The Ultimate Glossary of Reputation Management Terms

This glossary of online reputation management terminology will help you get up to speed on terms like brandjacking, EWOM, doxxing, social proof, truth remixes, shame famers, and of course zombies.

Affiliate Link

A link that contains a unique ID or username of an advertiser, which tracks the traffic sent to the advertiser’s site. Used in affiliate marketing programs, which are designed for people who hope to make money from the sales they generate for the advertiser.

Aggregators

Applications that are programmed to keep track of online conversations about you, your brand, and your industry on major social media networks, then combining this information for easy viewing on one service or site. Different aggregators come in different shapes and sizes. For example, Scoop.it is human curated, whereas WikiData is mainly machine curated.

Anchor text

Words that are highlighted in a hyperlink. Anchor text is the text on a web page a person clicks that takes the user to another page or site.

Attack blog

A blog created for the purpose of attacking an individual, company or group. Overt attack blogs mount open attacks on a specific individual, such as negative comments posted on a teenager’s blog, or even an entire blog created to trash the victim. Covert attack blogs, on the other hand, may masquerade as the intended victim with the intention of damaging their reputation by making it seem as though they are writing negative things about themselves.

Brandjacking

When a false representation of your brand is created, by masquerading as your brand on a website, page or social media account by an individual. The objective may be to create a parody, to protest, or to pretend to be a legitimate company, in order to ride on good branding to sell counterfeit and imitation products. Also known as squatting, it’s also sometimes done in the hopes of getting the rightful owner to pay for the name, account or page. Brandjacking can be part of a broader attack, combined with other tactics to damage the brand’s or individual’s reputation. This is not limited to brands, and could also happen to individuals.

Concern Troll

Under the guise of offering concern, this person often posts comments that hurt or offend instead.

Content Communities

Sites that foster community through the sharing of multimedia content, such as images, video and music. Some examples are Youtube or Flickr. This content is searchable and often organized by topic or interest, allows for comments, and are shareable to other social networking sites.

Content strategist

A person who plans for content to be shared online. The content is designed to work in tandem with the brand’s goals and objectives, and can take the form of written, video or audio content, and may even engage with online influencers to bring in additional audiences. The objective is to attract and grow a specific targeted audience.

Doxxing

Originating from the term ‘docs’ (short for documents), it’s a technique that dredges up information about an individual solely through online sources. Personal and financial data can be found by using various sites and tools, online documentation or enlisting the help of a hacker. Doxxing often culminates in a dossier that contains the compiled information, which may be used against the person in question or dumped onto a site for others to use.

EdgeRank

An algorithm on Facebook that controls the updates, posts, photos and other information shown on your Facebook news feed.

Ewom

Stands for ‘Electronic Word of Mouth’. When opinion, recommendations and reviews are spread online, generating awareness and new business in the process. Trust is an important component of Ewom, as it carries more weight when a statement is supported by a known and credible source.

Faceplant

To fall flat on ones face online, often by showing negativity or aggression about inconsequential things that few people care about. Faceplanting is the act of inadvertently damaging ones own online reputation.

Identity Assault

Occurs when an impersonator pretends to be you online, and mounts an attack on your credibility and reputation.

In-depth sentiment

A comprehensive look into online activity that shows you how people are feeling about the search terms associated with your brand.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph provides quick information in Google search results from reliable sources without the need to click to the originating site. Launched in May 2012 it understands facts and connections between similar entities and information online.

Libel

Defamation through the written word in a permanent and public record.

Monitoring Specialist

Someone who specializes in listening to online conversations and are able to tap into the most pertinent and important conversations.

Online Privacy

Internet Privacy is the ability of individuals to control the flow of information and have reasonable access to data generated during a browsing session.

Online Reputation Management

Designing and managing the information that appears online when people search for you or your brand online. This includes channels and search engines like Google, Bing, or on social networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or articles, video and other online content.

Scraping

Extracting information (often personal) from all available sources using bots.

Sentiment analysis

A tool that’s programmed to track and analyze whether commenters are expressing positive or negative opinions, thoughts and feelings. Until sentiment-sensing artificial intelligence is perfected, sentiment analysis is best performed by people.

Shame Famers

People who enjoy being in the spotlight for scandals or shame-garnering events. Viral shame famers are able to inflict potential collateral damage on those around them.

Silent slashes

Damage to one’s reputation from anonymous and often stealthy sources, which often go unnoticed until it’s too late or too hard to ignore, or when the pain is felt. Agencies exist whose sole purpose is to act against their clients competitors online and to do so silently.

Slander

Defamation through the spoken word in public, with the result of damaging the victim’s reputation.

Social network aggregation

Services that pull in information from various social networking sites to compile them all in one place. Instead of logging on to all the different sites individually, there is just one account to log into, where all updates can be accessed at the one time.

Social networking sites

Sites that are designed for people to connect and network with each other. Each individual has a profile page that they can set up, which contains information such as contact information, photos, interests and other characteristics. Facebook and LinkedIn are examples.

Social proofs

The idea that the more a piece of content is read, shared or liked, the more trustworthy, relatable or credible it is.

Social strategist

A person who plans and maximizes online activity between social networking sites in order to align them to business goals.

Strawman

A strawman is a fake person or entity online. It can also refer to a real entity being promoted in place of another real entity in search results that is used to engineer search results.

Truth Remix

A distortion of a truth, often negative (such as a mistake or shortcoming), that has been molded and shaped to support a different purpose. The end result is a truth that falls into a grey area, which can neither be accepted nor refuted.

Zombie or Bot

A computer that has been infiltrated by a piece of programming code that allows it to be controlled remotely without the owner’s knowledge. In computing terminology, a zombie is a computing device controlled by a third-party. But a bot is software that may scrape content from a web page, infect a system, or perform other tasks online.

With these terms added into your personal vocabulary, you will be able to speak the online reputation management language. Furthermore, you can use many of these strategies and tools to fine tune your online reputation and further success online.