If you are not convinced that SEO can influence Google’s ranking and your online reputation, go read this article to find out how “SEO experts can bend the truth”

You may need the help of these SEO experts to help you manage your digital reputation and to control the damage caused by some uninitiated advertising agent.

SEO for CEO

If you are the boss of the company (and I mean a really big company) or a government agency, are you not concerned about what is listed on the first page of Google search result for search terms related to your company name or product?

Here’s three of the examples which I’ve witnessed firsthand over the past year in Singapore… Samsung’s Omnia Contest, A*Star’s Star Challenge 2008 and NTU AdWords Fiasco.

Case 1: Samsung Omnia Contest

Can you imagine how you feel when you searched “samsung omnia contest” and see “Samsung Omnia Contest – Scam?” in the #1 position!

How will that #1 position affect potential customers of Samsung mobile phones?

It would be good if potential customers can hear from the contest organizer or Samsung regarding that “scam” blog post.

Whose responsibility? Samsung Singapore’s or the advertising agency’s?

Case 2: Star Challenge 2008

When you searched for “star challenge 2008″ on Google, you would see my earlier blog post on “Star Challenge 2008 Website Broken?” in the #4 position. I didn’t know it would end up there, oops… I just wanted to help.

This accidental first page ranking of my blog post makes me realize the importance to manage what people see in the first page of Google result for those keywords related to one’s reputation or brand.

Case 3: NTU AdWords Campaign Fiasco

Here’s another example of online advertising campaign went wrong:

Google SMU get NTU

And one of the comments was “Whoever did this for NTU should be sacked.”

Digital Reputation Management for Brick and Mortar Business

Even if your business do not have any online marketing campaign or advertise aggressively online, you still have to manage your online reputation.

Because you cannot control what people write in their blogs.

You may not even know you lost at least $3000 worth of business because someone talked about her excruciating encounter at her blog.

Don’t wait for negative publicity to surface on the Internet before you take action.

Because that can be too late and costly.

You have to set aside your company’s resource now for digital reputation management to prevent publicity catastrophe.

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SEO for the Rest of Us

[Updated 16 December 2008] Just came across this newly published blog article by Tony Hirst and realized that, in fact, even librarians need to understanding how search ranking works or risk innocent content being “associated with inappropriate material in a search engine results listing” unintentionally.