Spokeo.com is a search engine that collects information from social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter and other places like phone books, marketing surveys, and even Census data and puts it all together in one place. “It makes me a little worried,” Allison Fondacaro, of Albany, said. “It’s a very interesting site and very scary,” Gary Robbins, a computer expert who owns Solutions by Design, Inc. in Delmar, said. He said in this day and age you can access almost anything about anyone on the Internet. “People can find information about you but, to have it all in one easy interface really changes the game,” Robbins said. This website can list your address, a picture of your home and the street where you live, how long you’ve lived there, your approximate age and income, your relationship status, and more. “I don’t think they have a right to do that,” Megan Dority, Delmar, said. But, Robbins said they do. “It’s all publicly accessible information,” Robbins said. “It’s a lot of information, wow, they have my hobbies in there too,” Cody Germain, Clifton Park, said after he checked out the site for the first time. But, not everything on his profile was 100 percent accurate. “I’m not Catholic, but apart from that, that’s pretty good information. I don’t know how they got all that,” Germain said. Since some information posted on Spokeo.com is wrong, it could be bad if someone important, like an employer, is searching the web to find out about you. That is why it is a good idea to make sure that anything you post online you’d be willing to share with everyone. “The only thing I will tell people is be careful what you put online,” Robbins said. “I will be more careful now…definitely,” Dority said. There are ways to remove your information from the website by visiting http://www.spokeo.com/privacy and following the steps. Robbins said this process is difficult. He recommends paying a monthly fee for a service like Reputation Defender.com which, will scour through all online databases with information about you and they will remove it upon your request.

Hard, honest work doesn't count if professional accomplishments and accolades aren't top results in a Google search of a lawyer's name, a reputation management expert told lawyers at the ABA Annual Meeting. "The Internet does not reflect reality," said panelist Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, a Redwood City, Calif., company that helps clients improve their image on the Web. "One negative result in the top search results on Google reduces the chances that a new client will contact you," said Fertik. "And you won't know you're not getting that chance." Increased competition and information have made diligent online reputation management a necessity, said panelists. Static websites and law firm bios will fade in importance as ratings by clients and peers on sites like Avvo and Yelp gain traction. Potential clients are more likely to trust a client review than an ad, and current clients are more vocal about lawyer performance than ever before. "There's been a shift in how people talk about each other," said Natasha Innocenti, a partner at legal search consultancy Major, Lindsey & Africa in San Francisco and Palo Alto. "Lawyers are much more open about disparaging other lawyers. I'm often shocked about the things people will say about another partner."

Several years ago, B.L. Ochman ran a business called "Rent a Kvetch," in which clients hired her to complain for them and get results. Most of the complaints had to do with lousy customer service from large, impersonal companies. "In the '80s, there was no way for average people to get heard," she says. Enter the Internet, which has afforded a sounding board for anyone who wants to complain -- anonymously or otherwise -- and gives erstwhile powerless individuals the chance to thump a company's reputation. "It could be one kid in Bulgaria making a video about your product, but that's going to cause a problem if it starts spreading around," says Ochman, now a director at Proof Digital Media, the online media arm of the public relations agency Burson-Marsteller -- the company that helped handle reputation damage control for Exxon Mobil (XOM) in the wake of the Valdez oil spill in 1989 and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) after seven people in greater Chicago died from taking cyanide-laced Tylenol caplets in 1982. In spite of the virtual nature of the Web, anything anyone posts there tends to stick around forever -- old news stories and abandoned blogs alike. To that end, companies such as Burson Marsteller are employing multiple monitoring tools to keep track of who's saying what about their clients online. "Before you can begin to manage a reputation, you have to figure out what's being said," she says. "You can't just rely on Google (GOOG) Alerts anymore. Before you really begin to get involved online you have to launch a listening campaign." The stubborn permanence of online condemnation is a common problem among clients of Reputation Defender, a venture-funded Redwood City, Calif., company that specializes in monitoring and managing online reputations for businesses and their executives. "It might be a lawsuit that they were involved with 10 years ago," says Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation Defender. "A few of them have had very high-profile divorces. And some of the really large companies are dealing with dedicated attack sites -- Web sites specifically aimed at criticizing them." Several Fortune 100 companies are among the customers who pay for Reputation Defender's My Edge Pro service, with which the company helps ensure that the initial results of a Web search garner links to positive information -- such as a company or employee's official bio -- rather than years-old negative news about a company or its executives. For smaller businesses, Reputation Defender will help create positive content to post on the Web. For larger companies, "We're just moving their best content to the top of the search," Fertik says. The methodology of moving positive content to the top is a trade secret, he says. "The basic premise of the product is that you need to control your search results," Fertik says. "The idea is that you want to control as much of a page one and page two for searches for your business name or people associated with your brand." Reputation Defender also is testing a free reputation alerts system Fertik describes as "Google Alerts on steroids" -- a tool that continually searches for information about you online, even in content that doesn't show up on search engines. For people and corporations who find out they are under attack via Twitter or in blogs, the best course of defense may be to acknowledge the attackers with blog posts of their own -- or, better yet, offer to help. Comcast (CMCSA), saddled for years with a reputation for bad customer service, finally faced the problem head-on with its Comcast Cares campaign, in which the company employed full-time ambassadors to troll the Web for complaints about the company and reach out to the complainers with offers to help. Best Buy (BBY) employs thousands of customer service reps to tweet electronics advice and engage customers in a program called Twelpforce. IBM (IBM) and Dell (DELL) also have thousands of employees tweeting on the company dime, Ochman notes. "I'm astonished that people are still asking whether, if they see a bad blog entry about their companies, they should respond," says Anthony Johndrow, a managing director at Reputation Institute, a consultancy that advises major corporations about their reputations. "Of course they should respond!" In April, Reputation Institute came out with a list of the most reputable large companies in the United States, based on consumer perceptions not only of the companies' products and services but of corporate governance and workplace policies, leadership and performance, citizenship and innovation. "We've talked to investors, and they care about these other dimensions too," Johndrow says. Rounding out the top five reputable companies were Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods (KFT), Kellogg (K), Walt Disney (DIS), and PepsiCo (PEP). The companies with the best reputations are those that bother to communicate with the public, Johndrow says, and these days that means communicating online with blogs, tweets andFacebook updates. He notes that Johnson & Johnson was the only company in the health care space in the top 50, let alone the top five. J&J's handling of the 1982 Tylenol cyanide crisis, which included a massive product recall, is often cited in business school textbooks as a shining example of crisis management. Last spring, the company's McNeil Consumer HealthCare division issued a 40-product recall, in part because of bacterial contamination in its production facilities. This time the crisis included a negative report from the Federal Drug Administration, and yet investors didn't seem concerned. According to a May poll by TheStreet, 70.4% of voters said the public will continue to trust J&J products, while only 29.6% of voters said the recalls have hurt J&J's reputation and will result in lower sales. This may be due in part to the fact that J&J made a point of issuing an apology from the CEO on its corporate blog. Banks fare terribly in consumer perception, not only because of the recent financial crisis but also because "no financial services company has talked about themselves publicly about what they do as a company," Johndrow says. As for Pepsi rival Coca-Cola (KO), Coke came in at No. 24 on the reputable companies list, 19 steps below its chief rival. "Coke has done very little compared with Pepsi to engage with the general public as a company," Johndrow says. "Right now if you're not talking about what you're doing as a company, people assume you're doing something wrong," he says. "If you're quiet, the assumption is generally guilt."

In his 1980s-era cartoon series, G.I. Joe would end each show with these wise words: "Knowing is half the battle." This is especially true for those trying to protect their personal or professional reputations online. "Before you can begin to manage a reputation, you have to figure out what's being said," says B.L. Ochman, director at Proof Digital Media, the online media arm of the public relations agency Burson-Marsteller. With the abundance of social media sites out there, it takes more than a simple Google(GOOG) search to keep abreast of who's trashing or praising you on the Web. Several startups are making a living in the reputation management field, but for those who don't want to pay for the service, here are five free reputation monitoring tools. ReputationAlerts: Still in the beta-testing stage, this service from Reputation Defender is similar to Google Alerts; it trolls the Web for new mentions of you and sends out periodic e-mail alerts. But it goes a step further by separately searching for personal information about you that could lead to identity fraud, such as mentions of your age and address. Future iterations of the product will include ratings of your social influence and the public's general perception of you, based on how others portray you on the Web. TweetBeep: Basically Google Alerts for Twitter, it keeps track of Tweeted mentions of you or your company or any other word or phrase you want to monitor. A free version of the service will keep track of five keywords and send you daily alerts with a maximum of 50 results. The Premium service, which costs $20 per month, keeps track of up to 50 keywords and includes hourly and daily alerts that include up to 1,000 results. OneRiot: OneRiot is kind of a one-stop zeitgeist tracker, helping companies and potential advertisers keep track of topics being discussed on social networking sites such as Twitter, Digg, MySpace and Facebook. BlogPulse: While this tool primarily is used for trend discovery -- for instance, what's hot today -- it also can be used to discover mentions of you or your company in the blogosphere, giving you have a chance to respond and defend yourself in blog comment sections. FollowerWonk: This tool lets you search for Twitter users according to keywords in their Twitter bios. This is a good way to sniff out imposters: Twitter users pretending to represent your company online, such as BP(BP) parody "BP Global PR" and "ATT Parody Relations."