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Posted by willcritchlow

It’s early on a rainy Tuesday morning here in London as I settle down to write the post I should have written yesterday…
What with it being Labor day in the US yesterday, it should have fallen on the trusty global associates to put together something for the SEOmoz blog. Unfortunately we were working instead. I was hoping to hold the fort while the Americans slept before returning to work after the long weekend, but it turns out Rand never sleeps.
Waiting for the bus in the rain this morning was a fairly miserable start to the day, but what if it had started worse? What if I had woken up this morning to find bad things written about me or my company on the internet?
Years ago, we only really had to worry about what was printed in the newspaper and what people said to each other (you know, person to person – in real life – which doesn’t scale all that far). These days, the power of the great world wide web means that people whining to one another can become a search result for your name for ever more. At the expert seminar a couple of weeks ago, Duncan and I talked about two things that have been taking up a lot of our time here at Distilled HQ – international SEO and online reputation management.
This morning, I wanted to talk about a particularly pernicious reputational challenge that we have seen recently and which is very very hard to combat. It is something we talked about at the expert seminar – where we called it ‘wiki-circularity’ – while it isn’t necessarily limited to wikipedia, it’s one of the easiest examples. Here’s the scenario:
You keep your nose clean, behave well, have a wiki page ranking for your name with nothing untoward on it (we’d generally class this as a ‘neutral’ result in a reputation audit)

Someone (malicious or misguided) writes something untrue (or even libellous) on the wikipedia page
Mainstream media pick up the story (“checking their facts” on the internet)
Fictitious story appears on powerful newspaper website (of course, they don’t reference wikipedia –they want to look like they researched the story)

So far, so reputation 2.0. The kicker comes in the final step:

Wikipedia gets updated to reference the mainstream media story

Your SERPS now contain a negative result (the wiki page – even if the news story doesn’t rank) and unlike in many situations you have done nothing to deserve it

It is now almost impossible to convince a wiki editor to remove the reference as they tend to assume the sanctity of “real” media – an assumption that breaks spectacularly when “real” media is getting their stories from wikipedia.
What can you do about it?
Unfortunately, as outlined above, once the circle is complete, it’s hard to do very much about it (try some high-powered legal advice – you probably want the page removed from the newspaper website rather than just a retraction elsewhere on their site). This makes it all a powerful argument for monitoring your reputation and that of your business online so that you get a chance to do something about it early. If you don’t have the information, you are dead in the water. For most people and businesses it takes hardly any time to skim everything written about you every day – and for higher profile brands it is definitely worth investing in.
Of course, I would say that, since we have an online reputation monitoring tool but I’m also going to give a shout out to other ways of doing your monitoring such as Andy Beal’s Trackur or if you want to put more work in but do it for free, you can follow Andy’s advice and monitor it all yourself.
If you are monitoring then these kinds of untrue stories can often be quashed early on without recourse to legal action before everything explodes. If the situation does get worse and you have the circular issue happening to you, then this real-world example of a similar thing happening to Sacha Baron Cohen (in a relatively harmless way) shows how with a lot of detective work, the circularity can be broken.

The real world
It’s easy to classify this all as a theoretical problem, but we have seen it in real life (those at the expert seminar got the story with names removed) in a situation where the story was completely untrue.
High profile people are gradually becoming aware of these kinds of issue – I found it interesting to read that the new Republican VP candidate had some wiki-cleaning done the day before the announcement. I’d call that reputation 1.5. They have understood the importance but not the social nature of web 2.0 and the likelihood of getting called out. It seems that the edits were approached in a pretty upfront way – with high-quality changes referencing published sources, but simply the volume and proximity to major news were destined to risk red flags. Rand always steers people away from political discussion in the comments, so remember to discuss online tactics not policy…
Breaking celebrity reputation news
On a different note, this morning I read a story about Soulja Boy having his online identity hijacked. I love his response to it. For a (expletive-laden, R-rated) lesson in how to respond to a reputation attack rapper-style, check out this story.Do you like this post? Yes No

September 3rd, 2008
Categories: SEO . Author: admin . Comments: No Comments

Worth reading, Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in today’s Times.
Summary — the McC choice of Palin is the plot of a low budget chick flick. Now, picking up the story where she left off…
The wrinkly white haired dude and the VP-chick win the election and just after he’s inaugurated, the old guy dies suddenly and she’s sworn in, over the objections of all the white males on the old dude’s staff and the leading members of Congress including the fat white male Speaker of the House played by John Goodman (ignoring for a moment that the actual Speaker is a spry foxy grandma type). Donald Sutherland plays the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who does the swearing-in.
She gets a chance to redectorate the Oval Office in pink and throws a frat party at the White House for her friends from Alaska, who do funny farting and belching scenes in austere parts of the White House supervised by stuffy old maids and butlers and a corrupt Chief of Staff who the chick-Pres fires when she finds out he’s been mean to one of her Alaskan friends.
Things are settling down to normal when the second Cuban Missle Crisis starts. It’s looking pretty tough for our heroine when her husband, riding his snowmobile across the Bering Straight, throws a keg party for the guys manning the Russian missile silos in Kamchatka and convinces them to reprogram the computers to point their missiles back at Moscow. The Russians, who are fed up with white men too, and want to break their own glass ceiling, overthrow Putin and elect a hot Russian babe to be President, and the final scene is a summit meeting in a hot tub with the two Presidents comparing breast pumping techniques, drinking a beer and of course enjoying a moose bratwurst.
Turns out Russians and Alaskans have a lot more in common than you might think.
Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

September 2nd, 2008
Categories: Scripting News . Author: admin . Comments: No Comments

I’ve been blogging a long long time. You can see my mistakes, things I got wrong, and the few I got right. I like to put my stake in the ground, and when I go back sometimes it makes me feel humble.
There was a time, believe it or not, there was a time when I liked George W. Bush as President.
On March 27, 2001, I wrote: “There’s something satisfying about the Bush Presidency, and for a time I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it is. Now I think I get it. If this guy could be president, anyone could. He bumbles along twisting around his mouth when he speaks, with his Texas accent that I don’t believe. I imagine him on the scene of The West Wing, reading his lines, and sipping his coffee saying “Oh this is really good coffee, thanks.” He gets his cues from Dick Cheney, but he could just as easily get them from a TV series director. Smile here. Say something nice about America. Good job Dubya. Excellent.”
Can you believe it!
Anyway, last night, I went to dinner with some friends in Berkeley (it’s good to be home), at a very nice Thai/Vietnamese restaurant. The waitress, a sweet Asian woman, was very polite and had a nice smile. One of my dinner companions said: “Maybe she should be Vice-President!”
We all had a hearty laugh.

September 2nd, 2008
Categories: Scripting News . Author: admin . Comments: No Comments

The radical right wing blogs are predictably complaining and slinging mud at people who pass on stories about McCain’s choice for vice-president, but that shouldn’t change a thing.
Latest: The Washington Post reports she led a 527 founded by indicted-for-corruption Senator Ted Stevens. So much for her being a reformer and maverick.
The current First Lady made some menacing remarks probably aimed at the press, indicating that she wants this VP candidate to be treated specially because she’s a woman (that’s how I interpret it) but the answer has to be no. If the press has any integrity, after such a challenge, they should go deeper and press harder. We, the electorate, have a right to know everything about this person who would be a 72-to-76 year old heartbeat away from the presidency. Even healthy people who are 76 have medical problems, and McCain hasn’t been all that healthy.
I have so much to say about this.
I have had mud slung at me, but the people who sling it have no idea who I am.
I have voted Republican for President, I don’t particularly like the Democrats, however if I had been old enough to vote for Kennedy I’m sure I would have (I was five years old when he ran), same with McGovern (I was draft age, even though I wasn’t old enough to vote, ironically). I voted for Ford over Carter, and I’ll stop there. I’m not proud of my choices in the 80s and 90s, but they have included Republicans. So when partisans smear me as being a liberal Democrat, they show how stupid they are, and how unskilled they are at getting votes. There’s absolutely nothing to be gained, although this time around I’m committed to Obama, I’m going to vote for him, and work for him, and give him money. But the Republicans should be thinking of the future, there will be an election in 2012 and 2016, they might want to come back. They should be thinking of building bridges, not burning them.
I don’t see how anyone with a conscience, who puts “Country First” can vote for McCain in 2008. But then I don’t understand many of my fellow Americans. I don’t understand how anyone could have been distracted by issues such as gay marriage or the morality of stem cell research in 2004, but those were deciding issues. The war, global warming, trade, education, health care and economics — the really important stuff, imho — those didn’t decide the election. For that reason I feel my country deserves what it gets, the world economy is routing around us. We will find out what a priviledged position we occupied and will miss it when it’s gone, when the world no longer supports our using 25 percent of its energy with less than 5 percent of the population.
We’ll miss it when it’s gone, but I’ll probably be all right, because I have skills that work in the world economy. Many of my fellow Americans do not. I’m willing to sacrifice for them, but are they willing to vote their own interest? The 2008 election is, imho, a referendum on the will and intelligence of the American voter. I sincerely hope we have a strong will and use our god-given intelligence. McCain is giving us every reasonable clue that his Presidency will be dumb and bullying and very very Republican. If that’s what we choose, it will, sadly, be time to give up on this country, because the world just doesn’t care about us that much anymore.
We have to earn the world’s respect, we never get to relax, we have to work hard to be competitive, and more importantly, we have to work smart. If the tables were turned and the Dems were nominating candidates who govern from the gut and don’t use their brains, I would be voting Republican this year. If the Republicans want to win, great, put up some candidates who are prepared to lead, who can sit across from other world leaders and command their respect, not just fear. It was never a good idea to push fear over respect, but right now I don’t think they’re all that scared of us.
Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

September 2nd, 2008
Categories: Scripting News . Author: admin . Comments: No Comments