Jacob Nielsen in 1999: "Reputation Managers are Happening"

An interesting look back to some predictions and pontification about the nature of the customer's experience on the future internet...

Reputation replaces image as the way to build a company, product, or brand position. This is partly because you can't establish an empty, slogan-based brand through mass marketing when there's no mass media. Also, reputation becomes more salient in the virtual world where it can be stored and aggregated.
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In the virtual world, you win by being good: Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the Internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans.
Reputation Managers are Happening (Alertbox Sept. 1999)


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and this summary and predictions from 2004 on the Future of Reputation on the web:

I see reputation managers as core to the success of the Web. As we get more sites, more content, and more services online, users need a way to learn what is credible and useful. Quality assessments must become an explicit component of most Web user interfaces. It is not sufficient to list millions of items for sale and leave it to the user to determine what they need. Everybody is not equal.
Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

The Huffington Post mentioned StepRep in this article on identity theft and online reputation

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-siciliano/celebrity-social-media-id_b_219754.html

StepRep is an online reputation manager that does a better job than Google Alerts does of fetching your name on the web.

Lots of links for those interested in reputation on the internet...

online reputation monitoring for beginners from Andy Beal, and a a podcast from Jon Udell's site

Your Reputation

Online Reputation Management from VendAsta's MyFrontSteps team was just released as a Beta offering. Try it out, let me know what you think. This is the first in a series of releases as we roll out our products. I'm really excited about what everyone's acheived so far and I'm looking forward to more. Reputation is important on the net and StepRep will help you monitor, manage and leverage what's being said about you out there.