Massachusetts Lawyer Blog

Sue Stapely, in When reputations are on the line | The Law Gazette, notes:

The approach of reputation management specialists and lawyers is often diametrically opposed. Good communication involves speaking up fast, filling the information vacuum, taking ownership of the issue and, if necessary, apologizing.

This is essential if the situation is to be contained and the organization under scrutiny is to recover. Most lawyers – media-averse, detail-oriented and cautious ever to admit liability – find this approach counter-cultural. [U.S. spelling conventions' edits made]

While a response of some sort may be necessary, taking preventative measures before a problem arises may help minimize the depth of damaging information. That is, there may be steps you can take to help protect your online identity in the first place. Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results lists 10 steps to proactively fill up content about you on the web.

In Online Reputation Management: Don’t Let One Bad Apple Spoil The Basket - EngineWorks, Tyson Braun, elaborates on this further, but sums up his approach into two strategies:

1. Boosting the position of favorable pages that compete with the negative listing (s)
2. Creating and promoting new highly optimized SEO landing pages

Lisa Barone, Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media discussed some of these issues while liveblogging and lists some legal options, at Search & Reputation Management. Speaking of the legal front, this post, Google Won’t Remove that Page You Don’t Like, But You (or Your SEO) Can | MT-Soft, states:

Google’s head of web spam (a division of the engine’s search quality division) recently posted a piece entitled, Why Google Won’t Remove that Page You Don’t Like. An excerpt:

Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on the web about me that I really don’t like. Is there any way to remove it from Google’s index?” People don’t usually say it like that. More likely, they say “There’s this person making crazy claims about me on the web, and the stuff they say is just off-the-wall. Can Google remove this crazy person’s page?”

In a standard follow-up email, two options for removal are offered:

The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.”

For a look at a recently covered lawsuit involving cyber-defamation issues, read ABC News: Lawsuit Cracks Open Online Anonymity.  Here a defamation case involving the identity of commenters reveals some of the challenges a lawsuit may face:

But even assuming Topix turns over its information, identifying online commenters is not a simple task. Unless the commenters registered with Topix, which most did not do, Tolles said all the company would be able to reveal about each person is his or her IP (Internet protocol) address, or the unique number assigned to each computer.

Once the couple has the IP addresses, it would still have to go to the Internet service providers (ISPs) to identify the actual users. Assuming Topix releases the IP addresses in March, it could still be months before the ISPs turn over the information they have.

And, even then, the Leshers could find that the long trail of digital breadcrumbs leads them to library and coffee shop computers used by scores of people, instead of those in homes and offices used by an identifiable few.