So imagine some undesirable coming along and squatting on your name or brand and acting as if he were you, and in the process actively working towards tearing down your name or brand. Why? Maybe your customer service department was less than efficient in handling his claim. Maybe the identity thief is your competition and finds it “fun” in tearing you down only to make himself look better. This is business social media identity theft.

It really doesn’t matter why. What matters is “how” and how to prevent it. How, is, they simply subscribe to the hundreds of social media sites and blogs out there and gobble up your brand and create a persona that is you.

From there they act as the puppeteer pulling the strings. And good luck getting the social network to pull down the stolen site. Your best bet is registering all your names, domains and brands so nobody else does.

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert and CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com discusses social media scams on Fox Boston.

We’re excited to welcome all the users from FriendsCall.Me into the KnowEm community, and hope everyone can benefit from the improved service and massive number of Social Networks which KnowEm currently tracks.  We’re up to just about 400 popular Social Networks in our system now, and of course we still offer our famous free profile system which allows you to list all the social networks with which you have registered an account.

Now for the boasting: we have to pat ourselves on the back just a little for the incredible honor of being nominated by SXSW as one of the best Social Media Business Startups of the Year!  If you’re coming to SXSW Interactive this year (March 12 to 16, 2010), be sure to stop by the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Event as we present the cool new features KnowEm has to offer for the Enterprise.  We’ve been busy working on them for almost a year now and have rolled them out to a limited number of our corporate partners, but we plan to fully unveil these amazing new Social Media tools for the Enterprise to the public at SXSW.  We think you’re really gonna like what you see

As always, if you have any questions about KnowEm, our service or our partner offerings, please feel free to contact us – we look forward to hearing from you!

Tired of having to spam blogs, write nasty comments on forums and get repetitive stress injuries just to ruin someone you don’t like?

What if you could run a smear campaign against your competitors, slandering them in front of millions of people per hour?

Well, good news, kids! Now, thanks to Google, you can do it in seconds!

Yep, it’s Google real-time search. If you want to chop up someone’s reputation, Google’s new ‘cutting edge’ (hah, get it!) technology will slice, dice, frappe and otherwise grind it into pulp.

</End cheesy announcer voice>

I wish I was exaggerating. But Google real time search will be the biggest online reputation management (ORM) nightmare of 2010. They make it so damned easy.

I’m going to show you how it works. This isn’t earth shattering. All the bad people out there have figured it out. But you need to know so you can defend yourself (somehow):

1. Find a trend

First, go to http://www.google.com/trends

Pick a top-10 trending topic. Those topics are sure to have real-time search results. You can double-check. Just go to Google and search for the trending phrase. Look for the ‘latest results for…’ and your keyword. If it’s there, you have a winner:

OK. Now you have the territory staked out. Time to do some damage.

2. Commence abuse

Now it’s time to have some fun. Go to Twitter (if you don’t have a Twitter account, you’ll need to set one up). Type in the message of your choice:

3. Watch the results

Go back to Google and watch the real time results. In a short time, you’ll see your message show up:

That’s it. Do this consistently for a little while and you can create an online reputation management disaster.

Who cares?

You do. No one gives a flying crap about me, so I can beat myself up in social media all I want. You’re different. If you:

• Sell a product;
• Offer a service;
• Look for a job;
• Are a public servant;
• Or otherwise matter in the universe…

…I guarantee folks search your name and check on you before they call. And it only takes one negative listing in the search results to drive away customers. I’ve seen it time and again. If you and a competitor appear identical to a consumer, but you have one negative comment and they don’t, you’ll lose every time.

What to do

Remember that big kid that used to slap you silly at the bus stop? Bet your dad said something helpful like “ignore him and he’ll go away”. Didn’t work for me either. You can’t stop assholes from slandering you via real time search. You can make sure they do little or no damage:

1. Take ownership of your brand name on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
2. Monitor what people are saying about you. Get a report at least once a day (hourly is better).
3. Make checking that report part of your normal routine.

Last, and possibly most important: Network with others online. The bigger your network, the more people you have to help you stand up to the bully.

I wish I knew…

…What the brainiacs at Google were thinking when they came up with their real time search model. Hopefully, they’ll fix the algorithm and make it harder to abuse the system. For now, though, your best bet is to think like a bully, keep an eye on the conversations that are going on out there, and know when someone’s abusing you.

About Ian

Ian Lurie is the CEO of Portent Interactive, and writes the internet marketing blog Conversation Marketing. He’s been an internet marketer since 1995. Recent calculations show he’s had over 30,000 hours experience in the field. Which may explain his tendency to rant like a lunatic. He’s co-author of the Web Marketing All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies, and author of the book Conversation Marketing. When permitted he rants and raves about internet marketing at various conferences, and attempts to use his powers of sarcasm for good.

If you aren’t participating in these sites, it’s easy to feel left out or alone. You may even proudly proclaim that you get more done without social networks and that strangers don’t need to know what you ate for breakfast. The problem is, if you’re an executive, a public figure or just Joe Schmoe looking for a job, you need an online presence. If I Google your name and find nothing but your qualifying time for a 5k and your Classmates.com listing, that doesn’t help me make a more informed decision about whether to hire you or your services. You need to dominate your search results and find ways to stand out from the crowd of other applicants.

Online reputation management (ORM) isn’t just about crisis management; it’s about relevance and prevention. If someone searches for your name, do they get relevant and positive results about you? If you share a name with Tom Cruise you may have a hard time ranking, but for the vast majority of us, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get at least one professional listing in the top ten results. And by professional listing, I don’t mean your MySpace page. You want a credible result that demonstrates your excellence in a particular industry or role.

It may not take much to get there, but you probably have questions about how to do it and you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend with a competitive online reputation management company. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to actively manage your online reputation today. So, let’s dive in to three simple techniques for do-it-yourself ORM:

1. Register your name. Use KnowEm to register your username across hundreds of social networks, reducing the likelihood of taken or, even worse, hijacked usernames. Since you’re reading KnowEm’s blog, I hope you’ve already made the investment. It’s worth its weight in gold when you consider the amount of money and time spent everyday by businesses trying to reclaim trademarked domains and social profiles. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to salvage a username or work around a client’s terrible domain because they didn’t have the foresight to register it before a competitor or an angry customer. So, if you haven’t done it yet, sign-up for KnowEm, right now. Seriously.

   Bonus tip: Don’t stop with your social profiles, register your domain name! It’s just a couple of bucks, so money isn’t an excuse when it’s our most powerful tool for repairing a client’s online reputation.

2. Build up your accounts. Now that you’ve registered your username, identify the most relevant and powerful networks (mainstream and/or industry-specific) and beef up those accounts. During the registration process with KnowEm they customized your profiles, but there might be more opportunities, such as integrating your Twitter or blog feed, adding external links to multiple sites, customizing your URL or adding a longer bio or personal interests. Take advantage of every opportunity on those stronger networks.

   Bonus tip: Befriend everyone you know by using the network’s friend or address book search feature (most social networks should have the latter). Also, look for active, new and similar contacts that you would enjoy communicating with on that network. This helps make your account more powerful by cross-linking it with others.

3. Use your accounts. Once you know which accounts are performing the best and have optimized those, identify the ones that are most relevant to you and start participating on them. It isn’t enough to simply register the accounts. If you have any competition for your name, you’ll also have to use the networks. After you’ve identified half a dozen accounts you’re going to maintain, choose one to two that you check daily and just do weekly posts on the others. This adds fresh content to your account, increases interaction with other users and makes it more likely that someone will link to you. Each of those will help your account rank better in the search engines.

   Bonus tip: Understand the privacy policies of each social network and your professional situation. The last thing you want to do is share private information or make slanderous remarks that could get you fired and force more drastic reputation management techniques!

Those few things make up the basics of DIY online reputation management. After you’ve set up your accounts, optimized them and used them, be patient. It could take several months to see significant results, but over time they should change in your favor.

Want to learn more about how you can improve your search results? Check out the online reputation management guide from Outspoken Media. And, if you have a problem that requires more aggressive results, contact us.

From TechCrunch: KnowEm Helps Businesses Stake Their Claim To Brands On Social Media Platforms

“There are increasing number of platforms in the social media landscape where businesses need to “stake their claim,” and engage with consumers. But it can be tough for brands to keep track of their Facebook pages, mentions on Digg, photos on Flickr, Tweets on Twitter and so on. Startup Knowem is launching a family of services that are designed to help both large companies and small businesses stake their brand claim in social media landscape and manage their presence on these sites.”…

From Mashable: KnowEm: Claim Your Identity Across Hundreds of Social Media Sites

“Having a consistent social identity is becoming increasingly important for users and businesses that engage in online communication. After all, people can associate you or your personal brand with your username.”…

Now about those new features …

One thing you’ll notice is a much more detailed user profile page.  Check out the pages for KnowEm co-founders Barry Wise and Michael Streko to see how you can use a personal profile to identify your presence on the social web.  You can use your personal profile to not only identify which social media profiles you control, but which ones you don’t (more about that in a later post).

For businesses, we offer another kind of profile – check out the profile page for KnowEm to see what it can offer.  Not only does it list Social Media profiles, it also catalogs all mentions of your brand on several social media mashups, as well as Google trending terms and Compete Statistics.

There are plenty more features we’d like to show you, so look forward to our next blog post when we discuss our new tracking and analysis system for social networks …

Facebook might have come before Twitter, but it only really snowballed into the social media juggernaut that it is in the past year or so — right about the same time that Twitter was starting its meteoric climb to popularity.  Until recently the two sites really had two different purposes – you meet new people on Twitter, you stay connected with people you already know on Facebook.  But it appears early on this year Facebook started getting pretty envious of Twitter’s popularity.

First they adopted Twitter’s very attractive concept of the ability to offer vanity URLs.  And people loved them because, well, people are vain.  It was a nice start, but that in and off itself wasn’t enough to make it look like Facebook was gunning for Twitter.  It actually looked kind of desperate and sad, like a balding 40-something trying to wear Ed Hardy (sorry Jon).

And then people noticed a new rising star – Friendfeed.  For a while there it looked like Friendfeed was poised to take over Twitter’s space; after all, they offered everything Twitter did and more.  It just didn’t catch on at first.  But once Friendfeed started gaining traction in Twitter’s space Facebook swooped in and bought them.  And they bought them fairly early, before the price tag went any higher ($50M).  At that point we all knew Twitter was making Facebook nervous, and the game was on.

Twitter’s response?  Several server outages in the middle of the day while they made a pretty new interface for adding friends.  And oh yeah, they also pissed everyone off by deleting hundreds of followers at once, blaming it on spammers and bots.

Today Facebook took the biggest swipe at Twitter’s jugular by offering direct @ replies in status updates.  Not only is this a wholesale copy of the heart of Twitter as an application, it clearly defines Facebook’s intentions of taking over Twitter’s audience in social media.

While we all know and love Twitter for its simplicity, it appears its going to have a hard time keeping up with everything Facebook has to offer.  If you want to see how a hostile takeover is done, keep an eye on Facebook.  They’re doing it right.

The popularity of social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter, are starting to get the attention of businesses – particularly small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). They’re attracted to it, because social media is proving to be an effective channel for creating new leads and also supporting existing customers.

With all of the promise that social media offers to businesses, there’s one downside, identity theft. Many businesses are often in shock when they find out their brand is already registered on popular social networks.

Raven Internet Marketing Tools recently tackled this issue by integrating an identity theft prevention tool called KnowEm. KnowEm was created by Barry Wise and Michael Streko to help businesses take control of their brand on social networks. It’s been featured in newspapers and on television, including the Washington Post, CNET and Fox News.

KnowEm does a real-time check for branded usernames and keywords on over one hundred popular social networks. It then returns a list of social networks where the brand is and isn’t registered.

In most cases, businesses will find that their brand is still available for registration on most social networks. While it’s good news that their brand is available, the bad news is that they still have to register it on over one hundred social media Web sites. Fortunately, Raven reduces the time and effort involved in registering their brand. For a nominal fee, Raven will register the brand on all available social networks, securing their brand identity for future use.

As social media identity theft increases, it’s important for businesses to protect their brand now. The integration of KnowEm into Raven will ensure that they can do that.

About Raven Internet Marketing Tools: Raven is used by marketers around the world to manage their search engine optimization (SEO) and social media campaigns. Raven provides a robust agency-ready suite of tools that enable Internet marketing departments to conduct research and analysis, manage link building, monitor their brand, track search engine performance, and analyze their Web site’s traffic and conversions. Learn more at http://raventools.com.

The biggest concern with your brand identity in Online Reputation Management and Social Media used to be just giving your brand a good name. But what happens if someone steals your brand name? Do you think they’re going to be as concerned with your reputation? The need for businesses to secure their brand name on every possible venue has never been greater.

Knowem co-founder Mike Streko was recently interviewed by Fox News in a report about Twitterjacking: “Unless you start spending money to put out press releases saying that’s not your profile or jump through hoops to contact Twitter, it never works out well.”

The truth is, it’s almost impossible to get your brand name or username back once it’s been taken. Unlike when someone takes yourbrandname.com, there is no universal naming authority for social media profiles. As a brand owner, you’re basically at the mercy of the site owner. Or, since there are hundreds (if not thousands) of social media websites thriving today, you would have to appeal your case to every individual site owner to get your brand name profile back.

Or you could just use KnowEm’s username signup service (or monthly subscription service) to secure all your brand name profiles today, in just one click.

Some people commented that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are a waste of time — “a huge time sink“. Some actual business owners posted that they have never created an account on any of these sites and never will. Many others stated they have never heard of most of the websites, and don’t understand the point behind them.

That’s where KnowEm comes in. Just because you don’t know every social media site doesn’t mean you can’t or don’t want to protect your brand name on it. You probably never heard of Twitter a year ago, but today there’s a mad race for every company to secure their @BrandName on Twitter. And for good reason; you don’t want someone else to get it first (by the way, you can also visit @knowem on Twitter).

Unless you’ve got an internet marketing staff working with you, you may not think you can keep up to date on all 120 sites which we register you with. That’s OK, because the important point to remember is that with KnowEm you are reserving your brand name, protecting it from someone else registering it. It’s not going anywhere. When you’re ready to start working with a different site, it will be there waiting for you. Convenient, isn’t it? That’s what our service is all about

So what kind of deal can I get?

Well, it really depends on what kind of online reputation management campaign you are planning. Obviously, when it comes to bulk orders the greater the number of orders, the lower the pricing. Since we just launched the service this week we are open to discussing any suggestions on pricing from you, our valued customers.

So can I submit 100 orders for “BuyViagra” misspellings?

No, of course not. We still reserve the right to reject any orders which we consider spam or objectionable. Remember, we are not trying to violate any of the terms of service for these great sites, and we don’t want to devalue their community. We simply want to take some of the workload off of you for creating accounts. We will also not participate in any cyber-squatting or social media identity theft, that is exactly why we launched this service, to protect brand names.

If you’ve got any questions at all about bulk orders, please don’t hesitate to contact us.