Reputation management

Reputation management is the deliberate influence, control, enhancement, or concealment of an individual's or group's reputation. It is a marketing technique used to modify a person's or a company's reputation in a positive way. Online reputation management (ORM) involves overseeing and influencing the search engine results related to products and services.

The ethical gray areas of online reputation management include the removal of mug shots from websites, the use of astroturfing in customer review sites, the censorship of complaints, and the use of 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. These unethical companies often impose exorbitant fees, amounting to thousands of dollars, to remove these posts – temporarily – from their websites.

The field of public relations has evolved with the rise of the internet and social media. Reputation management is now broadly categorized into two areas: online reputation management and offline reputation management.

Online reputation management, or ORM, focuses on the management of product and service search results within the digital space. A variety of electronic markets and online communities, such as 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. Big Data has the potential to be employed in overseeing and enhancing the reputation of organizations.

Offline reputation management shapes public perception of a said entity outside the digital sphere. Popular controls for offline reputation management include social responsibility, media visibility, press releases in print media, and sponsorship.