Insurance For Your Reputation

Call it search engine insurance. Since every personal and corporate decision is now preceded by multiple fact-finding queries on search engines, it’s now time to get protection – preventative and remedial – for the Internet. If you don’t control your search engine results, you’re letting fate or someone else decide what people will see first about you and your enterprise. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. Today, in fact, it takes only five minutes for anyone with access to the Web to ruin your reputation.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Internet was the domain of computer-focused people. Risks to computers and networks from rapidly proliferating viruses gave rise to virus protection software. Then the early 2000s saw the emergence of e-commerce. Risks to credit cards and other electronic payment instruments gave rise to sophisticated tools to protect credit. Today, you live your entire life on the Web. You do all of your business on the Web. You work, date, learn, and labor through and with the Internet. And a recent survey of insurance brokers even named “reputation risk” as the number one threat to their clients. But, as yet, there is no life insurance for the Web, or property and casualty insurance for the Web.

That is why Michael Fertik founded his company, ReputationDefender. It gives its individual and corporate customers tools to control their online identities. It’s not insurance, per se, since insurance is a regulated field, but the solutions are inspired by the same spirit. ReputationDefender’s mission is to protect the good name of people and companies on the Internet, a place where reputations can explode at any time.

Why does online reputation matter? Search engines are now the number one source of information about potential business partners, employees, and employers. A recent study by Pew Internet & American Life shows that over half of all Americans research other people in their personal and professional lives. The take-away? You may not be searching for your own name, but other people are researching you. It’s a good bet that you likely searched for someone in a search engine within the past 48 hours.

And the search results matter! Eighty-three percent of executive recruiters use search engines for researching job candidates and 75 percent of patients search online for information about physicians. Our online reputations impact our offline lives across employment fields and social strata. Like any other valuable asset, our reputations are worth insuring and protecting.

It is essential to remember that, when people research you on the Internet, they do not have to believe what they read beyond a reasonable doubt. They only have to believe it enough not to take a risk on you. That threshold is low. If there is smoke, they may be tempted to believe that there is fire. Or they may believe that there is enough of a risk of fire that they won’t proceed. After all, particularly in this economic climate, there are other employee candidates, other business partners and other service providers who may not have the same problem.

So what is the advantage of taking action now, before there is a problem affecting your reputation online? There are two strong benefits. First, search engines tend to favor results that have been around for a while. So if you start building your “reputation equity” on the search results now, you increase the chances that you will be able to defeat any possible future attack if and when it comes. Second, if you are not acting now to take control of your search results, you are missing an opportunity to turn your existing results into a strong positive messaging engine for yourself and your business.

There are steps you can take yourself. First, protect your name as an individual by establishing strong, well-rounded profiles in a handful of social networking sites, and open up the link to the search engines. Those links typically appear high in search results. Second, build a simple Web site or blog for yourself, and keep it maintained from time to time and looking fresh. For your business, make sure that your corporate Web site has outbound links to the positive press and other links that you want to appear near the top of search results. You might as well use the link equity your own site has accrued over time.

After you’ve done all that, call the pros! You insure yourself against rainy days with E&O, professional liability, health, property and casualty, D&O, cyber, and other coverage. But you remain exposed in one of the most vulnerable parts of your personal and professional life. You can’t afford not to protect yourself. ReputationDefender serves clients with proprietary promotion, optimization, and suppression techniques, as well as its staff of professional writers, to maximize results and search engine defense.

Without an established, positive online reputation, our good names are constantly at risk. Everyone is watching. Someone has to get your back.