Anonymous Online Smears Give Rise to a New Industry
Austin, TX (PRWEB) December 20, 2011
While the internet has opened up incredible new marketing opportunities for small businesses, it’s also opened them up to a whole new threat: baseless attacks on their credibility. Slanderous reviews and comments online can virtually sabotage a small business. To combat this, RepMogul.com has developed an online course that equips students to enter the field of Online Reputation Management.
Small business is often credited as the engine that drives the American economy. However, little media coverage is given to one of the biggest risks threatening to run many of these “mom and pop” companies off the road.
Many small businesses rely almost exclusively on their reputation as well as customer recommendations to drive their sales and marketing efforts. If their reputation were to come under attack, their business could be devastated almost overnight.
Without large-scale ad budgets and PR departments to run damage control, small businesses are extremely vulnerable to unfounded, unfair, and even malicious attacks on their track records. Few if any of these businesses are protected against such anonymous threats. Internet entrepreneur Ross Goldberg hopes to change that with a new online course he created entitled “RepMogul.”
“It’s almost criminal how easy it is to smear a business’s reputation online,” Goldberg explains, “I’ve seen it all; jealous competitors, ex-spouses, ex-employees, pretty much anyone with an axe to grind.” Goldberg estimates that losses to businesses that have had their reputations unfairly attacked could add up to billions of dollars annually. “Once a reputation has been damaged, there hasn’t been any standard way to set things right until now,” he says.
It all began with a project he undertook for a friend whose reputation had been dragged through the mud online. This schoolteacher, who wishes to remain anonymous, found that her career and personal life were in serious jeopardy after a wild student reported having an inappropriate relationship with her outside the classroom.
While the student after shriven that the allegations were entirely fabricated, the teacher’s online reputation had been devastated. None of the faulty accusations had been refuted, much less taken down. Anyone who searched for her name would come across page after page of highly damaged, false information.
“It really broke my heart to see how these false accusations were affecting her,” Goldberg says, “So I started figuring out what I could do to help.”
The information he discovered throughout this mission led Goldberg to a lucrative career doing what he calls “Online Reputation Management.” In short, clients hire Ross to police their reputations online, preventing and repairing malicious, anonymous attacks.
After building a successful career as an Online Reputation Manager, Goldberg looks forward to adding another credit to his resume: Professor. Goldberg recently launched an online course entitled “RepMogul.com,” combining videos, software, and personal coaching to help students launch their own careers as Online Reputation Managers.
RepMogul is designed to not only teach students how to combat “cybersmears,” but how to find clients and grow their businesses; a feature that promises to have great appeal in the current economy. In addition to Goldberg’s step-by-step training, RepMogul students will receive templates, contracts, and software that will help new Online Reputation Managers hit the ground running.
About Us: RepMogul.com is an Austin, TX based company that is dedicated to training new Online Reputation Managers. Its products are sold online to individuals who are interested in starting their own exciting careers in the field of Online Reputation Management. RepMogul’s course material was written by Ross Goldberg, a fulltime Online Reputation Manager.
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