As this panel touched on, even this topic can head different directions, part personal reputation management, part education and expectation management.

Unfortunately, on the rep management, I’m not sure there is much anyone can do, other than follow the same best practices that we would instruct our clients to do for reputation management in the ever-evolving web space.

This does seem to be a growing and popular topic as I’ve seen more and more of it lately and just wrote part one of an article for a local business mag myself. I think this will just become part of everyone’s ongoing operations, personally and professionally. And in some cases, there are just others out there who will always choose to pursue reputation slandering as their means of marketing.

On the other note though, setting expectations and even the education of clients is something that I think, as an industry, we must continue to drive forward. The reality is, much of this is still extremely new to the vast majority of people, so if we don’t help to bring them along, it will just take even longer before we start to see changes.

In the meantime, there are plenty who will prey on their lack of knowledge and understanding. Personally, helping to educate clients has been a great sales tool… they want to make a smart decision, we all do–usually–so taking the time to show them that you know what you are talking about and to help them understand, it sets you apart from everyone else.

And given a little straight forward education, instructing them why no one in the industry would guarantee a number 1 listing in the SERPs because it simply isn’t within their control… a lot of clients are intelligent enough to “get that,” which also helps them to cross off much of your competition as soon as they make those guarantees to the client.

It really is THE can of worms in the industry