Firms Tidy Up Clients' Bad Online Reputations

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB118169502070033315.html>

The Wall Street Journal


Firms Tidy Up Clients'
Bad Online Reputations

By ANDREW LAVALLEE

June 13, 2007; Page B1

As she puts it, Christina Parascandola has the bad luck of having an
unusual name.

The 37-year-old attorney was mentioned in news reports and blog posts about
a heated dispute between residents of her Washington neighborhood and a
noisy local bar that hosted some gay-themed events. Ms. Parascandola was
worried that she came across in the articles as homophobic, particularly to
potential employers.

"When you Google my name, it looks like I'm some kind of monster," she says.

Ms. Parascandola set out to minimize the bad publicity. She hired a company
called ReputationDefender Inc. that promises to help individuals "search
and destroy" negative information about them on the Internet. Businesses
and others have long employed so-called search-engine-optimization
techniques to try to make themselves appear higher in Web-search results.
Now services like ReputationDefender and DefendMyName are charging fees
that can run into hundreds of dollars to help clients remove or downplay
unflattering online information.

The companies cite success stories of customers who have buried snippy blog
comments, embarrassing photos or critical mentions of their names. But, as
Ms. Parascandola found out, the services can't wipe everything off the
Internet, and their efforts can backfire. ReputationDefender sent a letter
to political blog Positive Liberty asking it to remove Ms. Parascandola's
name from a critical entry on the grounds the post was "outdated and
invasive." Blogger Jason Kuznicki refused, and posted a new entry mocking
the request. He says he "had a good laugh over it."

Michael Fertik, a 28-year-old Harvard Law graduate who founded
ReputationDefender in October, said misfires represent a "tiny percentage"
of the company's efforts to fight the "permanent and public" nature of
negative online content. For fees starting at $10 a month, the 10-person
Louisville, Ky.-based company scours blogs, photo-sharing sites and social
networks for information about a client, then charges $30 for each item the
user instructs it to try to correct or remove. The service won't say how
many customers it has.

He declined to say how many times ReputationDefender has succeeded in
having content removed. He cited recent examples including a man whose
ex-lover posted revealing photos to a Web site; an identity-theft victim
who had his personal information published on a blog and a medical student
who had discussed his own clinical depression in an old newsgroup that he
didn't know was public. Mr. Fertik declined to identify those clients.

Janel Lee, a mortgage loan closer in Minong, Wis., sought
ReputationDefender out after her ex-boyfriend began posting her work and
cellphone numbers in response to several questions on Yahoo Answers,
including "What is 50 Cent's phone number?"

She got 15 to 20 calls a day, sometimes as late as 3 a.m. One after-hours
voicemail, presumably intended for the rapper, was a lengthy rap
performance. "I sing blues, jazz and rock. This was painful," said Ms. Lee.

Ms. Lee said she contacted Yahoo Inc. directly but was unable to get most
of the information taken down. So she paid ReputationDefender about $240
for a two-year membership, plus about $150 for the posts that the company,
over three months, got removed. "It was quite a great relief knowing that
someone was working on it for me," she said. Mr. Fertik said Yahoo removed
the information after being contacted by ReputationDefender.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company doesn't discuss individual
customer-care cases, but that if someone's contact information is posted on
Yahoo Answers without approval, the site will remove it.

ReputationDefender begins by sending emails on behalf of its clients to
Web-site owners. The letters typically introduce the company, identify the
client and the offending content, and ask the recipient to remove it. The
letters don't make threats -- Mr. Fertik, despite his training, and others
at ReputationDefender aren't lawyers -- but instead try to appeal to
recipients' sense of fairness: "Like our clients, and perhaps like you, we
think the Internet is sometimes unnecessarily hurtful to the privacy and
reputations of everyday people," one such letter reads.

"The first thing we do is we just ask, very politely," said Mr. Fertik.
"Thereafter, we can get less polite," including contacting a site's
Internet service provider to complain about the site. When Web site owners
don't respond to its letters, ReputationDefender sometimes suggests that
clients hire a lawyer, though Mr. Fertik said that happens infrequently.

Mr. Kuznicki, the blogger, said he refused to take down the information
about Ms. Parascandola because he merely included published information and
expressed personal opinions. "I was surprised to get a notice like this,
because I don't run an unprofessional or defamatory blog," said Mr.
Kuznicki, a Bowie, Md., policy researcher for a think tank.

Ms. Parascandola criticized ReputationDefender for sending a letter
directly to someone who had already written critical things of her -- an
approach she considered clumsy. "I certainly would not have authorized
that," she said. Mr. Fertik said he apologized to Ms. Parascandola and
refunded her fees.

While Mr. Fertik said such problems are rare, takedown attempts that go
awry can generate considerable unwanted attention. Stuart Neilson, a
statistics instructor at a university in Cork, Ireland, claimed on his
personal Web site that he was the victim of "academic bullying" by a
colleague. After the other professor hired ReputationDefender to try to
have the accusations removed, Dr. Neilson rebuffed the firm and posted his
exchanges with the company on his site. Those posts received wider
attention when they were republished on a blog devoted to faculty discord
in academia. "It has merely generated additional publicity," he said.

ReputationDefender also sent a takedown request to Consumerist, a Gawker
Media blog that had written about a man who was briefly jailed for
harassment after repeatedly calling online travel agent Priceline.com Inc.
for a refund. The letter asked the blog to remove or alter the archived
post, saying it was "outdated and disturbing" to its client. Consumerist
editor Ben Popken blasted the request with a profanely titled entry,
calling it an attempt at censorship. "It's not like we're spreading libel,"
he said. "They were trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube."

ReputationDefender's Mr. Fertik said the company is no longer sending
letters to irreverent blogs like Consumerist, which may be more likely to
mock the company's efforts. "We are no longer taking those kinds of risks
with those kinds of outlets," he said.

DefendMyName, a two-year-old unit of Portland, Maine-based marketing firm
QED Media Group LLC, markets itself as a way to remove negative mentions
from search-engine results. What it actually does, said founder Rob Russo,
is attempt to bury them below promotional sites, blogs and forum postings
it creates for clients. The company's rates start at $1,000 a month, he
said, though he declined to say how many clients it has.

Adding positive content to combat negative mentions isn't against Google
Inc.'s rules, a company spokeswoman said, as long as the content is
original and the companies don't use manipulative techniques to push pages
higher in search results. She declined to comment on individual reputation
companies.

Chris Dellarocas, a University of Maryland associate professor who studies
how reputations are built online, said the services are fighting a growing
trend of sites that let users recommend, rank and opine on other people,
from RateMyProfessor to Rapleaf, a site for people to rate each other after
business transactions.

Reputation-management companies "have a place in this new ecosystem, but a
limited one," he said. "Let's not forget that all of these mediums are
protected by the First Amendment," he added. "The question is, what is
defamation and what is a genuinely deserved negative comment?"

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'