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5 Ways to Manage Your Reputation with Darren Dunner

Easy Prey
“There are three key things in Google: content, code, and links.” - Darren Dunner Share on X

Have you ever Googled yourself to see what information is available about you? Knowing how to remove some of your private information or negate the impact of a negative review can make a big difference to your personal or professional reputation.

Today’s guest is Darren Dunner. Darren is a digital marketing and SEO guru with a track record of results-driven leadership. As Net Reputation’s VP of Reputation Management Operations, he provides expert insight and mentorship needed to consistently prove and optimize deliverables. He helps people and companies protect and correct their online reputation.

“Negative information goes against the guidelines that Google makes you follow. Because a negative sentiment is click-bait, therefore it breaks all the rules and can go through faster.” - Darren Dunner Share on X

Show Notes:

“Be wise about what you put online. Only put positive stuff. Don’t publicize your antics, just put the positive stuff out there.” - Darren Dunner Share on X

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Darren, thank you so much for coming onto the Easy Prey Podcast today. 

Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to have this conversation. 

Can you give myself and the audience a little background about who you are and what you do?

I am in the digital marketing space. I've been doing this for over 20 years; I don't want to give the exact number away. I cover it all. Anything from online SEO, paid ads, social media, and mostly what I am into right now is what we call as reputation management. ORM is the acronym. 

Organizational reputation management? 

Online reputation management. 

I don't know why I said organizational. How did you get into the field? 

About 2012 or 2013, at least in Orange County, there were several ads that constantly played on the radio for a certain reputation firm and it was just playing every day and every day. I wasn't really thinking about working in that space at all, but of course the commercial kept popping up. I'm thinking, “Wow, this must be a pretty niche market that's doing really well,” because it kept doing the ads, which cost a lot of money with the velocity they were going. 

I started researching them. I started researching what they do. I started reverse engineering what I saw that they were doing and immediately realized that's not the way it should be done if you're going to do it, and I came up with my own method. 

“Hey, I can do that better.” 

I wasn't trying to do it better. I was just trying to see, “Hey, how are you doing it, and can I copy it?” But I had to do it differently. 

Is the reason why you wanted to do it different is because it's part of the investigation—digging into what they are doing—your solution was just a little more durable? 

There are certain things in Google—let’s just call it Google because they are the ones where all of this matters the most. If you're going to optimize anything, optimize it for Google. There's three key things that always have remained with them and they have a terms of service. You can dig into it and really learn a lot if you want to know how to do that, but it's contents, codes, and links. 

These used to be a lot simpler back in the day. Now those three things could mean so many different variables and variations. It can get very convoluted but content is king. You don't want to have duplicate content out there, and everything you do has to have some kind of unique marker but also have a way to connect it to each other. 

I'm trying to be vague but also give details. If you follow their guidelines correctly, Google can follow and understand what you are trying to accomplish. What I saw people were doing was they were duplicating themselves too many times or creating too many easy traceable patterns or footprints.

With respect to Google, I remember many, many years ago, a company I was working for, I wrote a very cleverly worded paragraph that was on the homepage. It resulted in the company I was working for, their website ranking first for a competitor's name. 

Oh, nice. 

Needless to say, the competitor was a little upset and we got a cease and desist so I had to remove a couple of words out of the paragraph. In the early days of the internet, you could very quickly do some crazy things with a few cleverly placed phrases. 

That's very true.  

Let's talk about a reputation manager. Let's set the terms. What is online reputation? 

It could mean a lot of things. For a company, it could be reviews. It could be information being published about them from other people or other companies trying to sabotage or hurt them in some way. It could just be information in general, your personal name being put out there in the form of an article, a blog, a news release, a video. As we know now with all the social media, it could be something that you put in TikTok and it went completely viral out and of control.

What are some of these things that companies are doing that put them at risk of hurting their reputation, whether they are business or individuals?

With the open media right now, you can literally post anything you want. If you're not thinking about consequences and who's going to actually see this and how far will this go, will my friends see it? Will their family see it? People publish things and post things. They put photos, videos, you name it online that are really inappropriate or could really be used against them.

They think, “Oh, no. This will never come back and bite me. I'm just being funny right now, or this is me ranting because I want to rage a little bit online.” That's where it starts. 

I think in the last number of years, it's gone from hurting your reputation to if you work for a company, the company is now, “Goodbye. We don't want to deal with you.” They potentially put your job at risk. 

I can't count how many hundreds and hundreds of people we get that are out of a job because of something that they did or something that someone did to them, because it could also just be someone out there to hurt you and the… Share on X

I can't count how many hundreds and hundreds of people we get that are out of a job because of something that they did or something that someone did to them, because it could also just be someone out there to hurt you and the company had to let them go. They're trying to find a job and nobody wants to bring them in because the easiest background check you could do now is simply type in your name in Google. 

They're trying to find a job and nobody wants to bring them in because the easiest background check you could do now is simply type in your name in Google. -Darren Dunner Share on X

That's the scary thing. If you have a very unique name, there's a positive and negative to that, potentially. 

Yes, correct. I have one of those unique names that when you look me up, you're not going to find another version of me. 

Fortunately, I can say the opposite. I know that there's a drummer and a musician who comes up in the search results before I do. 

There you go. 

I guess if you're trying to be recognized online, the common name works against you. 

Very well, yes. 

This is a sort of thing like it can be as simple as a restaurant where someone has a bad experience with a server so they say something nasty and it goes into a Yelp review. 

Right. It could be something very simple like that, and, “Is it possible to remove this? How should I handle it? Can we monitor maybe what's happening so we could see it at a time?” Because sometimes if they know who that person is, you can maybe reach out and negotiate with them and resolve it before it gets too bad. 

That's always a good option: an amicable solution. Let’s say something has happened, either I have done something, misinterpreted online, or actually downright stupid online, and people are now starting to post new stories about the stupid things I do online. What in the world am I supposed to be able to do? 

The scenario that you are presenting is what probably over 90% of the people come to us. They didn't do anything pre the bad thing happened, now they are coming after the fact. Now we are dealing with a whole different type of monster, because if something happens and it gets published online, you could pretty much guarantee anywhere between five to 50 different sources will then republish the same information. Those that are savvy enough will make sure that it's unique and not duplicate so it shows up in the result. 

That's sort of the thing where someone takes the AP feed as a source, modifies it, quotes it, and then adds a little bit of their content to it?

Right, and all they're doing is they're making it canon. They're solidifying that this information is true because all these other sources are saying that it's true. Whether it's true or not doesn't matter. What you can do at that point is you have to reverse what just happened. Now we have to produce so many pieces of content that outweighs what's already out there and make those the connecting sources. It's a lot of work. There's a lot of details. 

Negative information kind of goes against the guidelines that Google makes you follow because a negative sentiment is clickbait, therefore, it breaks all the rules and it's allowed to come through faster than if I put something positive about you out there. 

Isn't that some of it is, that's just the way publicity works? I go out and say something nice about Darren, no news story is going to pick it up, but if I go out and say negative things about you, everybody is going to pick it up. 

That negative statement is very well read through Google's AI, and they want to put it out there because they want you to click on it, because that means you're spending more time in your search engine. -Darren Dunner Share on X

Exactly. That negative statement is very well read through Google's AI, and they want to put it out there because they want you to click on it, because that means you're spending more time in your search engine. 

Keeping you on their property. 

Yes, it's very important to Google, and they are huge. That's how they stay that way. 

This matter of, “I need to put out good content about myself, or about my client, or my company to offset the negative incident that happened.” Viewers outside of the US are probably not going to get this reference. There's a politician that was recently elected in New York where there's been a lot of accusations that he has embellished his resume and lied about where he went to college, what he did, where he's been, people in his family. 

If there is a big history online of stories like that, is that more problematic to resolve because now you have potentially [inaudible 00:11:19] of history out there by the person that I'm now trying to say is not true?

If somebody embellished or put something out there from 10 years ago and it resurfaces and comes back up as a hot topic, now you have all these new sources referencing this older, archived, aged source, which has more authority now than anything else, so it's going to add more weight and it's going to push it right back top of Google. 

I guess the question is with politics and politicians, because they are newsworthy individuals, because they are public figures, do these things impact them a little bit more than they would Chris Parker, website owner? 

Yeah, absolutely because now you have notoriety out there. You can have a Google Knowledge Panel. You can have a Wiki. These are all really strong sources that are highly recognized. You can have an IMDB. You can be listed on major government sites so there's a lot more out there proving that this person is in this political arena, and has all these things that connect them together. It just makes it that much more powerful and that much more difficult to replace. 

It sounds to me like dealing with reputation issues is actually really, really complicated. 

If you think about digital marketing in its basic principles—“I want to rank my websites so that people can come and buy my products or sign up for my services.” I only have to optimize one website. In this scenario, I have to build anywhere between 20-50 different websites that I have to optimize with SEO. It's 20-50 times more difficult than ranking one website. 

Reputation recovery—I don't know what you call the term if you actually manage it in a positive way—this is a long game. It's not by any means going to be a quick fix. 

No. I wish there was a really quick fix. I'm always looking for ways to find things to happen faster. Yeah, we can get certain things to rank really quickly even within the first month or so, but a lot of it, the overall results that you're trying to change, it can take 12 months or even longer than that. 

The basic rule of thumb in building authority is a year with Google. Now that you're dealing with negatives against yourself or whatever you're dealing with, and the fact that Google wants these negatives to show up over this stuff, it can take 13, 14, 15 months. Then once you get it, if you just stop all of the activity and work, it disappears. 

Something as simple as Twitter, you can build a Twitter account even three years ago. Put a couple pieces of information on and you can rank that Twitter with your keyword, name, or whatever you put in there within 30 days. But now if there's no activity, if there's not enough social signals that Google looks for happening within […], it wouldn't even show up at all. 

That's a pain. 

Everything’s become more difficult and there's a lot more pieces. Twitter would be the easiest thing. If you just created one for Chris Parker and whichever location you are in, you put those details then you just had some activity where people were following you and you were following them, then you created a post just on a monthly basis, it will rank really well and it will hold really strong. 

It's that Google likes to know that something's being maintained. 

Is there life behind that piece of asset that’s out there or is it dead? If it's dead, they don't want to show it. 

If this is a trade secret, let me know if you want to answer this. Is it difficult then for a business such as yours to have to maintain the stuff that's out there in attempts of recovering your client’s reputation for weeks, months, years, maybe even decades? 

There's a lot of work that goes behind it. Literally, the activity that we have to produce for our clients on a monthly basis is in the tens of thousands. Sharing a post in the tens of thousands. Engaging with other users online for each and every single one of our accounts is tens and thousands. It's such a huge amount of work that if you were to tell someone, “You can try it yourself. Here's a roadmap.” You'll be like, “I don't have time to do this. There’s no way I'm going to get all the stuff done.” 

It's a full-time job. 

Yes, it is. 

That's why companies like you exist because that is your specialty, that is your expertise. You've had time and effort to build the systems and figure out how to do it. Whereas Chris sitting at home is fighting against the wind. 

At a certain point, once you get it under control, you can slow it down significantly as long as you don't stop. But that's the same thing if you want your business to rank for keywords and get that organic traffic. Once you start that work, you start to see it moving up. Once you stop, you start to see it goes downward just as fast. 

In some sense very similar to marketing, but not quite the same. 

Correct. 

In marketing, you're looking for certain campaigns and yes, I do want it to end at a certain time because my sale is ending, but my reputation needs to stay good eternally. 

Yes, exactly. With the world changing, with AIs, with all these abilities to automate a lot of information, it's not going to be too far away where a company gets alerted when something happens to one of their employees and they go, “Oh, this person just got arrested. This person has a DUI. This person is not a good fit for our company anymore; we’re going to let him go.” It's going to happen more and more. 

I guess that's one of the scary things about life online, is it's what you want to have happen and it's also what you don't want to have happened. People find out about what's going on in your life and that either has good or bad consequences. 

Yes. 

I guess it is true that there are times that people's behavior will get him fired because the company is watching out for themselves. It's not necessarily that this person's behavior outside of work is specifically impacting their behavior at work, but it's just drawing negative sentiments towards the company.

You can say, “That's my personal life. That's my private life.” At the end of the day, if you're making it public, you just made it their business. 

Is the answer don't say or do anything online? 

No. It's just be very wise about what you put online. I only put out positive stuff. I've only put out positive stuff. Even before I was even in the reputation management, I've told all of my boys the same thing: Don't publicize your antics. Just put the positive stuff out there. 

It's not an issue of I'm just trying to present only the good in my life, but going on a rant is not always going to get you the response that you want. 

Right. Exactly. 

Let's talk about for individuals and businesses, what they could do to kind of audit their reputation. “What is my current reputation online? What's the sentiment about me or my business?” How would a company go about doing that, or an individual? 

Let's take an individual. You want to be self-aware of your name—your first and last name, or your first, middle, and last name just to figure out how unique it is. Is it unique like my name? Are there a bunch of people out there with the same names like Chris Parker? Figure out what that is. 

Knowing that is important because when you search for yourself on Google, you're doing it from your location. What you find in California is not going to be the same information that you’ll find in New York if you did a search because everything is geo-targeted. We have cellphones now. We connect to Google Maps. Google follows you everywhere you go. You can even get to the history of what you've done over the last several years and it will show you on the map where you've been. 

Show you places of interest. 

You take a photo and you share. Guess what? Your photo was tagged with your name, your location, your personal information from your phone. It's all in there. You can't see it unless you get into the data reading of it. You can even now swipe up on the photo now, you can get some of that information that you can see that gets pushed out there. 

Location has a big impact on how those results show up. Knowing that, you should search your name knowing that from your area, this is what people will see, and see what shows up. If I'm an individual, if there is more than one Darren Dunner that shows up on the internet, that means that I haven't put up enough information at least in my area to make it obvious to Google that I am the Darren Dunner in this area. There's just not enough online web assets created out there for that to rank or because I created so little, it's going to show something else. That way, the results don’t look like there's only two results or three results so they're going to fill it up. 

In the business, especially in the business, if you type in your company name, you don't want another company name to show up because you don't have enough web assets out there. You want that first 20 results—I would say page one and two, but we know that scrolling has changed those results—the first 20 results should be filled with everything related to your company. If another company shows up within the result, that means you don't have enough information out there for Google to rank it. 

You may say, “I have hundreds of things out there.” Well, you haven't connected them properly with Google the way that they require for them to understand and recognize it as well. 

I suspect if you are in a specific industry, if you're a doctor, you'll probably want to check out your reviews on rateyourdoctor.com. I know there’s a number of doctor-rating services just in the same way that you might want to look at OpenTable for businesses or Yelp for restaurants. Are there also quite a few industry-specific places to look at what people are saying? 

Yeah, doctors and lawyers are huge because there are so many different…like superlawyers.com. There are so many things out there that you can think of. Rate My Professor, if you are a teacher. There are all these things that you should know that are out there and those are ones that if you're in those niches to make sure you get help on whoever you engage with to claim those, to optimize those, and to make sure they have all the right information that they need. 

If you already have some of them out there like the ones where reviews can be left and they're really bad, then find the other ones that you can get reviews on and use those instead. 

I'm thinking of one of those other things that hurt people's reputation, not necessarily a bad incident, but if they're just a really old inaccurate data, like it says here's the business' address but it was three buildings ago. 

You mean if it's outdated and stuff? Yeah, for sure. Eventually, Google can catch on that you have a new location because they're going to start recognizing certain things. A lot of people miss that. Even franchises, very large franchises, I see that if you search for them, their information shows up, and their hours are wrong, their addresses are wrong, or they have two locations and one's open and one's not. You don't know which is which because they shut the other one down. 

I've seen that. “Oh, we moved out of that location two years ago.” “Why is it still on your site?” 

“Who's your marketing person?” 

“I need to talk to them.” 

I've got one other question, but I want to ask before I ask that one, are there any particularly good examples that you have of things that companies have done inadvertently or intentionally that have been a PR reputation disaster and was it recoverable or was it not recoverable? 

That's interesting. Without naming names, a lot of email marketing has become so huge in certain businesses like restaurants where you have apps you can download, you can opt in, you can say, “Alert me when there is a special,” and things like that. These messages are going out, emails are going out on pop ups on your phones. They are going all over the place with alerts. 

And you think, “Oh man. There are so many different reasons why I could put a message out because it's National Hot Dog Day. It's National Donut Day,” whatever it is, or, it's a national some kind of holiday.” 

What they do is they set these little bot animations to grab that information and then combine it with something that they want to promote and it just happens automatically now. One of those companies did that and it put out a really negative piece of information because what showed up on the calendar wasn't something to celebrate but something to remember from history that had happened years and years ago. 

It made it look like they were celebrating that negative thing that took place. It brought up a huge uproar. It went viral instantly and even though they had a lot of optimized assets out there, that information saturated the internet at least immediately and it will probably hold there for about 90 days or 180 days before it starts to settle down because news doesn't last forever on search results, but it does hold for quite a while, especially if it's really negative. 

News doesn't last forever on search results, but it does hold for quite a while, especially if it's really negative. -Darren Dunner Share on X

Is that sort of one of the disadvantages of all these marketing automation tools that we have? I think they call it a supply chain hack is what they often refer to as. I'm relying on this service that provides calendar events that I'm going to attach my marketing to and somebody at that company or some hacker gets in and puts on a fake calendar event and now it goes out to my social media because I've automated the list like, “Hey, every time there is an event in this calendar, we’re going to celebrate it.” 

In a scenario like that, if you can build it to happen on the fly, you can also build it to happen in advance and go into the future in a sense that all of those dates grab that information and compile it. Then you can have a team review it. This month is already being released so next month, here's the information that's going to come out. Let's read it together with one or two people and make sure that there's nothing we need to change or fix on this. You can catch it ahead of time if you prepare for it. 

It's definitely one of those that the person who creates it shouldn't be the person who is auditing it either. 

Never. The decoder, the engineer, let them build it, and let the content specialist read it. 

Because there’s definitely things that I have said that my wife has nudged me and says that doesn't sound very nice. “But I meant it this way.” “Well, but that's not what it sounded like.” There are times where we say things that in all intent is good, but just the way we phrase something that could be offensive and that could not sound positive. Where having a second person looking at it and says, “Hmm […].

“I know how I felt when I wrote it, but when I added all those exclamations, it sounded like I was angry.” 

Once I capitalized everything. 

Yes. 

For people who are newly entering the legal field, or, “I just graduated as a doctor,” or, “I just started up my business,” what are the things that they should be doing now to reduce the likelihood of something taken out of context or a bad review of these risky events that may happen. What can they do in advance? 

You can't necessarily prepare for a bad review, but you could hope and train your staff to make sure that they do things at least to the best of their ability. No one is going to do everything perfectly. At least prepare them that anything you say or do could be used immediately on the review site and it can hurt us really quickly. 

If you're just getting into your business and getting everything started, the very obvious common things that are out there, like your website, your Google listing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, create all these assets, claim them with your name, link them to your website, and fill them with information that is helpful to the reader. 

If you do that from the very beginning, at least you have established some kind of web presence that improves […] your existence. There's a lot more that can be done beyond that. It gets more difficult to explain.

Is it the sort of thing like if you are a restaurant finding some way to encourage your good customers to give you positive reviews, that way if there is a negative review, it’s kind of offset by a bunch of positive content? 

You just have to be careful because if you incentivize. 

Not incentivized. “We just really appreciate your business. We’d love it if you give us a positive review.” We're not talking about doing anything against any […]. 

I just want to put it out there to say you shouldn't incentivize in that sense, but it is always good to, “Hey. I hope you really enjoyed everything. If you did, would you please leave a review?” You should always have some kind of material that people can quickly scan to go right through that source you want them to review. 

Going back a little bit to what I said, if you are a restaurant, for example, and you want to create these obvious things, if you don't create a Google business listing on your own, Google will just do it for you. If you don't create a Yelp listing, Yelp will do it for you. 

A lot of these will do it for you, so if you want to control before they do that and put the right information, right logo, and right photos, do that ahead of time. Then you can get a share link from those and turn those into QR codes or somebody converts it to QR code. It's a really simple step you can do. 

Grab the image, put it on your brochures, your menus when they first walk in and just scan that. It will take you right to it. “All you have to do is leave a review. It will take you less than five minutes. It will help us a lot.” 

When you talk about that, it's funny. My wife and I like to go out and eat, so we’re looking around for restaurants. We found a restaurant that had a couple hundred reviews and it was a four-star restaurant. “OK, we'll go try this place.” As I am looking at their Yelp feed, it was unclaimed by the owner. I understand if your business has been around for a month, but this place has been a business for three or four years and they hadn't claimed their Yelp business. Missed opportunity. 

Yeah, and then if they didn't build the website or buy a domain for them, someone could easily do that and claim their business for them. 

That's scary. 

People will do that and they'll leverage it for blackmail or something. 

[…]. “I've claimed this asset. I'm happy to part with it, but I put this time and effort into it, so just give me $10,000.”

On that note, I just have to say I know this is more of your specialty but any account you create, use a two-factor authentication always because you will lose all of your assets. 

Any account you create, use a two-factor authentication always because you will lose all of your assets. -Darren Dunner Share on X

I think particularly for businesses, I guess individuals too, everybody needs two-factor authentication, unique strong passwords. Any listener who is listening to more than one episode of the podcast has heard every guest say that regardless of what we’re talking about almost, but it's true. 

That could be an absolute nightmare for a company. You've seen it. Businesses have had their Twitter accounts taken over and all sorts of horrendous content has been posted to them. That's got to be a nightmare to deal with. 

It is. It just happened to my mother-in-law. She lost her Facebook; completely lost it. It wasn't because they got her password. It was because they used friends from her Facebook account against her and made it sound like it was one of her friends asking for help to get a code, not understanding what the code was. You just gave them access to your code even though she had that authentication in there. She gave that code away. 

You really have to be aware that no friend of yours should ever be asking you for an authentication code. It's a nightmare.

I think it's one of those things you train your staff. When you're a business you've got to train your staff, “Hey, be careful about what information you give. Don't be evasive, but always question why someone is calling and asking for information that they shouldn't be asking for.” 

Exactly. 

Are there any resources that you recommend people to take a look at that can help them at least get a better idea of the space and all the things that they're not going to be able to do on their own? 

I just say pick the really easy obvious things—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you're not really sure that you've done them correctly, then just go to YouTube and say, “How do I create these accounts? What's the best way to optimize these accounts?” If there's a field that they offer, fill it out. That's always been my go-to. Don't leave something blank. Those will always help you to at least get something started and something established that could show up. Then if you create them, use them. Don't just let them sit around and die. 

Make sure that you link to them from your website. 

Vice versa. Exactly. 

I've seen many websites that have a Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter logo down at the bottom. I click on it and it doesn't go anywhere or it goes to a non-existent account. I'm like, “Oh, that's not good.” 

Then you know they pretty much bought a WordPress website. They use a free theme or a paid theme and they just didn't edit it. 

Link everything. Fill out everything. Even if you don't plan on using the accounts, you really should create them just to protect your company name or your personal name. 

Yeah, because one day you might come back and use them when you need them.

You might suddenly become famous. 

Darren, if anyone wants to find you or your company, where can they find you guys online? 

For me, if you just type in Darren Dunner, everything that you see shows up is everything I want to show up. I should have that since this is what I do for a living. If you look up netreputation.com, you have all the information of all different types of services and they're simple forms to fill out. Somebody will call you. There's plenty of business managers that will jump on the phone and talk to you right away. That's the best way to do it. If there's something that you're looking for that you don't see on there, just call anyway. 

Awesome, Darren. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. 

Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. 

 

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