Brand.com

Reputation Changer

The company was founded in September 2009 as Reputation Changer, with its headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The company began as an online reputation management company offering services to small businesses and individuals.

To help improve online reputations, Reputation Changer created its own positive content about its clients, in an attempt to force other less flattering articles about them down in Google search results and thus cause criticisms to "disappear". Though during this time the company had been accused of "making false claims" about the effectiveness of their services, the company insisted that those claims were the result of rivals and not legitimate complaints. This includes the hiding of negative user-generated reviews for hotels and other commercial enterprises.

In November 2012, Michael Zammuto joined the company as President. This led to some restructuring within the company, including the June 2013 renaming of the company from Reputation Changer to Brand.com. The re-branding including the acquisition of the Internet domain brand.com for $500,000. The company also moved its headquarters from West Chester to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company had 135 employees, and worked with both small and large clients. Seattle City Light hired Brand.com to remove a 2008 Seattle Weekly story critical of their CEO, Jorge Carrasco. Brand.com created several blog posts "to drown out critical stories" including one at Huffington Post where the writer did not disclose conflict of interest, subsequently leading to the article being removed. Ars Technica reported that some of the websites that the stories were posted on "appear to have been utterly fake". In May 2014, Seattle City Light requested a refund from Brand.com as they claimed the company did not deliver the services that were promised as the critical story still appeared high in Google searches.

Services

Brand.com offered brand management and reputation management services. They reviewed the online presence of individuals and companies and provided action plans said to help control how information appears in search engines. Services also included suppression of negative reviews on sites like Yelp or Google Reviews. Part of these services was the planned launch of Brand.com's "Google Eraser", which claimed to expunge negative listings from a Google search. At the time, some stated that the process was unproven, and that Brand.com had not been transparent about its process, claiming that their processes were proprietary.

In 2013, Brand.com stated further that they would enact a De-Indexing Action Plan to permanently erase false or libelous information from major search engines, as opposed to attempting to move the negative information further down in search results. The process involved verifying that the information was false, and then working with Google, Yahoo, and Bing to de-index the information. The company created the Command Center platform, through which clients could monitor the results of its advertising or reputation management efforts.

Brand.com edited Wikipedia on behalf of clients. The company claimed on its website to have "built an entire practice around creating, managing, and monitoring Wikipedia." and offered to create a "positive Wikipedia page". Michael Zammuto told Quartz in 2013 that the company "helps ensure that information on Wikipedia is accurate, not false or defamatory."

Bankruptcy

Having released most of its workers in 2014, Brand.com filed for bankruptcy in 2015.

References

References

1. Ensign, Rachel Louise. (14 May 2013). "The Morning Risk Report: From Cyber Lemons to Lemonade". Wall Street Journal.
2. "Brand.com Company Profile". Brand.com.
3. Ha, Anthony. (June 21, 2013). "Thanks To A Six-Figure Purchase By Reputation Changer, Brand.com Is A Thing Now". Tech Crunch.
4. Adams, Susan. (14 March 2013). "6 Steps To Managing Your Online Reputation". Forbes.
5. Key, Peter. (June 27, 2013). "Reputation Changer now Brand.com". Bizjournals.com.
6. Juliana Reyes. (2015-05-22). "Rich Gorman, Brand.com cofounder: Here's why my company failed - Technical.ly Philly". Technical.ly.
7. Han, Nydia. (December 10, 2012). "Protecting your online reputation". ABC Action News 6.
8. Tasmin Cave. (24 March 2014). "The Corporate PR Industry's Sneaky War on Internet Activism".
9. (February 2, 2012). "Fixing the Reputations of Reputation Managers".
10. (June 27, 2013). "Brand.com Helps Hotels Bury Negative News. Noble or Sneaky?".
11. "Michael Zammuto". Philadelphia Business Journal.
12. Koetsier, John. (5 July 2013). "Biggest domain sales of 2013 so far: $500K for Brand.com". Venture Beat.
13. "City Light hires online results firm to polish its CEO's image". Seattle Times.
14. "Huffington Post pulls blog item tied to City Light paid PR effort". Huffington Post.
15. Farivar, Cyrus. (2014-07-12). "Seattle utility wants $17,500 refund after failure to scrub negative search results". Ars Technica.
16. "Why reputation manager Brand.com had to manage its own".
17. Heitner, Darren. (20 August 2013). "Sharapova To Sugarpova: Why The Name Change Would Have Been A Silly Business Strategy". Forbes.
18. Davis, Daniaja. (10 September 2013). "Miley's Downfall". Huffington Post.
19. Daisyme, Peter. (11 September 2013). "How Brand.com Reviews Suppression Helps Boost Online Reputation". Search Engine Journal.
20. (November 14, 2013). "BrandYourself.com calls BS on Brand.com's Google eraser service".
21. Koetsier, John. (13 November 2013). "Brand.com launches 'first systematic program' to remove lies and libel from Google". Venture Beat.
22. Hong, Kaylene. (13 November 2013). "Brand.com launches a program for deleting false Web pages on Google, Yahoo and Bing". The Next Web.
23. (December 10, 2013). "Brand.com helps manage its clients' reputations online".
24. Leo Mirani. (13 November 2013). "This company promises it can delete slanderous results from Google—for $7,500 (and up)". [[Quartz (publication).
25. Harvey Chipkin. (20 May 2013). "The Other Guy's Social Media".
26. "The Wikipedia Action Plan manages, monitors, and helps control Wikipedia pages for your brand.". Brand.com.
27. Brand.com. (11 March 2013). "Reputation Changer Offers New Tools for Building Accurate, Authoritative Wikipedia Pages". PRWeb.
28. (May 20, 2014). "Newscred, Percolate, Brand.com Scheme To Alter Digital Content Creation".