UK businesses that offer Internet marketing services are exploring a new and potentially lucrative market lode: the administration of reputations. The service, which ends up working as a public relations network, involves manipulating the search engine sites like Google for unwanted articles about a particular company or person to be passed to the last positions in results lists that are displayed on users' screens.
In Britain, football players, politicians, actors and businesses that have suffered negative publicity in the media are some of the customers who have been paying for the service. Speaking to the BBC Brazil, the founder of one of these companies, the South African Chris Angus, said the increasing power of search engines and the increasing concern with privacy issues should make services like this are increasingly important in the world .
"Imagine if someone published a negative article about you on the internet. Our job is to weaken that article in proportion to other, more positive, so that the negative item will not appear on the first page of search results," said Angus.
To organize search results in order of relevance, the site Google uses a complicated algorithm based on multiple criteria. One, very important, is the number of links that a page has to other sites.
"What we do is look for positive or neutral articles about you and put links to these articles on other sites," he said. Statistics show that 90% of users of search engines look at only the first page of results and very few move beyond the third.
Therefore, the negative items are "hidden" in the results pages that nobody reads. The service is not cheap. Angus said his company charges between $ 15 and 30 thousand to hide negative information about their customers. The process, he said, lasts about two or three weeks.
The site of another British company that offers a choice of service, Kwikchex, based in Bournemouth, England, mentions some of the cases in which the company is currently working on:
A tour company is losing business because of bad publicity after a temporary failure on their computers have resulted in problems for customers, an airline accident has been investigated and that happened a long time is being used to harm competition by an airline, or a campaign against a company blog by a former employee.
Companies that specialize in hiding the negative publicity admit that there are ethical implications in relation to the service. "If someone is breaking the law, if someone is being harmed, we do not accept the job," said Angus. "For example, it would work for an African dictator or for people who have committed serious crimes such as murder."
Angus said the administration sector reputations emerged as an attractive niche market for about three or four years. He explained that it is difficult to know with certainty in the sector generating companies in the area, but risks the figure of U.S. $ 20 million annually in Britain alone.
The firm of Angus, Warlock Media, based in the English town of Banbury is a market leader in online marketing, specializing in promoting websites that appear at the top of search listings.
"This service is the opposite of what happens in the administration of reputations when push negative stories to the foot of the lists," he said. Angus has been in Brazil and said he was in talks with Brazilian companies. "Because of the great opportunities that anticipate, should come around."
