Cleaning up your digital dirt

Bringing in the experts
You can also hire a firm that specializes in vacuuming up the digital dirt.

ReputationDefender is an online reputation management company. CEO Michael Fertik says about half of the negative information they find about their customers is self-inflicted, and half is inflicted by someone else. “Maybe someone wrote something about their eating disorder years ago and now it’s among the top 10 results about them on Google,” he says. “Or there’s someone calling you a thief or a jerk, or a bad girlfriend or boyfriend.”

ReputationDefender charges between $100 to $500 for its services, which include publishing so much accurate and positive information about an individual that the bad stuff gets pushed off the first page on Google.

The company also offers a service that provides manual removal of dirt, including asking site owners and bloggers politely to take down information.

None of this stuff is guaranteed, however, because too often the people that run these sites refuse to remove any data.

Indeed, even ReputationDefender has trouble defending even its reputation on the Web.

When the firm first started, it tried to help out one of its clients by asking a blogger to remove dirt about the individual. But the strategy backfired and the blogger ended up blogging yet again about the client’s dirt — and also slamming ReputationDefender.

In a recent Google search on “ReputationDefender,” the negative post appeared as the third result. This proves how difficult it is, even for experts, to keep a cyber reputation untarnished.

Getting out your cyber mop
As I mentioned before, I have also been slammed on the Internet.

I came across a blog post written by Mark Story, a communications expert and adjunct faculty at the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University, that blasted a story I had  written for msnbc.com about social networking overload.

Story called my reporting “sloppy,” which is probably the worse slam you can make against a journalist.

I decided to write a response on his blog. I'm a blogger at CareerDiva.net and msnbc.com’s YourBiz, after all, and I should be able to take what I sometimes dish out.

I politely disagreed with him on his blog post, and to my surprise, he e-mailed me an apology.

He also blogged about our interchange, saying, “In a moment that was likely based on blogger hubris and too much caffeine, a few weeks ago, I blogged about an MSNBC piece on social media overload and called it ‘sloppy journalism.’ ”

I know, not all these stories will have similar happy endings. But if there’s a chance you can control some of the digital dirt out there, why not take out a cyber mop?

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