The most important tool one can have as a professional is your online footprint—if a digital reputation is tainted, it is easy to be backed into a corner both professionally and unfortunately also in your personal life.
In the reality of present-day business networking, it is highly unlikely that a first-time contact is met without some sort of preliminary scan of the online profile of a potential contact. A simple search of social media can provide a plethora of information in a matter of minutes. Going a step further, a search engine can crawl the internet for all relevant news sources, articles or other public records pertaining to a single person or objective such as a phone number, address etc. Historically, this vetting process was a time-consuming challenge before the investigative potential of the internet was fully realized and evolved.
What Does Reputation Management Entail?
Reputation management is somewhat of an encompassing term; however, the principal of our services is simply to maintain and elevate one’s digital image to the highest possible standard.
There are two fundamental strategies the Inquisitive Intel team engage to achieve results for our clients:
Suppression strategies: entails “deranking” negative statements, media, or content that can be deemed threatening to a business or individual’s professional wellbeing.
Direct response strategies: consist of directly acknowledging and responding to a particular subject.
There are pros and cons to both strategies, and it is our job to determine which of these strategies will achieve the best possible results for our clients.
Growth of the Reputation Management Industry
According to a market research report from 360Research, the annual market share of reputation management services will reach $1.3B USD in 2025. This suggests that individuals and businesses are beginning to recognize the importance and competitive advantage of maintaining a clear digital image.
This trend is commensurate with the growth of digital consumer activity over the last decade. For example, almost all businesses utilize some form of digital marketing/messaging to communicate with their customer base: social media, PPC advertising, or influencer campaigns. At the individual level, professionals have recognized the advantages of creating digital resumés and utilizing professional networking sites like LinkedIn (as of today there are roughly 750 million daily users).[1]
How Can We Help?
When individuals recognize their personal or professional digital reputation has been compromised, the initial reaction is to directly respond to the negative content as soon as possible. The problem with this approach is the individual is inherently biased and any direct response or endeavour to fix their reputation problems will almost certainly make things worse. Outsourcing for a professional reputation management service allows for impartiality—a necessary condition for achieving the best possible results.
If you would like more information on our reputation management services and how we can help, please feel free to reach out and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
[1] https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/