How do you take control of your e-reputation?

What is e-reputation?

E-reputation is the digital image the internet reflects of a person, a company, or a brand. It is made of the online information that concerns that individual or brand. You find it on social networks, blogs, collaborative sites, discussion forums, or image and video sharing platforms.

E-reputation, or e-notoriety, therefore delivers facts about a person or a brand without those parties being able to fully control them. This digital identity can tilt an opinion for or against someone. It can make or break reputations very quickly. Why? Because e-reputation is built from a constant stream of information published online, some of which you never see coming.

Today, in a hyperconnected world, e-reputation is word of mouth with a thousand voices.

Why has e-reputation become an important issue?

What do people do today, almost without thinking, to learn about a brand, a company, or a person? The first reflex, and the logical one, is to go online, gather information, and evaluate what we call that entity’s e-reputation.

E-reputation therefore has a large, far-reaching impact on everything. People now trust what they read and rely on what they find online, and a good or bad reputation on the internet shows up in sales and in the trust a consumer, a professional, or anyone looking up those facts is willing to give.

It is an element to take seriously. There are now several ways to check your digital identity, understand it, analyze it, and produce an accurate picture. There are also ways to move that online reputation in a meaningful way. You can call in professionals; if you do, choosing the right e-reputation agency for the need is essential. That work can improve brand image and make you more convincing to prospects and customers, at least when you are a commercial organization.

What are the risks?

What happens when you do not control your e-reputation, or simply ignore it? You can be undermined by content that is visible on the web. Visitors will then see those slanderous claims, which can have serious consequences for your activity in general, whether you are a person or a company. Visibility on the internet is therefore not risk-free, because it can be good or bad, and it can sometimes carry values that are not yours.

What are the vectors of e-reputation?

A person’s reputation in the “real world” travels door to door and by word of mouth. Today, e-reputation on the internet is also built very quickly from everything that circulates online. The vectors of online reputation keep multiplying and diversifying:

• search engines: Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, Yandex, where a first-page ranking signals how well known a person or a brand is. People talk about “notoriety pages” for that reason. To manage e-reputation, though, it is wise to focus on Google’s results. More than 91% of people in France use this search engine, and 3.3 billion Google queries are run every day worldwide. That dominance means brands and individuals have to watch what sits on its first pages. 67% of clicks go to the first five results. To manage e-reputation, the Google top 5 is the place to watch.

• social networks: companies, even more than individuals, are now present on social networks through community management, to attract prospects or retain customers by creating content or running events. The point is to keep a permanent conversation and a closer relationship with their audience through those accounts. Unlike a search engine, where content can stay visible for years, social posts disappear more easily and are, in a sense, “ephemeral”. ;

• professional networks such as LinkedIn, which work through connections, networking, and communication. They are a good tool for strengthening e-reputation with the people who matter;

• blogs and forums: open discussion around a person, a brand, or a purchase experience increasingly helps future customers buy into a personality’s appeal, a company’s values, or a product’s quality. They can also make people reject a personality, a product, or a brand. For business leaders, it is therefore necessary to know the conversations happening about their company on those forums and to learn how to steer them in order to manage their image;

• YouTubers: the growing power of YouTubers who, “in real time”, report on a purchase and on a product’s actual quality is well known. The most famous example is fashion or beauty YouTubers who film a “haul”. They compare the product as it appears on the site with the garment (cut, fabric, color, finish) as they wear it;

• review sites and experience-sharing platforms such as Tripadvisor, Yelp, Google reviews, and others. They specialize in giving consumers and visitors information about a company by sharing certified, uncensored user reviews. Some reviews left on those platforms have no business being there and can be posted in bad faith, which is why we offer a Google Business Profile review-removal service. ;

• video and photo sharing platforms (YouTube) or photo platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, and others): video content creation and photography are two extremely powerful tools for building or destroying an e-reputation. On personal social accounts or on these participatory platforms, they can strengthen a person’s or a brand’s reputation, or damage it for a long time, with unflattering or overly intimate images published without consent.

The stakes of e-reputation: how do you look after yours?

It is essential to know what is visible about you on the internet and to be able to manage your e-reputation when negative judgments, false news, or defamatory comments appear.

Without control of the content being published, therisksare high!

You can control what you publish yourself on your personal accounts. You have much less hold over what other people publish. That is especially true on blogs and social networks. Those surfaces are increasingly consulted by people searching in a professional context (recruiters, employers, employees, clients, suppliers, and so on) or a personal one (family, partners, friends, and so on). The habit is now so common that people say they “Google” someone when they look up a person or a brand.

How do you control and improve your e-reputation?

The important part of mastering online reputation is understanding it and seeing what it involves. That is how you can then take care of it and get some hold over it. Defining your image and reputation on the web is therefore the first essential step.

You will then need ways to manage your e-reputation, by putting a set of measures in place. That can mean specialized agencies, or your own monitoring. The goal is a complete diagnosis of your reputation on the web, then different ways to change the picture if you need to. Some laws can also help, especially if you are an individual who wants to protect a private life from being published online, notably through the right to be forgotten. The internet is a tool that is as useful as it is dangerous for getting yourself talked about, and you have to see that in order to act in your interest.

An individual and a company can both control part of their e-reputation: sometimes the leader’s reputation matters as much as the company’s image for the business. You then have to control as much as you can: texts, photos, or videos posted on social networks, articles published on a blog… all the content the company or the leader produced themselves. If a publication is outdated or unflattering, you can delete it. For forum posts, chats, or judgments from other visitors, de-indexing depends on the host sites. The internet still does not really have a right to be forgotten, and it suffers instead from information overload: long after publication, caches keep a trace of our writing and our photos and make reputation management harder.

Even if we ourselves deleted the excessive judgment or the unflattering photo that was hurting our brand image and our reputation, the site keeps copies of the documents that passed through it. There remains, finally, a share of our online e-reputation that does not depend on us. Reputation is tied to what third parties can publish about a person, a brand, friends, acquaintances, clients, employees, or employers, and that can be much harder to control. The sources are scattered, so de-indexing becomes harder to obtain.

How do you manage and monitor your e-reputation?

To monitor a digital reputation or e-reputation, brands and individuals are advised to regularly type their name or their brand name into a search engine as keywords. That lets them “see” their reputation on the web immediately and take stock of everything that is present. They then have, in a sense, a “composite picture” of their digital identity. Several monitoring tools also exist to keep watch. To help companies and individuals “see” their e-reputation, Google launched a tool called My web presence. It is meant to make it easier to monitor an internet user’s online identity. The monitoring tool follows the simple principle of Google Alerts: the user is notified as soon as they are mentioned on the web via their name, email address, or other data about them.

How do you get negative or defamatory content removed online?

We publish more and more of our lives online. It is now easy to damage an e-reputation, whether you are an individual who wants to defame a company that dismissed them, or a brand that wants to hurt a competitor’s e-reputation. The law does allow anyone to request the removal of data published on the internet that they consider harmful to their private life, their reputation, or their e-reputation. You then send a removal request to the person responsible for the site that published the content, explaining the reasons: breach of privacy and reputation, defamation, unfair competition, and so on.

To help internet users with that process, the CNIL publishes a sample removal-request letter on its site.

If, within a legal period of two months after sending the request, a person still cannot get the content removed, they can send a complaint letter to the CNIL. The CNIL can then support the request with the site owner, and watch for a concrete response aimed at improving the reputation on the web of the person concerned.

The right to delisting with site owners

To have a negative page that harms a person’s or a brand’s e-reputation removed, two options have existed since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling of 13 May 2014 on the right to delisting:

• the option to ask the original site to remove that information

• the option to ask search engines to stop listing that information

Those two steps should be taken together, because even with a recognized right, delisting is hard to obtain. The newer “right to delisting” only allows the removal of links about a person or a brand from a search on their name. The unwanted texts or images remain accessible on the original site if they appear for queries other than the name, or if they were found through other search engines.

To contact the site that published the negative content you want removed, look at the site’s legal notices or terms of use.

You can also find a site’s contact details in the public Whois database, which lists domain-name owners, who are usually responsible for the sites. Whois records can be consulted on the AFNIC site (Association française pour le nommage Internet en coopération) or on whois.net. That step matters, because it is the person responsible for the website who can decide to delist certain pages. They can also remove articles or images that harm a company’s or a brand’s e-reputation and a person’s private life.

Even after those steps, traces can remain in search results through temporary copies, or “caches”. Through Google, you can then use a voluntary de-indexing procedure: you ask for the removal not only of the unwanted pages’ links, but also of their cache.

The right to delisting with search engines

The second option is for a person or a brand to request the removal of a result directly from the search engine. Google, for example, offers internet users a request form for that purpose. It then reviews whether the request is justified against the conditions set by the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union).

For other engines, the request has to be sent in writing.

These steps are long and tedious. They require a solid knowledge of the law and of the internet. Semji specializes in e-reputation management. With a team of SEO experts, the company can support you effectively in managing your reputation on the web.

Going to court

Recent news has shown it: false stories that spread online, intimate photos made available to everyone, can do serious damage to a person or a brand and degrade their reputation on the web in a few hours. If a delisting request gets no answer or an unsatisfactory one, you can still file a complaint with the CNIL and/or go to court. Even with those remedies, it can be very hard to force a site to take down unwanted content, especially if the site is hosted outside the European Union. That is why companies and public figures increasingly turn to firms and agencies that specialize in e-reputation management.

Calling on firms that specialize in e-reputation management

With always-on monitoring tools, firms that specialize in e-reputation, including our agency, offer to clean, remove, or hide information that can harm clients’ e-reputation. They also use monitoring tools and put influence strategies in place by acting on search-engine algorithms. That is what people call SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This set of techniques optimizes the visibility of a name or a link in the results pages, in order to increase organic traffic. The goal is to see your site rank on the first page of results.

These positive pages push negative results or unflattering writing further down.

Our agency can grow a brand’s notoriety through partnerships with many media outlets. Publishing press articles on online newspapers helps strengthen a brand’s or a person’s identity and move negative results down on Google.

What can you do if some content cannot be removed online?

Since 2014, there has been a right to delist information that could harm the e-reputation of a natural or legal person. A company, a brand, or an individual can also go to court to obtain the removal of unwanted content. It is often very hard, though, to obtain the permanent removal of content from a host site located outside the European Union. In that case, specialized firms such as Semji put influence strategies in place: they create neutral or positive content about their clients and distribute it on as many surfaces as possible. That creates “noise” around a brand or a public figure, while making the negative content that cannot be removed less audible and less visible.

To make sure positive or neutral results appear on the first page of the engines, specialized firms encourage their clients to open accounts on every social network, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Viadeo, and others. The negative content is then “drowned” under the stream of flattering information published on social networks. As the internet keeps growing, the role of these specialized agencies will only become more important, while e-reputation will remain a major issue in the development of companies and institutions.

The role of social networks in e-reputation

Even more than search engines, a social network is an open window onto private life. If companies or brands limit what they publish to their values, images of their collections, or videos of the promotional, community, or charity events they organize, individuals use social networks to stage themselves or tell their story. Private life then becomes public, even when it is shared with a small closed group of friends or “followers”. Photos from the last vacation, portraits of children, hobbies, parties, evenings and birthdays, the latest products bought, favorite clothes or good addresses: all of it can be brought to other people’s attention.

Young people and e-reputation on the web

Some people, and young people in particular, seem to live constantly under other people’s gaze. They are at an age when the desire to belong to a group and to receive a third party’s approval is very strong. Without a filter and without distance, they often “post” raw reactions to recent events or snap judgments about public figures, sometimes in a one-upmanship tied to group or networking effects. Others photograph themselves, or let themselves be photographed, in casual, risqué, or compromising poses at drunken parties.

A social network is also a tool for school bullying and for non-consensual pornography, “revenge porn”. Either practice can lead to suicide or have heavy psychological consequences for the person whose intimate images were published on the web without their consent. A recent case shows how far this can go. In Denmark, two videos and a photo showing a 15-year-old girl in a compromising sexual situation were posted on Facebook Messenger. According to Danish police, one of the videos was then widely shared on that social network, to the point that 1004 young internet users (including 800 boys) are now accused of having relayed the clip online and face prison.

In France, the digital law of 7 October 2016 penalizes “revenge porn”. Facebook, for its part, decided to be at the front of that fight by testing in Australia a tool that would let users report, before publication, intimate photos that could be shared without their permission. The system would not remove the photos immediately. Once reported, the images would first go to a team of reviewers. Then an algorithm would block any new download.

E-reputation and recruiting

Even with sophisticated reporting tools, compromising images or opinions have time to circulate on the internet and destroy your e-reputation. For young people looking for a job, that unwanted content and those photos can seriously damage their reputation on the web and therefore their career. Recruiters and managers regularly consult social networks to research their candidates or their employees. “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” That saying is even more true on the web. Recent examples of this information overload include newly elected young members of parliament whose old insulting comments were found, shown to everyone, and destroyed their e-reputation.

Young people in particular should use social networks with moderation and caution, and avoid exposing their most private life.

A specialized agency such as ours can, at the job-search stage, help young people clean their various accounts of anything that could compromise a current hire and a future career.

People often talk, wrongly, about a “digital revolution”. The internet did not start a revolution so much as a deep change in our habits and in society. It has not only changed the rules of work; it has also changed our relationship to private life and to other people. In an always-connected era, e-reputation has become a major issue.

Calling on an agency that specializes in e-reputation

Are you a company that wants to strengthen its employer brand? Are you a leader who wants to improve your online image? We have been helping companies and leaders improve their e-reputation on Google for nearly 10 years. Contact us to use our e-reputation services: our experts support you in strengthening and monitoring your online reputation. They build a strategy to improve your brand image through a thorough analysis of your presence on Google.