Inside Track: Guard against bad rep online

There's a niche market for just about everything these days, and that includes "online reputation management." According to a survey by Weber Shandwick and the Economist Intelligence Unit, two out of three executives believe that their companies' reputations are threatened by employee sabotage and misdirected e-mails. But two-thirds also said that they were unaware that employees were criticizing their companies on the Internet.

The survey also found that 87 percent of executives acknowledged their own foibles by missending at least one e-mail.

As far as judging their competitors in cyberspace, only 49 percent said that they considered information in corporate blogs to be accurate, and just 14 percent trust blogs as a good source for assessing reputation.

Back to court Mike Vanselow, one of the top prosecutors in the Minnesota attorney general's office for years, has left Medtronic Inc., where he oversaw litigation, to climb back into the ring at Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly.

"I loved Medtronic and found the work interesting," said Vanselow, who today joins the health care litigation practice of the Minneapolis law firm.

"But I found after a couple of years of managing outside lawyers in litigation that I wanted to do their job," he said. "I want to be the litigator instead of the in-house manager."

Vanselow joined Medtronic in 2007 from the attorney general's office, where the top pay for a lawyer was $116,000, about what new associates make in the Twin Cities' largest law firms.

Between 1991 and 2007, Vanselow worked on some of the state's most prominent cases, including an antitrust lawsuit against drug companies attempting to block Canadian prescription imports, the landmark tobacco industry litigation in the late 1990s and a fraud case involving Certified Mortgage.

Doggin' it In its own words, Minneapolis ad agency Fallon "has gone to the dogs."

Fallon last week was named agency of record for Purina's Alpo brand of dog food.

Fallon will handle creative and strategic planning for the account. According to AdWeek.com, Alpo spent about $1 million in media buys last year, half the amount it spent two years ago.

Fallon's responsibility will be to let "dogs be dogs again." In other words, don't expect any commercials featuring dogs wearing sweaters.

Let the good times roll Some of you older than 50 probably remember the Mystics rock band. It played in packed ballrooms across the Upper Midwest in the 1960s. The band's drummer was Stephen Bergerson, a Minneapolis attorney at Fredrikson & Byron, where he chairs the advertising, marketing and trademark group. He can now add Hall of Fame member to his business card. Bergerson, who also performed with the Castaways, another regional phenom from the '60s, has been elected to the South Dakota Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bergerson and the Mystics will reunite in May to perform at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Arkota Ballroom in Sioux Falls.