By Bob Clark
Sept. 16, 2010
WILD WEST 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier
By Michael Fertik and David Thompson
AMACOM, New York, NY
June 2010, 288 pages, $24.95.
The web is problematic because it never forgets. Post anything, and it gets a life of its own.
Michael Fertik and David Thompson are key players in a company called Reputation Defenders, Inc. – Fertik as CEO and Thompson as Chief Privacy Officer. Both are lawyers and experienced in the field of protecting reputations in our online world.
With this book they deliver:
• Insight into motives of attackers who can remain completely anonymous.
• Information on the different methods attackers can use.
• Guidelines that show how to perform a reputation audit as a starting point for the process of protecting yourself.
As is true with most defensive strategies, Fertik says “an active self-defense is the only way to protect your online reputation from accidental damage and malicious attack.” In this regard, the book spells out four actions that put this approach in motion:
• Claim your online identity. This can involve creating user names and URLs that mirror your business. Creating profiles in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blog sites and Google can help shut down some of the mechanisms that could be used to impersonate or defame you.
• Create positive and neutral content about your business. Use the various profiles mentioned above to build positive stories so that search engines will find good material when responding to queries.
• Encourage other people to create positive or neutral content about your business. The more people blog or otherwise post positive information about the business, the more likely your identity will be protected from attacks.
• Bolster the visibility of existing positive and neutral content about you. The order of the views in most search engines is driven by activity, therefore, it is important to encourage others to visit your positive sites frequently so those sites become the most likely to pop up in searches.
This book does a good job of explaining the problems that can result from accidental or malicious attacks on your business.
While it has some weaknesses, this book will provide business leaders with real help in three areas:
• It delivers important information on the potential for online attacks.
• It includes useful steps on how to prevent attacks.
• It offers insight on responding to an attack, but this portion is less well developed.
Bob Clark is the president of RWC Consulting LLC and has more than 30 years’ experience in labor-management relations. He provides consulting help in labor relations and is an adjunct professor at Concordia University in Ann Arbor.