The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, once said that “it takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it”.
In the age of the internet, it sometimes feels like it takes even less than that. A single tweet can be enough to determine that you and your views are in fact beyond the pale (just think of JK Rowling’s infamous “people who menstruate” tweet last year). Your reputation can be absolutely REKT in a mere instant.
But, of course, where there are problems, there will also be a whole array of solution-providers who are more than willing to help — for the right price. Indeed the online reputation management (ORM) industry is raking it in; more on that in this How To Spend It feature here.
It’s not just the rich and famous who need help, though. On the other end of the scale, the everyday person can also find all sorts of services, such as “Tweet Deleter”, where prices start at $3.99 a month for the privilege of having up to 500 tweets deleted, with the most frequently deleted tweets apparently “racial” or containing profanities. From the company’s website:
Usually, people seek to clear their profile of embarrassing and controversial tweets. Filter tweets related to a specific topic quickly and effortlessly by searching by keyword and erase them to make the embarrassing stuff go away forever. Nobody has to know.
It’s all a bit bleak really, isn’t it? But that is the very vanilla end of the scale. On the other end, we give you . . .
Pure Reputation
Founded in 2010 by Simon Leigh, Pure Reputation promises to provide “tailored solutions for individuals, brands and companies who want to protect their name online”.
Leigh says the company is based in the City’s glitzy Broadgate Tower but that’s . . . not what the Glassdoor reviews say. More on that shortly.
Here’s a nice video that explains what the company does:
So far, so standard.
But we wanted to understand how all this stuff actually works. So we called up Leigh to tell us a bit more. First he told us about a client, who we’re going to call Alphie McAlphaface*, who was trying to get a new job but was being refused because it turned out that there was another McAlphaface who was doing rather well in . . . the adult entertainment industry. And given that McAlphaface is a pretty uncommon surname, you can imagine what the Google image search results looked like. Leigh explained:
This guy is just a normal guy. And he just happens to be very unlucky, because if you go on image search, you’ll see some stuff in it that you don’t want to see.
(He was right. We really didn’t.)
That kind of guy, he hasn’t got enough content to push this all down. So we have to set up fake profiles to mix things up — you know some other guy called [Alphie McAlphaface], and we’ll go through pulling those up and we basically use those profiles to push the other stuff down.
But how does one go about setting up these fake profiles, and who are the pictures on these profiles of, in fact? Leigh again (with our emphasis):
You could take a John Adams and call him David Smith. As long as it’s someone that totally unrelated — it could be someone who’s dead.
It’s just got to be someone who’s not going to be upset about it . . . But if anyone does contact the client and say, you know, ‘this is my picture’, we just remove it immediately.
Yeah. Leigh continued:
So what we do in order to reduce the clicks on the negative things that are right at the top is we promote the things just below it and also set up new things for people to click on. And what that does is it gets seen by Google, because the way that Google works is it sees how long you spent on the page, and then it works out how useful it is based on time on page, whether you clicked on something, and your general interaction with the page.
So how does Pure Reputation make sure these fake profiles, which may or may not contain the pictures of a dead relative, get interacted with and therefore end up higher up the Google search results?
Well do you remember how “bounty hunting” worked, back in the days of ICO mania, when people across the world would get paid tiny amounts of money to promote whatever coin offering would pay them? Here’s Leigh again:
We use a platform with real people from all over the world, and we can even specify where they come from, how long they spend on the page, which things they click on, and we can get them to do micro tasks — small tasks, like do a Google search, and click on that result. The difference between buying traffic and doing this is when you buy traffic, all it does is it says to Google: a lot of people have visited this page. But if you buy the user journey, and you basically pay people to say, do a search for David Smith on Google and go to Image Search . . . It’s like a microwave meal sort of set of instructions – so you go to image search, click on the third row, find the image, click on it, and then what they do is they paste the link of the image in the proof box – there’s a kind of proof box.
We can specify like 100 people to do that, let’s say 5p each, or maybe 10p each, so what that does is it really factors into Google because Google really, really cares about how people interact with the content . . .
Turns out it’s not that hard to game the internet. Who knew! As well as creating fake profiles, Pure Reputation also creates fake headlines and articles, as Leigh explains:
Sometimes what we do is we do articles where it’s like, “Dave Smith shocks the industry” — you know, something like that just to have a title there that’s clickbait, in the same way that the tabloids do.
But obviously the idea is that you would never know there had been any tinkering . . .
We want to create a natural result, so people don’t feel like there’s been any online reputation management carried out. We want them to look at the Google results and see everything natural; we give them pages that add value, and give them what they need to see, and that stops them digging.
Behind the Glassdoor
As you might expect for a company whose purpose is to create shiny online reputations, Pure Reputation’s Google reviews are just wonderful. And to be fair, it sounds to us like they do get the job done, even if the methods are a little . . . unconventional.
But the Glassdoor reviews are more mixed. There are some really lovely ones, like this:
But then quite a few less lovely ones, like this:
And this:
We asked Leigh about these reviews, and he told us they were from a “bad employee” he had fired who used fake Glassdoor accounts to try to slander the company, and that he has asked the company to have them removed. We’re sure all the good ones are totally legit.
He also told us that they used to have a “regional office” in Harrow on the Hill but they now just work out of their Broadgate Tower office. So we asked to see some proof. Say, perhaps a photo of the lovely view from its top floor, or just the office. Turned out Leigh didn’t have any to hand as he was “on holiday”, so he sent us an invoice from 2016 from a serviced office provider with an address there.
Maybe Pure Reputation’s website is so basic because the rent is so high in the tower? That must be it.
We’ve said it before but we haven’t said it in a while: The Entire Economy is Fyre Festival.
*Alphie McAlphaface is not the man’s real name.
Related links:
The entire economy is Fyre Festival – FT Alphaville
Enron’s Glassdoor page – FT Alphaville
Inside the ‘digital cleanse’ companies taking on cancel culture – How To Spend It
We live in an age of curated ‘profilicity’ – FT
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