Ok, before you start calling me a spammer or anything like that, I’ll say there may be totally legit reasons why you would want to keep several online identities, for example:

• You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
• You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!)

Create several FireFox profiles:

Imagine you can run several FireFox profiles simultaneously and be logged in to various profiles there at a time (again, this is not (only) for spamming). For example: you have one for stumbling professional sites and one for other fun stuff you don’t want people to know you like it.

I did a detailed post on how to do create several FireFox profiles previously and here’s a quick recap:

1. Exit FireFox;
2. (Windows) Go: “Start” button => “Run” => Type “firefox.exe -ProfileManager” => “OK” button;
3. Click “Create” in a profile manager and choose the name for your new profile, then click “Start FireFox”;
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to create as many profiles as you want;
5. Done! Now each time you want to switch to another profile or change the default profile, repeat steps 1-2 and choose the one you want.

• Install this sweet FireFox extension to quickly switch between profiles.
• Now save different sets of social media profiles on different profiles.

Quick tip: I name my FireFox profile same as my social media moniker I want this profile for.

Use multiprotocol instant messaging application

If you have several IMs installed or even various accounts on each one for various groups of your friends, you can connect them all in one handy utility.

DigsBy is by far my favorite such application because it connects so many IMs and social networks that you can hardly think of any suggested feature for it. Find inside:

• IMs: GTalk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook chat;
• Email notifications: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL mail;
• Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My favorite features of the app are:

• For each social network add as many accounts as you want;
• Sort Gtalk (and other) contacts into groups (!);
• Set tracking for any GTalk buddy: e.g. get notified when some person signs in or changes the status message;
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows;
• Set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status right from Digsby.

Use some extra tools to make your parallel lives easier:

• This script makes it easy to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. It is pretty fast and can make my life much easier.
• Use temporal email address to sign up: most sites require an email address to sign up. If you do not care about their updates, just use any temporal address for quicker registration;
• I thought of adding a few tips on IP switching but then thought I’d look like a complete spammer in that case. So I’ll just stop here, hope I managed to do that before you thought I was a jerk and just left this site for good.

Post image by SideLong

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A really cool reputation management tool WhosTalkin.com has been launched fro public usage this week. The tool is free, requires no registration and offers plenty of options to play with:

• search blogs (using various blog search engines);
• search social networks;
• search forums;
• search images (with instant preview);
• search news; etc

According to them:

Our search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

Image credit: “Google-talk“

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While Tom over at SEOmoz posted a must-read piece on negative reputation, its types and ways to deal with it (like SERPs monitoring, social media monitoring, etc), I decided to add my two cents here discussing a few online services that encourage spreading negative reputation over the Internet.

The websites discussed offer anyone anonymously to post a rant on other people or companies – be it a former boyfriend or a place of work. For some reason these services keep popping up quickly and that’s a complex question if that’s for good or worse. It seems so complex because:

• these services allow you to take revenge on anyone who offended or hurt you if you have no other way to struggle (if revenge is a good or a bad thing – that’s for you to decide);
• these services allow a dissatisfied customer/ employee to warn others of the poor service – also accounting for the new era of reputation management and customer care (but who will protect merchants and companies from the ungrounded/ false/ deceptive accusations? After all, like always, only minor (probably innocent) players will be affected – huge companies will find the way to counteract).

Disclaimer: before listing some of these services, let me disclose that I do not encourage or discourage anyone to use them. Besides, I am not linking to any of them, as, like I said, I am not sure if they should exist.

DontDateHimGirl.com is an online community of women offended by their boyfriends. The website (among other services) allow women to post the name and the story of the “cheater”.

It is worth to mention (and I do like the feature) that the service invites anyone to post a rebuttal – though I wasn’t able to find any and not sure how it can influence the initial rant; my guess is, it will still appear both on site and search engine results.

Anyway, to be completely honest, the site is not too good for rankings:

• it seldom appears on the first page for the [Cheater Name] search;
• it doesn’t use the man’s name in the page title (and hence the title of the search result).

Axelist.com invites to share negative experience with any kind of possible contacts: bosses, cheaters, racists, business partners, liars, co-workers, tenants, employees, dates, debtors, politicians, teachers, stock promoters, stockbrokers, realtors, bullies, doctors, neighbors, etc.

Apart from the detailed complaint, the website provides some of offenders’ details: their age and location. The site explains its benefits the following way:

“File your complaint and watch Axelist expose and put your villain on the spot. We will post and promote your story and even go beyond the Internet to help you make your case.”

While the site could have done a better SEO job, it does have some ranking ability:

JobVent.com invites people to post negative (and positive) experience on their job allowing thus for affective discharge and also warning people who are going to start a new job.

They do have very interesting posting guidelines that attempt to encourage offended people to be as fair as they can. Among others, the rules state that:

• no company deserves the lowest ratings in every category;
• negative ratings should be adequately grounded;
• profanity is not allowed;
• no names or initials, just company name;
• each company can be reviewed only once by one individual.

While I couldn’t find any first-page rankings for the [company name] – obviously due to the fact that [company name] has much higher competition than [personal name] – but the site does rank fairly well for some combinations of [company name] + [job]:

To be perfectly fair:

• none of the above services were designed for negative reputation management (hence poor on-site SEO btw);
• each of the above services encourages fair ratings and true stories.

Closing: I may be sounding skeptical about the whole negative reputation thing and to tell you the truth, I am not sure myself what my attitude to it is. As a customer, I would really want to be timely warned of a bad service or product. As an active Internet user, I do realize that Internet is the place of unfair judgments, misunderstandings and manipulation; the place where people are often unfairly treated (let along if they are invited to rant), the place where online argument looks like this:

Post images: Internet argument and RANT, this way

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