Reputation Clensing

My PR professor posted a link last week to Tom Murphy’s PR blog “Murphy’s Law”. The post talked about reputation cleansing on the internet. Simply put, there are a few companies out there (as Reputation Defender (US), Tiger Two (UK) and Distilled (UK)) that offer services that promise to ensure the top search results about you are positive.

I started thinking about how this relates to sports. Do you think Barry Bonds would hire one of these companies to make sure that his top search engine results were all positive? Probably not.

While this may be a valuable service for companies and people that are not high profile, it does not matter what comes up first in a search engine when you google a prominent athlete when you already know what you are looking for.

Search engine optimization and the service that these companies are promising is not worth the $25,000 -$300,000 per year price tag, when the media is covering national stories that are not positive and the information is out there.

You can make it hard for people to find information, but if they really to find it, they will.

If I were Reputation Defender, I would not look to target sports figures and celebrities that are regularly covered in the mainstream media. Coverage will be available to the public on these people, regardless of how long it takes to find it.