The internet has been affecting reputations since its earliest days, and its impact has grown as more people use the web as part of everyday life. Product reviews are ubiquitous and have become essential components of the websites of internet retailers large and small. Auction sites like Ebay, where the customer is inevitably dealing with an unknown seller, could not survive without a way to establish a basic level of trust. To that end, mutual ratings of buyer and seller establish users’ reputations, for better or worse.
Until recently, the internet had largely ignored services as a subject for ratings and reviews, but that has been changing quickly. Even the professions, once sacrosanct, have been touched, and the medical community is no longer immune from the judgments of the web.
In part this is the result of the appearance of sites that specifically invite patients to review their medical and dental providers, but it also stems from patients’ wish to learn about their doctor or dentist by any means available. These means have themselves multiplied. Search engines were once the information providers of choice. They are now supplemented by the “social web,” represented by sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Orkut, and by a proliferation of blogs and forums.
Since there is so much information available, tracking what affects reputation is a daunting task. Monitoring all of that online content can be greatly simplified by using Reputationobserver.com, especially one that focuses on medical providers. Reputationobserver automates the process and sifts through the internet noise in order to get to meaningful data and provide useful results.
The advantages of using a Reputationobserver’s medical online reputation include:
• Constant, uninterrupted monitoring of all data that can affect reputation.
• Identification and analysis of the sources of reputation information affecting medical providers.
• Collection and analysis of data from sources in addition to search results, including social sites, blogs, forums and reviews.
• Analysis of the relative impact of multiple sources on medical reputation.
• Creation of complete reputation management documentation appropriate for both internal and external review.
• Ability to focus at the provider, practice or institutional level.
• Analysis of influential sources as those sources change over time.
• Analysis of medical reputation itself as it changes over time.
• Tracking of changes to reputation in response to the application of reputation management tools.
The powerful impact of the internet on professional reputation is an undeniable fact of current medical practice. That impact cannot be fully understood without a systematic and dedicated examination of the vast amount of data that makes up an online reputation. A medical online reputation management tool is the key to an effective response to this new reality.
