Have you ever “Googled” yourself? Why not, are you chicken? Maybe you’re scared about what you might find? Well, you’re actually not alone. A study, commissioned by Microsoft, asked 2,500 professionals (HR representatives and recruiters) and consumers if they had ever Googled themselves. The survey showed that only 42% of Americans have actually done it. [...]

Most recently, the FTC has been cracking down on their advertising laws, particularly in relation to Internet advertising and blogging. I have a feeling that most of these new laws have come as a result of the myriad of high converting less than truthful affiliate ads which can be found all over the net (if [...]

Most articles centered around online reputation management – at least for individuals – tend to be focused on making sure you don’t have inappropriate pictures and content on popular social networking sites like Facebook. It is important to remember however, that images from all sources have an opportunity to surface in search engine results. Even [...]

Reputation Management has become a hot topic over the past few years (hence the need for a blog dedicated to it), especially given the ability consumers have to create, and share, their own content. It’s scary if you’re a business, but even scarier if you’re a small business. Small business owners rely on user reviews [...]

Earlier this week Facebook finally released their new simplified privacy controls to all users. While the changes won’t affect Pages or Groups, they do have a big impact on personal profile privacy settings.
At first glance, Facebook gives you the option to leave your privacy settings as they were or to allow each segment of your [...]

This may seem obvious to many, but it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses neglect their reputation by not addressing negative reviews online. Seriously, FAIL. It has gotten to the point where I almost feel morally obligated to give the local businesses I frequent a heads up when I see a bunch of [...]

By now we all know how important it is for a brand to control their online reputation, and we’ve heard the myriad of instances where big brands have failed to do so; like the popular I Hate Starbucks example or when Apple failed to take their current iPhone users into account when lowering the price, [...]

In one of our recent posts, we talked about owning your brand terms in Google AdWords. Now, we need to address what you can do (and can’t do…) to constructively combat other advertisers that are negatively impacting your business on PPC. When you have a brand worth protecting, it’s critical to keep tabs on all [...]

If you’re a business that doesn’t operate 100% online (i.e. you have a building or buildings where customers want to visit you), pay attention:  Google Place Pages are up and running. In late September, these pages came along and early buzz speculated that Google was either trying to overthrow Yelp or overthrow small business websites [...]

We all know the past year has been rough, to say the least, as hoteliers have seen the worst slump in decades. Occupancy rates for the first week in October have dipped just under 60% nationwide, which is a 5.4% decrease from the same time last year. Looking at revenue per available room (RevPAR), a [...]