You can pay someone to clean your house, you can pay someone to clean your office, why not pay someone to clean up your online reputation? The PR blog Murphy’s Law recently posted about an interesting service offered to help keep online reputations clean by ensuring top search engine results yield links to only positive comments about your product, brand or company. The post, titled Cleansing Your Online Reputation, describes how now-a-days, people jump to their search engine of choice to find out about a company, client, service or industry. It’s important, then, to make sure those results that pop up on the search engine are monitored and managed so as to best reflect your company for this potential customer or client. What if a nasty product review was posted on a blog seconds before your next would-be client searched your product on Google? The first piece of information available to them could possibly be that damaging review. Companies like Reputation Defender in the US and Tiger Two in the UK, however, offer to ensure that “only friendly entries appear on the first few pages” when a client’s name is run on a search engine. This handy online maid service will run you $25,000 per year though, and $300,000 for the most premium version.

Money, however,—and wow, is that a lot of money to a college student—isn’t even my first concern. What these services are doing is blocking blogging’s very purpose. Yes, Search Engine Optimization is key when monitoring the blogosphere, but control is not the goal nor should it be the method. Managing your reputation means participating in the sometimes harmful dialogue and responding to bloggers who want to be heard. I disagree with these services and think instead, insightful management of the blogosphere enlisted under a social media campaign can run you a cheaper and more ethically sound reputation control than these companies hope to offer. Companies interested in these services don’t seem to be all that experienced with social media in the first place. Otherwise they would understand social media’s potential as a tool for raising reputation by fostering relationships through conversation, communication, and just some good ol’ fashion listening.

Photo courtesy of Daily Candy at http://www.dailycandy.com/seattle/article/28462/Maid+to+Order.