“The biggest mistake people make is failing to realize that there’s no distinction between their personal and professional reputation,” says Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online and CEO of Trackur, a company that makes social media monitoring software. “You, as the business owner or executive, are an extension of your company’s reputation. I see a lot of individuals who think they can make a distinction, but consumers don’t.”

Read more over at the OPEN web site.

Run keyword searches of your name, address, phone numbers and other identifying data and see what turns up. Don’t stop after the first few pages of search results. While they will be the most influential, the embarrassing or forgotten tidbits can show up on page six and beyond, warns Andy Beal, co-author of “Radically Transparent,” a book about monitoring and managing online reputations, and a consultant who says he has helped people get information removed from the Web.

“Google is playing a game of chess with China,” says Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal, editor of Marketing Pilgrim. “But it’s clear that Google doesn’t know what tactic will actually result in it being able to keep its presence in China.”

I personally believe that Google will ultimately face checkmate. I suspect it’s trying to frustrate the Chinese government into a compromise that the search engine can live with.

As it may be a few weeks before you receive your PubCon CD, I thought I’d go ahead and share my Google Reputation Management slidedeck as quickly as possible.

If you didn’t get to PubCon, you’ll notice many of my slides are somewhat criptic. That’s because I don’t like to be one of those presenters that simply reads off from his slides. If you have any questions about Google reputation management, managing negative search engine results, etc, please leave them in the comments section.

Cheers!

Mr Prescott’s tweet was spotted by Andy Beal, a British expat marketing executive based in the US, who linked to it on his website and saw the story followed up across the blogosphere.

He said it was an example of “click fraud” – following a link purely to generate a charge for its owner.

Mr Beal told the BBC: “John Prescott has a reputation of being a bulldog MP, so I wasn’t too surprised by his Twitter request. ”However, I was shocked that he didn’t realize the ramifications of suggesting Labour supporters maliciously click on Google Ads to deplete the funds of the Conservative Party.

“It’s the equivalent of asking Labour Party supporters to call the Conservative Party HQ and reverse the charges,” he added.

The article is full of my advice, but specific quotes include:

“Focus on publishing content about yourself that you can control, and that portrays you in a positive light,” says Andy Beal, the chief executive of Trackur, a social media monitoring tool.

“Go ahead and build that content now, before you need it,” says Beal. “Give that content time to percolate and move its way around the Web.”

Here’s what I told the NYT:

The blog reports could help to build trust and add legitimacy to the site’s matchmaking approach, said Andy Beal, an online marketing expert and co-author of “Radically Transparent.”

“There is an underlying psychological benefit to publishing statistics that resonate with your target audience,” Mr. Beal said. “People will start to think that this is a site where others like them are hanging out, and they should join it instead of one of its competitors.”

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

If you’re not an audio person, the same advice was recently published on Yahoo Finance via an interview I did with Bankrate.com.

My advice includes…

When it comes to your social media policies, every company is going to differ on what type of engagement is acceptable, says Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur.com, an online reputation monitoring site, and author of the book Radically Transparent. Beal, who advises companies of all sizes on how to effectively manage their reputation on the Internet, believes that any company that has a social media presence these days can benefit from having some type of policy in place, but he specifies that it need only include what is necessary to protect the company legally and financially.

…a social media policy does not have to be a long, weighty document, says Beal. In fact, most companies that have social media policies have “no more than 10 bullet points,” says Beal. It should be posted in a place where it is easily visible, he adds, like an internal company wiki. Ultimately, your social media policy should function as an informal guide, in which there is room for interpretation and discussion with employees. “The benefits of having your employees engaging in social media far outweigh the dangers of them saying something that they shouldn’t,” says Beal.

Still, two awesome bloggers were on hand to take copious notes.

Listen here.

The technology continues to evolve to more accurately discern meaning in unstructured data. The complexity and nuances of human language are such that they often confound text analytics, said Andy Beal, who helps clients manage their online reputations. Think of the blogger who texts that his new cell phone is “wicked bad.”

At present, sentiment analysis tools are right 70 to 80 percent of the time, but compared to the cost of surveying 1,000 people by telephone, they’re a lot more efficient, Beal said.

“If a government agency can use sentiment analysis to determine the pulse of people affected by a planned project or spending proposal, it will cut down on human input and the expense of market research,” he said.

Other critics wonder whether Yahoo’s money would be better spent on product improvements. “They’re really trying to package up what’s already there,” says Andy Beal, editor of the Web site Marketing Pilgrim.

Beal doesn’t think the ads are likely to win new customers. “I would argue that consumers have already made a decision: They are aware of what Yahoo has to offer, and they’ve decided there are better alternatives for their time,” Beal says. The company might have been better off taking a cue from Microsoft, Beal says.

Before launching its own ad campaign for Bing, on which Microsoft is reportedly spending $80 million to $100 million, the company poured money into developing the search engine. “Bing is spending $100 million to launch a very compelling alternative to Google. [Yahoo is spending] $100 million to jog somebody’s memory,” he says.

You can listen to the interview here.

According to Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, personal pages on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all rank highly in Google searches. LinkedIn especially sends a positive message to potential employers, since it’s widely viewed as a highly professional network. Beal says that 78% of recruiters use search engines in their research when they screen new candidates.

You can read all of my advice in “How To Protect Your Online Reputation.”

Anyway, a couple of months later the signed copy of the book was returned to me, along with this letter:

While I’m dissappointed the book was returned, I am somewhat blown away by the integrity of the President’s chief communications guy. Not even accepting something as benign as a $20 book–less it suggest any conflict of interest–makes a pretty bold statement about his integrity, don’t you think?

“One of the most important steps is to do an audit of what people are saying about your business,” says Andy Beal, a reputation management consultant at Marketing Pilgrim in Raleigh, N.C. He suggests doing a monthly Google search to see what shows up in the top 20 results, which might call up a customer’s comment or review on sites such as Yelp, CitySearch, or TripAdvisor. You might be dismayed to see unflattering results high in your Google search. “Google is ambivalent to the tone of the results—it doesn’t care if it’s positive or negative, only if it’s relevant,” Beal says.

If you do see a negative comment, it’s best to respond as soon as you can, within the first 24-48 hours if possible. Use a nondefensive tone and ask for more information, offer to help resolve the problem, or offer your perspective or an apology if warranted. Then, to push those negative results further down in a search, create some new content.