop words”
 Converts all text to lower-case
 Each entry in index stores list of documents
with that search term and also the location
within the text of that search term

15. How Google works (4 of 7)
 Query processor
 Multiple parts
 Search box
 “engine” that evaluates searches & matches to relevant
documents
 Results formatter

16. How Google works (5 of 7)

17. How Google works (6 of 7)
(It’s a popularity contest… sort of)
 PageRank
 Link analysis algorithm
 Page with higher rank displays higher in results list
 Google uses over 100 factors to determine rank
 How is PR calculated?
 Basically,the more times that a page is linked to
determines its PR
 Built from this algorithm, which is used iteratively:
• PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … +
PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

18. How Google works (7 of 7)

19. Other algorithms
 Google Panda
 Released in February 2011
 Downgraded sites w/ poor user experiences
 Google Penguin
 Downgraded rankings of sites that use “black hat”
techniques that trick the PageRank algorithm
 Latest update in January 2013
 Update to Google Panda
• Google has committed to updating its
algorithm 500 times during the 2013 calendar
year

20. Why did I just spend 7 slides on Google?
 If you understand how Google works, you
will understand how to:
 Positively
increase your online presence
 Monitor your reputation
 Formulate a basic reputation restoration plan
 Understand when you need to seek professional
help

21. What is ORM (online reputation management)?
 Basically, “…the practice of making people and
businesses look their best on the Internet.”
WWW.REPUTATION.COM
 For whom is this service?
 Individuals
 Professionals
 Institutions
•Who can perform this service?
•Reputation management professionals
•People just like you

22. ORM is big business
 “American companies will spend $2.2 billion in 2012
for "reputation and presence management,"
according to Jed Williams, senior analyst for BIA /
Kelsey, a media-consulting firm based in Chantilly,
Va.By 2015, that sum will grow to $5 billion, says
Williams.”
 “Can you erase your online blunders? With effort, and
luck, it's possible”; Lacitis, Erik; Seattle Times; July
29, 2012

23. Should individuals/institutions bother with
ORM?
 In my opinion, if you aren’t monitoring your
reputation in the same way that your monitor your
credit, you’re:
INSANE

24. Pew Internet & American Life’s
Internet & Health Report 2012
http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/2013/Hea
lth-and-Internet-2012.aspx

25. Some online healthcare ranking sites
 HealthGrades

26. Some healthcare online rating sites
 RateMDs

27. Yelp again
 Study shows high Yelp rating correlates with
better Hospital outcomes
 Bardach NS, Asteria-peñaloza R, Boscardin WJ, Adams
dudley R. The relationship between commercial website
ratings and traditional hospital performance measures in
the USA. BMJ Qual Saf. 2012.
 http://www.imedicalapps.com/2013/02/yelp-hospital-
outcomes/

28. Establishing a
reputation management plan
 Begin monitoring your online presence
 Good
 Search for your name at least once per month
 Best
• Create a search alert for your name
•Check your privacy settings on all social media
•Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
•Feed your online presence with positive content
•Blogging, Tweeting, profile sites, YouTube, professional
directories, newsletters, etc.

29. Search results for me

30. Establishing a
reputation management plan
• Beaware of who might be looking for information
about you
•Think about to what sites Google will direct
searchers
•E.g., those searching for information on doctors will
be directed to sites such as HealthGrades, RateMDs,
etc
•Accept the fact that no information does NOT equal
a positive image and in fact can be viewed with
suspicion

31. Reputation Restoration
 First steps
 You will be hurt, scared, and angry. Take some time to process
your emotions.
 Tell your family and trusted friends. You will need their
support to get through this.
 Realize that you are not the first person whose reputation has
been damaged- you are not alone.
 Realize that there exist tools to restore your good name.
 Assess the damage; if severe, consult a professional reputation
management consultant immediately. Accept that you cannot
repair the damage on your own and that the issue won’t just go
away.
 DO NOT respond with posts of your own.

32. Reputation Restoration
(information drawn from
Chapter 12 of Wild West 2.0)
 Understand the problem
 Make a plan
 Implement the plan

33. Understand the problem
(WW 2.0, Chapter 12)
• What is the extent of the problem?
Perform an online reputation audit (see Chapter 10
of WW 2.0)
Comb carefully through first three pages of Google
results, and then skim the next seven.
• Find the source of negative content
• Use an Internet archive provider to check the URL’s
of negative content. Try to determine where it began.
• Determine whether it is accidental or deliberate
• accidental- “name collision”- reinforcing cycle
• Deliberate- lie about your committing horrible act

34. Make a plan
(WW 2.0)
 Create a recovery road map
 As in Chapter 10: create list of people who might search for you
 Create list of sites to which they are directed
 Prioritize which sites to repair first- some smears easier to
repair than others
 Create recovery goals
 Be realistic: it may be impossible to completely expunge false
information- News sites and some blogs will may always show
up in top 10 results and only feeding positive content (and
time) can remedy that.
 Pushing negative content to bottom of search results may be
just as effective

35. Implement your plan
(WW 2.0)
 Try to find a human
 Contact
page administrator via form or email
 CALMLY explain the problem- you need his/her
help!
 If
a human will not help you, figure out from
where that website is drawing its false
information. Try to correct the information
at the source (claim your online identity, etc)

36. Also…
 Sites like Yelp, Facebook, etc, are protected
from being liable for content on their sites
by section 230 of the Communication
Decency Act (CDA 230), part of the 1996
Telecommunications Act:
 “no provider or user of an interactive computer
service shall be treated as the publisher or
speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider.”

37. Implement your plan
(WW 2.0 Chapter 12)
 Malicious attacks
 Determine seriousness of threat & frequency
 If a one-off, let it fade away
 If dedicated, persistent attacker, understand that no
matter what you do, this person may continue to spread
lies.
 Try to identify attacker
 Sometimes use info known only to a few
 Sometimes pseudonym is a clue
 Try through legal means- understand expensive and
lengthy

38. Implement your plan
(WW 2.0, Chapter 12)
 Choose your strategy
 Fight back directly
 Try to resolve offline (but proceed carefully)
 Try to isolate negative content indirectly; i.e.,
“Google walls”
Create more positive & neutral content than
attacker creates negative. Play the Google
algorithm.

39. How does reputation restoration work?
• Remember all of those slides about Google?
• ORM professionals will always be more effective than
an individual simply because they can devote more
resources to it.

40. The future of ORM
 Just as institutions have attorneys, they will
have contracts with reputation management
companies which cover:
 Institutionitself
 Individuals who have support of the institution
 After all, the reputations of its individuals affects
the reputation of the institution.

41. Don’t be an ostrich!
 Not only SHOULD you not ignore your online
identity, but you soon WILL not be able to
 The way in which you respond to legitimate criticism
can in fact bolster your reputation (individual or
institution)
 Yelp example from Atlanta

42. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
 We offer classes and consults on a wide
range of topics!
 Visit us online:
 http://hsl.virginia.edu
 www.Facebook.com/uvahsl
 Contact me! Kimberley@virginia.edu

43. Further Resources
 Wild West 2.0: How to protect and restore your
online reputation on the untamed social frontier;
Fertik & Thompson
 The Reputation Society: How online opinions are
reshaping the offline world; Masum & Tovey
 How Google Works:
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html
 2012 Google Panda infographic
 http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-112805

44. Further Resources
 http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
 http://www.sirgroane.net/google-page-rank/
 http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Health-
online/Part-Two/Section-2.aspx