Online Reputation Management: Impending Gold Rush?
Here’s a pretty simple business idea that you can twist, turn and enhance for your own good or dastardly ends.
It requires practically no capital and no overheads. It requires only basic internet marketing literacy and most of you probably have the skills to do it already.
If not, there are plenty of free courses, blog posts and case studies for you to get the skills and information.
So what’s this opportunity?
Let’s find out.
Online Reputation Management
The term Online Reputation Management first crossed my eyes a few years ago. It was back when the search engines were in their wild west period and you could blast tens of thousands of links using Scrapebox and that was “SEO Strategy.”
Anyway, those practices got a lot of people in trouble. Naturally, people decided that they’d blast these links until sites got penalised. Then some other people decided that they’d fix the problems the first lot of people had created and give it a name… online reputation management.
Then we had another era where sites like RipOffReport and other dastardly scammers would create what were essentially “Negative SEO” pages. They’d write bad reviews about your company, get them to rank and then charge you for the privilege of having the reviews removed. Extortion… but online reputation management came to be known as “I’m not getting extorted, how do we bump these guys off the first page of search results?”
Now we’re entering a new era where celebrities are getting popped for not keeping their hands to themselves, programmers are getting fired for writing that girls are stupid and dumb frog memes are considered a matter of national security and election fraud.
Best era ever?
Where there’s instability, there’s opportunity.
In a world where online activity is embedded into everything (you can give treats to your dogs via the cloud now) and online activity can also ruin your life, you need online reputation management.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Online reputation management as I’m talking about is the idea of manipulating everything for a client so that whatever they want to see as far as searches, social media and the like is concerned is what they will see.
Now, this is obviously pretty expansive yet could be straightforward.
In short, there are a lot of different options and different opportunities.
Most of them have been developed and explored already, so the hard work is done for you.
Let’s say you want to save the every man. Let’s say he’s a socially-retarded programmer who just can’t help but post stupid memes and like dumb PUA stuff online.
Online Reputation Management for that guy might be a course in best practices for privacy and a guide/program on how to set up some clean, professional looking social media profiles.
Now imagine you’ve got a company that’s petrified of bad Yelp reviews. This might involve a funnel collecting testimonials that post automatically to Yelp. Or something similar.
In most cases, online reputation management is going to be “basic SEO and social media knowledge.”
But let’s say some of you are dastardly. What’s the end limit?
You could set up fake news sites. Run FB Ad campaigns. Hire out a botnet or build one yourself. Get bored redditors to astro-turf subreddits.
I don’t do any of this, but you’d be surprised at the amount of businesses and people who do.
I mention it to point out that the blueprints are out there.
This Markets Itself
Your big motivators are going to be fear and fame.
Are you afraid that someone is going to accuse you of something bad?
Or… are you some rich kid who wants Instagram fame?
Again, you can go totally above board with this. Brand building is important and so is “online visibility.” It’s easy to get left behind… and so on.
But again, if you’re a dastardly rascal, you can follow the shameless copywriting from the doom-and-gloom industry.
Got A Nice Life? All It Takes Is ONE Accusation And Your Life Can Be Ruined. Your Boss Will Fire You. Your Wife Will Leave You. Even Your Cat Will Hate You… Unless You Follow This Advice.
You know, that sort of thing is pretty sneaky marketing. But like all good salesmanship, it’s not wrong. There are many examples of people’s lives falling to bits. There are also examples of people being wrongly accused.
Hell, just switch the TV on and you can see big untouchable people getting hit with accusations and having everything fall apart. Rightly or wrongly.
For constant marketing of your service, just take those stories and point out that you could save someone from having an accusation be there forever.
I’d recommend working with people who just fear this stuff as opposed to getting into the business of defending criminals, but your business, your choice.
Final Thoughts
The above is a relatively simple thing that you can do with basic internet skills and time to figure out the logistics of it all.
It’s also something you could charge well for, because how do you put a price on either of these:
- Fame
- Not having your life ruined
You can either offer the same service but market to those two different audiences.
Marketing the whole thing is as easy as pointing out how people are going wrong (or right) and then saying how you can achieve the same effect for a low-low price (when you think about the potential upsides of controlling the information.)
Anyway, that’s enough to get your idea machines revved up.