Search Reputation Management Advice for ORM Professionals

Of all people whom one might expect to keep a squeaky clean online profile, I would say that anyone engaged in search reputation management marketing or social media brand management should be included in that relatively small class.
Everyone has some dirty laundry in their past. Dig deep enough and you’ll find I was once engaged in pretty nasty flame wars over … books
. At the time it was a consuming passion, defending myself against lies from people who really didn’t matter to me. The reputation I built from that period followed me around for years. Occasionally I still run across some obscure nitwit who repeats the lies that were written about me. But I set about the hard task of putting all that nastiness (not participating in it any more) behind me many years ago.
It helps that some of the hard core liars have died and can no longer work their evil against me or anyone else. But I cannot take back the words I wrote, the nasty things I said, or recover the good will I lost among people who once respected my opinion … about books
.
I didn’t realize it at the time but that experience prepared me for a career in online reputation management. When my clients shared their pain with me, I understood that, yes, they found themselves in situations that spiraled out of control and they did and said things that didn’t work out well. Billionaires and Fortune 500 companies sometimes do dumb things just like the rest of us.
I have always taken responsibility for the things I have done and I have tried to practice the advice I freely give to people undergoing reputation management nightmares.
Even in the SEO industry I occasionally rankle feathers and upset people by calling “bullshit” on their preferred marketing beliefs. “It’s all about links” is one of my favorite targets for criticism. SEO was never “all about links” — it’s just that some of your favorite SEO bloggers and forum managers never saw any value in producing worthwhile content without spamming content to the top of the SERPs with links; they justified or rationalized what they were doing by saying nonsense like “links are the most important factor in the search algorithms”.
When I occasionally attend an SEO conference there are usually a few people who approach me tentatively, having heard all about me from their more knowledgeable and experienced friends and mentors (many of whom have argued with me online). These poor folks never quite knew what to make of me. I guess that’s fair because I never quite knew what to make of them
, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and I guess some of them gave me a similar benefit.
I’m not so mean and dreary when you meet me in real life, especially after 6-8 hours of plodding back and forth at a convention where people are saying things like “it’s all about links” or “I’m a content marketer”….
Your reputation precedes you in many ways. I won’t share any more details as I think I have made my point well enough.
Technically, you don’t need any credentials to provide a search reputation management service to people. But some people, apparently, feel the need to manufacture credentials. I will not name names as — so far — these people are having little to no impact on my life (that I can determine). At least one of these people has (I have been told) lied about me to clients and business partners in order to shift blame for failing projects with which I was not involved at the time.
I understand your need to reassure people that, yes, you have the experience and the background to deal with sensitive information presentation campaigns. I also understand that when you are fired from your job for being nasty to a co-worker that you have a need to go out and find a new source of income. And when your former employer seems disinterested in continuing the only profitable line of business they have, the temptation to leverage your business contacts and bring those business partners into new relationships is both natural and obvious.
So let’s assume that anyone who has acquired a bit of experience (and perhaps two years’ worth of technical SEO training on a weekly basis from one of the world’s leading SEO theorists) at managing communications between technical teams and clients decides, “Hey, I can do this too.” Let’s further assume that this person understands the basics of how search works and — having watched many dozens of keyword campaigns rise and fall with the strategies and the search algorithms — knows how to articulate these ups and downs to people.
That is pretty decent experience, in my book, and it is about all the credentials you need, in my opinion. After all, I started doing search reputation management with Forbes 50 and Fortune 500 clients with far less impressive credentials, so it’s not like credentials matter that much. Landing these highly sensitive clients depends more on connections and sales expertise, and we had some pretty well-connected sales people. There is, in my book, no need to make DEMONSTRABLY FALSE claims about how important you are or were in any particular industry (like search reputation management). Just be honest with people about what you
did. You don’t have to take credit for what other people actually did.
So let’s assume that now you have what may be a successful job or business, and that you brought yourself from the ranks of the unemployed to this current pinnacle of personal success through a lot of hard work, with some help from a few old associates who, perhaps, felt you did a good job before you lost it.
Let’s further assume that you have partnered with some honest, hard-working people who only mean well (at least in their public-facing profiles and content) and that they believe in the things you teach them. You have, after all, survived some pretty nasty shit storms in public relations (if I may say so myself) even though you were NOT the architect of the solutions to those nasty shit storms
.
Several years have passed since you enhanced your experience and past responsibilities in order to impress people. You have been fortunate not to have crossed paths with anyone about whom you have lied or otherwise infuriated. But your old resumes — falsely claiming responsibilities you never had, falsely taking credit for success in campaigns you never managed — are still available online.

What does it say about your good sense in the search reputation management arena that you have exposed yourself to public outing, criticism, and rebuke? What if one of your lies comes back to haunt you because something you said about someone else — something demonstrably false — suddenly disrupts that person’s life?
Personally, I am not involved in such a situation. Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the lies that others have shared about me in the past. That’s a long line of people and so far, fortunately, no one has come to me in a business relationship and said, “Michael, I heard such-and-such about you and I am concerned….” I certainly hope that never happens but you can rest assured that if it did I would respond only with the truth. I would not respond to lies with lies.
But if you’re the person who built your current reputation on lies and you’re selling reputation management services on the basis of those lies, well, there’s only one thing I have to say to you.
I’m serious. The enhanced resume and the false claims about who designed and managed the reputation management campaigns have served their purpose. If you’re running a successful business NOW
or happily engaged in a good job NOW, then put all that behind you. Take down the false claims so that no one can come back and point out to the world that you lied about yourself.
Many people dress up their resumes and sometimes they come to regret doing so, but in a lot of cases it’s relatively harmless. You might lose a job for making false claims on your resume but most companies don’t spread that around because they are afraid of being sued. So most people probably learn from their mistake, clean up their resume, and find a job where they don’t have to misrepresent their past experience.
But if you’re making a business out of online reputation management — even though you may have brought some old clients along on your new venture — even if someone may have published an absolutely ridiculous quote from you in a book, giving you a false credibility that just would not hold up under a fair and skeptical investigation of the facts — I should think it would be obvious that now you have much more to lose than just an income.
You could lose your business, your colleagues’ trust and good faith, your clients, and your reputation in the search reputation management industry.
I would hope that any person who benefitted from two+ years’ of intense training in search reputation management and search engine optimization theory would have taken away useful knowledge. Such a person could be a considerable asset to any company or organization, either as an employee or a consultant.
But if the truth comes out — that you have no integrity — what will you do to repair your reputation? Will more lies fix that problem? I hope no one tries to find out.
No matter what bad choices or mistakes you have made in the past, there is no time like the present for setting out on a new path where you don’t repeat those mistakes.
There may always be someone out there waiting to spring a hostile campaign against you. You can’t prevent that from happening. But why give them new ammunition? Just clean up your public record by removing the false claims you have made and go forward.
No one has to know the sordid details, and you have no idea of where the truth may slip out from. It usually comes from a less-than-obvious source. I don’t picture myself as being the architect of such a campaign but, let’s face it, if the lies ever made about me came down on my career and business path in some way, I would make sure that everyone saw the truth and knew just exactly who it was had lied in the first place.
Some people might continue to work with you even so. But wouldn’t it be better to know that you led by example and cleaned up your own SERPs before a problem arose?
I know I would want to do that, had I made false claims about myself.
Redressing the lies you have said about someone else may never be an option for you — but you could at least stop lying from now on. Most people won’t know you were lying to begin with if you don’t get outed, and you can still continue to build a successful life and career.
To me, that’s a pretty simple choice with rich rewards. Perhaps some people just like living on the edge. I don’t know. I don’t think that way.
Maybe one day I’ll write about some of the people who really
founded the online reputation management industry. Trust me, your name won’t be among them.

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