Reputation management

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Reputation management, originally a public relations term, refers to the influencing, controlling, enhancing, or concealing of an individual's or group's reputation. The growth of the internet and social media led to growth of reputation management companies, with search results as a core part of a client's reputation.^[1] Online reputation management, sometimes abbreviated as ORM, focuses on the management of product and service search engine results.^[2]

Ethical grey areas include mug shot removal sites, astroturfing customer review sites, censoring complaints, and using search engine optimization tactics to influence results. In other cases, the ethical lines are clear; some reputation management companies are closely connected to websites that publish unverified and libelous statements about people.^[3] Such unethical companies charge thousands of dollars to remove these posts – temporarily – from their websites.^[3]

This field of public relations has developed extensively with the growth of the internet, social media, and the advent of reputation management companies. The overall outlook of search results has become an integral part of what defines "reputation" and reputation management now exists under two spheres: online and offline reputation management.

Online reputation management focuses on the management of product and service search results within the digital space, which is why it is common to see the same suggested links in the first page of a Google search.^[1] A variety of electronic markets and online communities like eBay, Amazon and Alibaba have ORM systems built in, and using effective control nodes can minimize the threat and protect systems from possible misuses and abuses by malicious nodes in decentralized overlay networks.^[4]Big data has the potential to be employed in overseeing and enhancing the reputation of organizations.^[5]

Offline reputation management shapes public perception of a said entity outside the digital sphere using clearly defined controls and measures towards a desired result that ideally represent what stakeholders think and feel about that entity.^[6] The most popular controls for off-line reputation management include social responsibility, media visibility, press releases in print media and sponsorship amongst related tools.^[7]

In the 2010s, marketing a company and promoting its products online have become large components of business strategies. Companies are trying to be more aware of how they are perceived by their audiences both inside and outside their target market. A problem which often arises from this is false advertising.^[8] In the past, contribution of internet posts and blogs to a company would have been a foreign concept to most corporations and their consumers. However, with more competitors and more clutter, it is increasingly difficult to get noticed and become popular within the realm of online business or among influencers because of how the algorithms that serve users content work on social media.^{[citation needed]}

Reputation management is a marketing technique used to modify a company's reputation in a positive way.^[9]