NEW YORK, NY — (Marketwire) — 01/09/13 — A recent story in Britain-s Daily Mail highlights a real-life incident so strange, it almost seems like it could be a work of fiction. The story involves RJ Ellroy, a published author who has found himself entangled in the messy world of online reputation fraud. According to the article, Mr. Ellroy has taken to using fake names to post laudatory reviews of his own books, on sites such as Amazon.com. Not content to stop with his fake reviews, the writer also used aliases to attempt to edit unflattering stories out of his Wikipedia page — an incident that has resulted in his being banned from Wikipedia altogether. The strange saga of RJ Ellroy and his failed attempts at online reputation management have won the attention of Reputation Changer; the world-s leading reputation monitoring and defense firm, Reputation Changer has issued a statement to the press, commenting on the Daily Mail report.
“The story of Mr. Ellroy brings two points into stark relief,” says Cliff Stein, the Chief Executive Officer of Reputation Changer. “The first is that online reputation matters a great deal — and the second is that seeking to repair your online image or inflate your Internet persona through acts of dishonesty and duplicity tend to make things worse, not better.”
Stein says that Ellroy was not wrong in taking his online reputation seriously. “Individuals, especially public figures, need to understand how important their online reputation really is, and the same goes for businesses and brands,” Stein says. “For companies, online complaints and negative reviews can prove devastating. At and other acts of online defamation are taken very seriously, because we have seen the effects that malicious words can have on a business.”
The Reputation Changer CEO continues by drawing parallels between the case of Mr. Ellroy, and online reputation management trends more broadly. “What this author understood was that online reviews are tremendously influential in shaping consumer behavior — and that if he wanted to sell more copies of his books, he needed to ensure that his reviews were positive,” Stein notes. “Faking reviewing is not necessarily the way to go about doing this, but review management and monitoring are both critical, not just to authors but to brands of all kinds.”
Ultimately, Stein says Reputation Changer offers an array of brand-enhancing services that can benefit businesses of all kinds. “At Reputation Changer, complaints and bad reviews, as well as scam accusations and other acts of online defamation, are addressed quickly and decisively,” he affirms. “While we cannot make these listings go away completely, we can hide them, and effectively render them non-existent. We can do this much more effectively, and more honestly, than what Mr. Ellroy attempted.”
Indeed, Reputation Changer offers a range of online reputation repair services to businesses and brands. “Our clients have included Fortune 500 brands and small business start-ups,” Stein offers. “What we seek to do is to establish each of these brands as a brand of choice among consumers, managing reviews, suppressing negative content, and ultimately flooding the Web with content the presents our client in the best light possible.”
According to Stein, Reputation Changer works through burying unwanted content with positive, brand-enhancing online assets. “If your problem is bad reviews, or online complaints, we will inundate the Web with articles that cause your brand to shine, and effectively push the unwanted listings out of the way,” Stein concludes. “At and bad reviews are combated through suppression and through positive, proactive efforts in brand enhancement.”
ABOUT:
Reputation Changer was launched in 2009 by a group of online marketing professionals and SEO experts. The company quickly established itself as the leading online reputation management agency in the world. Delivering brand-enhancing services to businesses, brands, and individuals alike, the agency is zealous for giving companies and people control over how they are portrayed on the Web.
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