Have You Finished Your Year-End Reputation Check-up?

Dallas, TX — Dec 16, 2011 / (http://www.myprgenie.com) — A new blog post from author Deb McAlister-Holland  offers some timely seasonal advice about an annual ritual she adopted a few years ago. It’s an annual review of her online activities, reputation management successes and problems, and a plan to improve how she’s presented by the search engines in the coming year.

It started when she came back from a long vacation and found that she’d become the target of a very angry person after a private email she sent to a “friend” wound on a blog without her knowledge or consent. That blog post put her squarely in the middle of an ongoing war of words she didn’t know about — and since she was offline for more than eight weeks, it escalated to a reputation-damaging series of accusations and attacks before she knew what had happened.

The article includes examples of people others found themselves in the same position and what steps they took to repair their online reputation — as well as the high price some paid when they couldn’t repair the damage.

It also includes links to timely advice on the reputation check-up and the process of avoiding reputation issues or cleaning them up if they happen.

McAlister-Holland writes, “There are people out there who use the semi-anonymity of the Internet as an excuse to say and do things that a normal person would never do face-to-face. Most of them seem to have all the time in the world to post replies, escalate flame wars, and swoop in with nasty comments 24/7. Some truly scary ones seem just to want to intimidate, threaten and harass others.

“I wasn’t new to the online world when this happened, and I’d always taken care not to say or write anything that would get me in trouble. But I made the mistake of trusting the wrong person, and not realizing that a casual conversation via email could turn into something much more when it was made public. Trust me when I say that I’ve been even more careful since,” she says.

Since that run in with her personal Internet nightmare, McAlister-Holland says that she’s had to explain the continuing accusations that pop up in Google Search results to potential employers, co-workers, and even to a judge and Child Protective Services when she and her husband took in a foster grandchild. On the upside, she wound up writing a book about her experience, made some great new contacts, and learned valuable lessons in managing and mending online reputations.

Read the rest of the story on her blog, which includes tips and techniques on social media marketing, avoiding legal troubles in online activities, and the many strange places ways where marketing and technology intersect in everyday life.