Recently Grant Crowell of Reel SEO sat down with Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik to discuss Video Reputation Management Solutions. Reel SEO specializes in Video SEO and Video Internet Marketing, so they understand how a video can influence one’s reputation online. The post is well constructed and highlights the emerging trend of Video Online Reputation Management. There is, fittingly, video and audio media inside the post that our readers are encouraged to check out. Below is a brief snippet from Mr. Crowell’s piece:

It seems like a lot of people who post video online can become pretty careless when it comes to managing their own reputation online as well, or respecting the reputation of others.

Warren Buffet once said that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to destroy it. Today in the Internet world, it takes just 5 minutes for you, in a mistake of your own doing, or someone else, who has attacked you on the web, to destroy your reputation. Whether its something that you or someone else does quite innocently or maliciously to begin with, can be taken out of content, and repositioned, recalibrated, recontextualized, and used to do damage to you.

How Reputation.com help someone out with gathering evidence if someone needs to protect themselves from defamation, harassment, or other criminal activities?

We’ve helped some people gather evidence where people have already hired attorneys. In some cases the work that we do uncovers information that ends up with someone saying that they need to hire an attorney for what we found for them. We are able to turn over the information to attorneys, although we are not attorneys ourselves. On the criminal side, we have had occasion to be in contact with law enforcement authorities in a few jurisdictions. But chiefly, what we are focused on doing is helping people solve problems without having to resort to the law. A lot of times, a lawyer can be helpful. But also many times, if you contact a lawyer in an online dispute, you can actually exacerbate the problem, and inspire someone to attack you further on the Web. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but the cost of litigation can be quite high, and often through technical means, you’re able to solve the problem without needing to hire a lawyer. But we do work with attorneys on occasion, and we able to turn over data – sometimes whole reams of data – over to our clients for their attorneys use.

Reputation.com thanks Reel SEO for their thoughtful interview and post.

Michael Fertik, CEO and Founder of Reputation.com, has a post over at MainStreet.com that covers Online Reputation Management and the importance of proactively controlling one’s online presence in a wired world. Fertik points out, correctly, that the most well researched and authoritative points of view on the web can be drowned out by slander, falsehoods and innuendo. Quoting from his post:

It might seem illogical that bogus speculation can end up dominating searches for you, but that’s how a rumor mill works.

A great strength of the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice.  That’s also one of its dangers: it can endow fraudsters and idle speculators with the appearance of authority.

The danger is real. This does not mean you should stop using the Internet.  It means that you must proactively establish your accurate and positive presence on the web before there is a problem.  You need to maximize your control over what people find about you, before someone else does it for you.

The article is both thoughtful and informative and well worth reading in its entirety. Kudos to MainStreet.com and TheStreet.com for spreading the word about managing reputational risk online.

Reputation.com is the leader in Online Reputation Management, Online Risk Management and Online Privacy Solutions.

As we move into an increasingly digital world, the right to privacy has become one of the most highly politicized issues in government and industry. Can you ever be truly anonymous on the web? How much information can companies gather about potential consumers through the web? What would happen if a major social network like MySpace or Facebook were hacked? Because privacy laws can’t adapt as fast as technology can change, these kinds of questions are notoriously difficult to answer. Of course, that’s the reason people invented Think Tanks.

Known for their eclectic mix of industry insiders and academic researchers, Think Tanks play an important part in shaping policy on a variety of issues. While there are already a number of Think Tanks in Washington, D.C. dedicated to privacy, the relatively new Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), merits particular attention.

Established in November 2008, FPF is headed by Jules Polonetsky, the former Chief Privacy Officer of AOL, and Christopher Wolf, a partner at Washington D.C. law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. According to the organization’s official homepage, the FPF “advocates for privacy advances that promote transparency and user control in a manner that is practical for business to implement to ensure personal autonomy for all who seek to embrace the benefits of our digital society.”

While the FPF boilerplate sounds good, we especially like that “personal autonomy” bit; ars technica reports that the group’s corporate ties have made some anxious about their promises.

From the article:

The Q&A session, however, quickly turned from the private to the pecuniary, with some pointed questions about the organization’s funding. The Forum’s initial money has come primarily from AT&T, with which Wolf’s firm has longstanding ties. Several online commentators, such as Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, have worried that the Forum will act as a handmaiden of business, helping it preempt or dilute privacy legislation. Wolf, after all, was formerly chair of the Hands Off the Internet Coalition, a self-described consumer advocacy group that has often been characterized as an astroturf organization—an industry front dedicated to opposing net neutrality legislation. Polonetsky sought to confront those suspicions head on, denying that the group was an attempt to forestall legislation through promotion of self-regulation.

Besides Wolf’s connection to AT&T, questions of the FPF’s role in the net neutrality debate also arose.

Another—and, it should be noted, inconsistent—theory advanced by Saul Hansell of The New York Times holds that this is part of an ongoing feud between AT&T and Google that has its roots in the net neutrality debate. In this account, the Forum’s rationale is to level the playing field, ensuring that companies like Google don’t enjoy a competitive advantage in their ability to target advertising to consumers by using their personal data at the application level, something that ISPs are prevented from exploiting directly.

One of Google’s privacy attorneys has been invited to sit on the Forum’s advisory board, which may cast doubt on this suggestion. That invitee, however, hasn’t yet accepted or rejected the offer, which may signal that the search giant has suspicions of its own on this front.

Empowering individuals to use the Internet responsibly and pro-actively goes to the very core of Reputation.com, and any government agency or Think Tank that works toward that goal is a potential privacy advocate. The Future of Privacy Forum is certainly something that we’ll be keeping our eyes on here at the Reputation.com Blog.

According to that glorious repository of information, Wikipedia, entrepreneur Phillipe Kahn became the first man to demonstrate the practical use of a camera phone when he snapped a picture of his newborn daughter and sent it to 2000 friends and family. That was all the way back in 1997. Now, 12 years later, cellphones with camera functions are the standard. In fact, some ultra fancy phones, like the ever-popular Apple iPhone, boast cameras that can snap pictures with 2 megapixels of quality.

Of course, like with any new technology, there are certain trade offs. With the prevalence of cell phone cameras, it has become much easier for people to take and share pictures instantly. In some cases this has helped lead to justice, such as the recent arrest of an Oakland BART police officer for the killing of an unarmed man. Unfortunately, it has also led to an increase in good-old fashioned virtual voyeurism. One of the main places where this kind of camera phone use occurs is on the subway. Michael Daly discussed the issue in a recent editorial for the New York Daily News.

Quoting from the article:

You do not need to be a celebrity to have embarrassing images of you flashed before the public.

Yawn, doze, pass out, smooch, weep on the subway and you risk one of these pauper-azzis posting your picture on a site such as Flickr.

A woman who sat despondent on a train with her face in her hands appears in a photo captioned “The Saddest Girl.”

“Nice shot,” reads a comment.

Women who fill out their jeans risk appearing along with captions such as “fat bimbo a–” and “big a–.” A pair of youngsters appears with the caption: “Two kids from my neighborhood … I’ve watched them grow into very unhappy fat kids.”

“Killer capture,” applauds a poster.

One sorry soul was snapped while suffering a lapse in personal hygiene.

“Nose Picker,” reads the caption.

Another nose picker appears with a comment reading: “Eeeew!”

[SNIP]

There are also those whose pictures have artistic value. This underground aesthetic dates to the time of the Great Depression, when the renowned photographer Walker Evans rode the subway with a hidden camera poking from between the buttons of his overcoat.

“The guard is down and the mask is off,” he once said. “Even more than in lone bedrooms [where there are mirrors], people’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”

The reason for the underground “naked repose” is the psychic privacy we grant each other aboard the subway. We recognize we are trapped together with greatly reduced expectation of private space. We therefore allow another sort of distance, which joins with anonymity to accord a kind of solitude even when people are pressed in all around you.

According to an annual survey taken by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, Google, as of 2008, is no longer trusted. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

 The San Francisco-based groups noted that Google’s fall from the leagues of “trusted” to “not trusted” puts it in company with such ne’er-do-wells as Countrywide Financial and Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide). When a search engine is getting the same treatment as failing banks you know that the economy is wacky.

 This notion is made even more apparent when considering the fact that Nationwide, the embattled insurance carrier, maintained a spot at ninth for the most trusted companies, and U.S. Bank and eLoan remained in the top 20.

 American Express retained its position at number 1 for the fourth year in a row (this is the survey’s 5^th year), with eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson rounding out the top five.

 The Ponemon Institute conducted the interview by collecting over 6000 people and asking them which companies they trusted most and least. The answers were then weighted by the subjects’ age, gender and household income to comport with U.S. census data.

 When the data was broken down some surprising trends emerged from the numbers. 45 percent of the responders said that they feel in control of their personal information – a drop from last year’s 48 percent, and further away from the 56 percent in 2006. More than half of those questioned (60 percent) indicated that identity theft negatively affects how they think about a company, and almost as many said they are concerned when a company sends notifications of data breaches.

The CEO of TRUSTe, Fran Maier, said that the results indicated that consumers were becoming more astute about privacy. Dr. Larry Ponemon, the chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute, said that larger companies, such as IBM, are trusted because of a strong brand, and others, like Apple, are trusted because of the products they sell. With regards to search engines, Dr. Ponemon felt that many people feel sorry for Yahoo! because of the company’s troubles with rivals Microsoft and Google. “Google (and Microsoft) suffer from big company syndrome, people figure that if you’re big and collecting data, there must be an issue.”

An overarching trend among companies that are trusted by consumers is the presence of good privacy practices. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said that the social network earns peoples’ trust by empowering them. “It shouldn’t be binary, where you either reveal a piece of data to everyone on the Internet or Facebook or not at all,” he said. “We think people want to share more information, but they want choices.”