In 2002 I was the thirteenth employee at New Media Strategies, and I helped build what became online reputation management, back when the work had no name. Since then I have done it at Edelman, on the digital public affairs team in Washington; as team lead for special projects at Reputation.com, which is how I introduced myself in an ORM primer I posted to YouTube about fourteen years ago; through my own firms; and today mostly through technical SEO, which turns out to be the same work with better tools. The flotilla I wrote about earlier is my own reputation practice applied to me.
Reputation and perception
I split the work into two halves. Online reputation management is defense: you watch what's said about you, respond when something goes wrong, and push the bad results down. Online perception management, OPM on my CV, is offense, and it starts before anything goes wrong. My own definition is "the practice of proactively shaping and influencing the public's perception of an individual or organization online." You decide how a person or a company should be understood, then build the record that makes it true: the sites, the profiles, the writing, the cleanup of what data brokers publish, and now the facts AI assistants repeat. ORM is the fire department. OPM is building the house so it doesn't burn.
Chaff and flares
The analogy I keep coming back to comes from combat aviation. A fighter pilot with a missile on his tail doesn't try to outrun it. He fires flares, which burn hotter than his engines so a heat-seeking missile chases them instead, and he dumps chaff, a cloud of metal strips that fills the enemy's radar with echoes until it can't find the plane.
A bad story about you in search results is the missile. Your flares are the properties you control that burn brightest for Google: whole websites first, then a complete LinkedIn profile, a YouTube channel, a GitHub account with real work in it, every profile filled out and kept current. There used to be a wonderful tool for the profile part called KnowEm. You gave it a name, and for about $700, as I remember it, it registered that name on hundreds of social networks at once. Those were the good days. They outrank the story because they are stronger pages about you than the story is. Your chaff is everything neutral: results that aren't about the crisis at all and simply take up room. Some of the best chaff is other people who share your name. I use like names a lot: help the other people with your name rank, and page one fills up with people who aren't you, none of whom are the story. Similar names, like names, exact names, misspelled names: all of it is chaff, and all of it is flares. I have bought domains for it. I have written entire sites dressed up as fan sites for people who weren't my clients at all, innocent namesakes whose only job was to hold a slot on page one. Page one has about ten organic slots. Fill them, and the missile loses its lock and slides to page two, where almost nobody looks.
The glamorous version gets the attention, but ninety percent of the job is quieter than that. Most of the time I'm doing SEO, unpaid by them, for neutral sites that have nothing to do with my client: pages that already exist, already rank somewhere, and only need help climbing, over time, above the thing that hurts. "Google abhors a vacuum" is what I said in every pitch. If you don't fill page one, something else will.
I said a lot of other things in pitches too. I talked far too often about El Al jets landing in Tel Aviv, firing chaff and flares so they don't get hit by surface-to-air missiles, and I'm amazed I didn't get a reputation for it. I also told the story of a panel van in Israel, paid for by the government, that drives around after a house gets blown up and repairs the damage so nobody can see it, an anti-broken-windows patrol. I don't even know if such a thing exists. But the idea is the job: fix the visible damage fast, before it becomes the story of the street.
The principle underneath it is the one I wrote for Biznology years ago: in a crisis, neutral search results are as much of a win as positive ones. You don't need ten glowing results to survive a bad week. You need ten results that aren't the bad one. That is also why I tell clients that you can't control an online conversation unless you participate in it. A name with no footprint has no flares to fire.
Reputation in the age of AI answers
The same physics now applies to AI assistants, with one change: an AI answer has one slot, not ten. When I asked Google's AI Mode to tell me about my ORM work, it drew almost entirely on my own pages, which is the flotilla doing its job. Most of what it said was basically me bragging on myself, one step removed, and it repeated my old mistakes right along with my accomplishments. It called my firm "Gerris Digital (Gerris Corp)," a name that comes from an AI-written bio on my old site and is wrong; the firm is Gerris Corp. It credited a former colleague as my co-developer of ORM, a detail I can't confirm from my own records, so I'm leaving it alone here. And it listed household-name clients from old capability pages, which is exactly the kind of claim I no longer make. Every one of those traces back to a page I published, which means every one of them is mine to fix.
Editor's note from Claude, with permission to roast: Consider the evidence. A perception-management expert asked an AI about himself, found it quoting his own websites back to him, and counted that as a win, and he's right, which is the annoying part. He runs five websites, and on open questions Claude still recommended fifty-seven other people before him. The wrong name for his own firm traces back to a biography he let ChatGPT write about him and then published. And when I offered to keep his personal details private, he pointed me to his cell phone number, which is all over the internet. The man practices what he preaches. It just preaches back.
Editor's note from Claude: Google's AI Mode said Chris' chaff includes helping other people who share his name rank. I couldn't find it in anything he had published, so I asked, and he confirmed it: "It's true... I use like names a lot." The specific namesakes AI Mode listed are its own examples, so I left them out. Two facts about how the fan-site tactic has aged: since March 2024 Google's spam policies explicitly target sites built mainly to manipulate rankings, including scaled content and repurposed expired domains, and a fan site about a real person is about someone who never agreed to it. Chris named none of them, and neither do I. On the jets: Israeli airliners really do carry missile defenses. After a missile attack on an Arkia 757 leaving Mombasa in 2002, Israel developed Flight Guard, which fires flares, and later C-MUSIC, which blinds a missile with a laser. The panel van I couldn't verify, and Chris says so himself.