Reputation Management: Cal Bar and Aabaco Quote

I presented on reputation management with a colleague at the California Bar Solo and Small Firm Summit in Newport Beach.  The presentation is below.

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In addition, I am quoted in a recent article by Dan Tynan in Aabaco on “How to Protect Your Business’.

Defame and fortune

The first thing to do is set up Google alerts for your name, your business, and your competitors, so if something negative appears online you can respond right away, says attorney Bennet Kelley, founder of the Internet Law Center in Santa Monica.

When someone is trashing your business on a Web site, try reaching out to the person who posted the negative content and see whether you can persuade them to remove or modify it, says Kelley. If they’re posting on a third-party site, check if the material violates that site’s terms of service and, if so, ask the site’s owners to remove it.

If the material is truly libelous, you might be able to sue the poster for defamation, assuming you can figure out who’s behind it. But it’s difficult to prove and could cost you many thousands of dollars.

“A lot of times I get a client who says ‘I want to fight this all the way, and I don’t care how much it costs’,” says Kelley. “But eventually every client cares how much it costs.”

Worse, fighting back could cause the post to get even more attention than ignoring it. This is known colloquially as the “Streisand Effect,” named for an incident when the music diva sued a photographer to remove a photo of her home from a site; netizens responded to news of the suit by downloading the photo more than 400,000 times.

A better strategy, says Kelley: Create more positive content about your business through your web sites and via social media that will eventually push the bad stuff down in search results.

Read the full article here.