At the time the company launched their services were confined to asking companies to take down the offensive material but, it seems they have (in true Web 2.0 fashion) expanded their service offerings.

In order to protect you from your earlier indiscretions, RD are now in the business of

hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.
Forbes Magazine

Um, isn’t this just spamdexing?

So, you are foolish enough to publish something indiscreet or, according to Ars Technica, you are one of the 40% of bloggers that published damaging information about your organization on your blog, and then you panic and think, ‘what do I do?’ You call these spammers and they game the search engines to fill their pages with bogus content to bury your indiscretions. It’s like Gresham’s Law.

This service, called MyEdge, is described as “labour intensive” and fees start at US$10,000. So, it doesn’t really look like an option for us public service bloggers who have, as Che Tibby describes it, a hot-heated morning with too much coffee.

It does, however, raise a couple of interesting questions about the practice of online reputation management. The dubious ethics of MyEdge aside, all of us (or certainly our organizations) are constantly building our online profiles. Every page published, article, photo or video posted is indexed and stored – possibly forever. What are we doing about that? Che and Colin McKay have some pretty good suggestions for public servants, but what about the way public sector communicators curate their agencies’ reputations?

How many of our agencies actually practice even a rudimentary form of search engine optimisation? Or have a social media strategy that actively manages online content to effectively curate that reputation?

I don’t have any easy answers, but it seems to me that public sector communicators cannot afford to assume that this space is solely the province of private sector marketers and is of no consequence to them or their organizations.

Photo: PartsnPieces