The DownRiver Group

The DownRiver Group on protecting web presence

A recent occurance brought this topic to the forefront. One of our clients is involved in some active brand building and, in the course of my regular client tasks, I discovered a cyber-stalker making use of videos(along with meta-tagging, descriptions, linking & the works) made on the clients behalf.
Since we made these videos in-house (one of our many services), I was none to pleased, either.

I won’t go into detail, here, how I decided we would respond to this affront but suffice it to say it was pretty effective.
Still, I always feel an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure and this episode reminded me of the importance of being proactive.

There are a number of tasks that should be fulfilled in order to protect your brand in the internet age. The landscape of the world wide web is still much like the wild, wild west and I’m often reminded of Deadwood, the wild west town depicted in the HBO miniseries, for it’s brutality and lawlessness.

Protect your Brand ~ Maintaining Proper Web Presence

There are numerous ways to affect and manipulate ones web presence and that effect can be sudden and intense with the advent of the “social web”, which is, essentially, a growing network of a social sites. You may recognize the names of many and the list grows almost daily.

Set up accounts with your primary web identity/business name at the following sites:

Facebook Myspace Wordpress Blogger Twitter Tumblr Youtube Metacafe Dailymotion viddler This is just the short list. There are others but these are the most important, right now.
(A good antivirus is an important part of the defense ~ we use and recommend Avast Professional.)

You don’t have to use the sites but what you’re doing is preventing some malicious entity from using them to damage your reputation or worse (and, believe me, it can get worse). You may argue that you’ll simply engage legal representatives to handle any problems with internet ID/theft/squatting issues, but some 14 year old hacker in the Ukraine, who is simply having fun while toying with you, isn’t going to be affected by any threats you can come up with after the attack has occurred, as it continues to occur and continues damaging your reputation or worse.

Accounts on these services are all FREE(which makes it so appealing to someone who may want to embarass you, or worse) and relatively simple to set up.

By the way, do you have a company-brand “gmail” account? If not, consider this; what if someone sends a trojan or virus out via a gmail account in your name? Certainly, you can explain that the poison wasn’t delivered by you but consider the potential effect to your brand.

This is a DIY project well worth your while or should be very inexpensive for your webmaster to manage in a reasonable time frame.

With a few hours of proactive effort, you’ll be immunizing yourself from the potential for some serious headaches and reputation management tasks.