3 Pieces of Advice From an Online Reputation Fixer

WebFactCheck.com Online FixerOriginally published on PRDaily.com

By John P. David, Partner, WebFactCheck.com and President, David PR Group

For the past two years, I have been building a segment of my business around helping people with online problems.

Striving to get negative content removed from search on behalf of my clients has been, without question, one of the most interesting things I have done in my 25-year career in public relations.

I gained interest in the practice due to a number of factors. Part of it was directly related to hearing an increasing number of online horror stories, and the other part of it has to do with my sometimes overly righteous personality. I have strong opinions about what is fair and what is unfair in life, and the Internet can be incredibly unfair. It enables people to say almost anything they want. The door to the online world is wide open for crazy people, mean people and folks with an axe to grind.

As I develop my own reputation as something on an online reputation fixer, I have learned that a huge number of folks have issues with our digital world. The Internet plays a major role in how we are perceived, and many of the challenges facing PR professionals today have to do with online issues. Quickly and steadily, the two worlds are starting to collide.

By the way, it’s not always people who have done something terribly wrong who have online troubles. In many cases, folks find themselves in a bad spot because of an honest mistake or an act of immaturity that gets catalogued digitally. Though I hold client engagements in the strictest of confidence, there are some lessons to be learned from them, particularly if we change the names to protect the digitally disenfranchised.Read more