Donald Canning has a great post over at Windows in Financial Services that covers Online Reputation Risk Management, Reputation.com and the emerging concept of Google Insurance for professionals, students and corporations. Don Canning is currently Managing Director of the Insurance Worldwide Group at Microsoft Corporation so he has deep knowledge of insurance, risk management and technology. Mr. Canning’s post is both readable and information rich and well worth a read. Quoting from the post:

Call it search engine insurance. Since every personal and corporate decision is now preceded by multiple fact-finding queries on search engines, it’s now time to get protection – preventative and remedial – for the Internet. If you don’t control your search engine results, you’re letting fate or someone else decide what people will see first about you and your enterprise. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. Today, in fact, it takes only five minutes for anyone with access to the Web to ruin your reputation.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Internet was the domain of computer-focused people. Risks to computers and networks from rapidly proliferating viruses gave rise to virus protection software. Then the early 2000s saw the emergence of e-commerce. Risks to credit cards and other electronic payment instruments gave rise to sophisticated tools to protect credit. Today, you live your entire life on the Web. You do all of your business on the Web. You work, date, learn, and labor through and with the Internet. And a recent survey of insurance brokers even named “reputation risk” as the number one threat to their clients. But, as yet, there is no life insurance for the Web, or property and casualty insurance for the Web.

That is why Michael Fertik founded his company, Reputation.com. It gives its individual and corporate customers tools to control their online identities. It’s not insurance, per se, since insurance is a regulated field, but the solutions are inspired by the same spirit. Reputation.com’s mission is to protect the good name of people and companies on the Internet, a place where reputations can explode at any time.

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And the search results matter! Eighty-three percent of executive recruiters use search engines for researching job candidates and 75 percent of patients search online for information about physicians. Our online reputations impact our offline lives across employment fields and social strata. Like any other valuable asset, our reputations are worth insuring and protecting.

Reputation.com thanks Mr. Canning for the thoughtful post. We look forward to preserving and maintaining reputations in the digital age.