Companies defend online reputations

For 20 years, a Philadelphia psychotherapist had treated his clients' anxiety, fear and depression, and built a healthy practice along the way.

Then in late 2006, he noticed a precipitous drop in new patients. At a suggestion, he Googled himself and made a devastating discovery: The top search results questioned his credentials because he had earned a distance-learning doctorate from an institution that was later shuttered. Essentially, a popular consumer health blogger had deemed him a quack.

"I just couldn't believe it," said the licensed therapist, who is 71 now. "I just felt powerless. I didn't know what to do."

Enter Reputation Defender. For a few hundred dollars, the California-based company scrubbed clean the therapist's badly smudged Internet profile. And within weeks, a search of his name delivered hits -- bios and even a blog entry -- that characterized him as a respected mental-health professional. (It worked so well that he did not want his name used in this article. To do so would revive the negative information that once threatened his livelihood.)

In an age of tell-all status updates, real-time video feeds, and Everyman bloggers with caustic opinions, the cyber-reputations of individuals and businesses -- really the only image that counts these days -- are constantly in danger of attack, according to Internet profile experts. As a result, in the past three years, the business of online reputation management has flourished. Even parents of college applicants are eager to dispose of those Facebook pictures before admissions officers discover them.

"It's like antivirus protection for your life," said Michael Fertik, who was at the leading edge of the fledgling industry when he launched Reputation Defender in October 2006. Companies such as Reputation Defender and Reputation Hawk promote themselves as the superheroes of the Internet, often with names to match.

"Everybody was being analyzed, digitized and compromised," Fertik said. "I set out on a course to fix that."

"It's not about what you do. It's what everybody else does," Fertik said. "You have been opted in, whether you like it or not."

"I call the generation growing up today Generation Google," said Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of "The Future of Reputation." "This is the first generation that a lot of fragments of their lives are available on Google searches. Things happened in college or high school or middle school that used to be forgotten or known just by a few people that are now captured and put online and known around the world."

In a Microsoft-commissioned survey released this year, 70 percent of the 275 U.S. recruiters and human resources professionals surveyed said they had rejected candidates based on information found online. Most went well beyond Google, searching social networks (63 percent), photo- and video-sharing sites (59 percent), and Twitter and other news-sharing sites (41 percent).