Our local newspaper, the Northern Star today published an article that local real estate agent Sean Kenny is under fire from a well-known ethical campaigner Neil Jenman, who alleges that a property was purchased from a near blind elderly woman and put back on the market for in excess of $250,000 more than the original sale price.

Knowing that the Northern Star regularly has pages showing in the search results I conducted a quick Google search for Sean Kenny Real Estate to see what was coming up for his business name and low and behold the Northern Star article was well and truly entrenched in the top 10 results.  To make matters worse the news article by Neil Jenman titled Sean Kenny’s big deal was also in the top 10.

With the Web becoming the number one source of business and product research I think Sean Kenny Real Estate has some serious damage control ahead of them in terms of managing their online reputation (they actually have some serious work on overall reputation actually).  It is one thing to be named and shamed in a local newspaper, the story will come and go and over time people will forget.  These days we all have a lot more to worry about when negative publicity arises,  every time now that somebody searches for their business these negative articles will be there for all to see.

So what should they do about this?

Without knowing the full story is difficult to provide any solid recommendations, however if it were my business I would be completely honest.  If he has made a mistake he should admit to it and make a statement on his website that he has learnt his lesson and will never be a bad boy again. However, on the other hand if it is a complete misunderstanding he needs to to lay out the facts in a well compiled article on his website and then try and get the content removed or replaced with an updated article from the other mentioned websites.  The worst thing that he could do is nothing.

The next thing that he should do is post a comment on the Neil Jenman article and provide a link across to his article/statement on his website.  You really need to get control of online conversation on your website, not somebody else’s.

Removing the negative pages from the search results would be the next step, I will leave that advice for another time because if the information is true I have probably helped these guys far more than what I feel comfortable with and I’m sure they now have a spare couple hundred thousand dollars to hire an unethical search engine marketing firm to help to fix things up.

The main point that I’m trying to put across with his post is that conducting business in the modern economy is a completely different ball game and your reputation can be easily be compromised for a very long time if you’re not paying attention.

The merits of each of the New South Wales candidates for this year’s State election are questionable at best… but I’ll leave that for others to comment on! What I would like to comment on though is the terrible job that the Morris Iemma marketing people have done with his online brand management.

A few weeks ago I thought that I would have a quick scan over the search results of each of the top two candidates, Morris Iemma (Labour) and Peter Debnam (Liberal).  I couldn’t believe it when I clicked on one of the top 10 results www.morrisiemma.com , only to find that it was owned by the Liberal party with a flash video telling everybody not to vote for Labour.

After a good hearty chuckle to myself I decided to head over to our domain registration tool to see what other versions of his name had been registered.  At that point of time the only names that have been registered were morrisiemma.com.au & morrisiemma.com, however when heading back now I see that morrisiemma.net and morrisiemma.info have also been registered.

When visiting both of these domains we find what is basically an opportunistic domainer asking:

This Website is for sale. If your name is Morris Iemma, or you (or your party) have some interest in aquiring this domain for your promotional purposes,

please email: buynow@morrisiemma.info   and make a serious offer!

I’m not sure what price this enterprising chap would be willing to part with these names for, but I am sure that it would be a hell of a lot more than the $20 they would have cost Morris if he had grabbed them at a few months ago (or realistically and a few years ago).

A large part of Online reputation management is being proactive in protecting valued assets such as your company name, name of your products and the name of your key personnel.  Politics is all about reputation and the fact that Morris Iemma didn’t have people around that were switched on enough to secure all domain name variations of his name is a disgrace.