Businesses need to become more proactive in managing their reputation online in the face of rising crime and a phenomenon called reputational persistence, according to Gartner. As the Internet evolves and the level of sophistication of online crime increases, it is becoming ever riskier to participate on the Internet. Gartner's 5 steps for proactively managing online reputation include establishing a policy against allowing employees to place co-worker recommendations on peer social network sites, such as LinkedIn or Ryze.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, criminals will routinely use the Internet to extort funds from organizations, threatening to damage their corporate reputation by ensuring that routine online search requests will return negative or even libelous results.

“If your business depends on a positive internet reputation, then you have little choice than to explicitly manage that reputation online, “said Jay Heiser, research vice-president at Gartner. “The Internet is like a bad-news Petri dish; negative information multiplies and spreads with frightening speed and becomes virtually impossible to erase.”

Despite the plethora of reputational resources that are available to assess and help manage reputation -- from PR agencies and competitive analysis companies to identity verification services and content analytics tools -- a comprehensive ‘scan and alert’ mechanism for the Internet does not yet exist.

“Reputational persistence is a unique Internet phenomenon that traditional reputation specialists have never had to deal with,” said Mr. Heiser. “The fact is that where the Internet is concerned the only way to counteract persistent negative information is to overcome it with a greater weight of positive information. This means getting to grips with internet reputation management.”

Mr. Heiser outlined the following recommendations to organizations seeking to proactively manage their reputations online:

• Understand the role that reputation plays in social and commercial relationships
• Work with PR and marketing to create your organizations reputation management strategy
• Educate your employees ability to assess reputation
• Look for new business opportunities in reputation enhancement
• Establish a policy against allowing your employees to place co-worker recommendations on peer reference sites such as LinkedIn or Ryze

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