How could William Poundstone get it so wrong? He brought out a book full of brain teasers and puzzles claiming to be modeled on the interview questions asked at Google, called Are you Smart Enough to Work at Google? The title packed enough punch to make not-so-smart wannabes like me pay hard cash to buy a copy, ignoring some loud criticism at the Amazon reviews that he was barking up the wrong tree. But then, Amazon reviews can be misleading. And Poundstone is a respected writer and trivia buff. He is celebrated for writing about the origins of the Kelly Criterion, a formula used to determine the ideal size of a series of bets, in everyday language, and bringing to light the personalities involved in developing and deploying it at casinos for gambling, and at Wall Street to beat the market. The book, called Fortune's Formula, has a cult-like following among people who are fascinated by such mathematical wizardry. Poundstone had earlier written another book called How Would you Move Mount Fuji, about the grueling interview process at Microsoft during its heydays as the world's most sought after tech employer. So he does have the DNA for this genre.
But then what to make of this interview given to New York Times by Laszlo Bock, senior vice-president of People Operations at Google? "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up." 
Did Poundstone make it all up then? I flipped through the book. He has done his research. Talked to enough interview givers and takers. People mentioned by name include Todd Carlisle, who devised the Google Candidate Survey for People Operations (how HR is called at Google), as well as Prasad Setty, director of people analytics and compensation. Brain teasers and puzzles may have been Big Ticket items at Google once upon a time. But as Laszlo now confirms, they have moved away from it. 
Another welcome development seems to be Google's turning back on its extraordinary reliance on Ivy League schools and high G.P.As. Ken Auletta, a biographer of Google (Googled. The End of the World as we Know it) once termed this obsession "preposterous". Poundstone narrates the instance of Roni Zeigler, a physician with an advanced degree in medical informatics, being asked to bring his secondary school grades. But in the NYT interview, Bock notes that this too is now a thing of the past. "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything." Well, that's candid enough.
So then, Poundstone may not have been altogether wrong to give a central place to brain teasers and puzzles in Google's recruitment process when he started out, but just as he finished writing the book, it looks like the company made one of its infamous algorithm updates on the entire hiring process. As a good SEO practitioner knows, these changes are often enough to shut down businesses. And Poundstone's book is certainly a lemon, albeit an interesting one, to all those like me who shelled out money to learn more about the celebrated interview process at Google. Now quick, answer this question: A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
e.o.m.

Several Reputation Management companies were among those busted by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for creation of fake reviews in Yelp, Google Local, Yahoo, and City Search. They now have their work cut out __ recover their reputations or shut shop!
Here's a gem from the New York Times report on the same:

The investigation revealed a web of deceit in which reviewers in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Eastern Europe produced, for as little as a dollar a rave, buckets of praise for places they had never seen in countries where they had never been. In some cases, the reputation shops bribed their clients’ customers to write more fake reviews, giving them $50 gift certificates for their trouble. They also went on review sites that criticized their own fake-review operations and wrote fake reviews denying they wrote fake reviews.

The NYT report mentions only SEO company Mainstreethost. But the Attorney General's site reveals the names of several others SEO and Digital Marketing agencies among those who paid up $350,000 in penalties, along with an assurance on ceasing their misleading practices. Here are a few of the fake review creators we identified from the New York AG's list:

• XVIO
  
• The Web Empire
  
• Stillwater Media
  
• Envision MT
  

Here's how one of the SEO companies advertised for a reviewer:

We need a person that can post multiple positive reviews on major REVIEW sites.  Example:  Google Maps, Yelp, CitySearch.  Must be from different IP addresses… So you must be able to have multiple IPs.  The reviews will be only few sentences long.  Need to have some understanding on how Yelp filters works.  Previous experience is a plus…just apply --)we are a marketing company.

The stakes are so high that they couldn't resist taking the short cut to making money. It might prove a costly mistake.

e.o.m.

Most SEO agencies now offer Online Reputation Management services. The connection is not immediately obvious. But if you understand Online Reputation Management to be all about burying negative references about you or your business in the 10th page of a SERP, you've got it nailed! Who else is better qualified to do that than an SEO professional!! 
But Online Reputation Management is not merely about removing or burying negative references. Considering the proliferation of professionals who are attempting to do just that, the time has come to provide a more inclusive picture. To start with, for individuals or businesses to lose reputation, they need to possess reputation in the first place! This is why it has become crucial for companies as well as individuals to ensure that they distinctly stand for something unique. 
It's possible to be cynical about the whole personal branding industry, which took off in the wake of a seminal article by Tom Peters in Fast Company magazine in 1997, but one can be at peace if it's understood as nothing more fancy than individuals taking care to ensure that they're perceived for what they really stand for. So if you know who's the authentic you and what is it that you represent, you can pay attention to all the components _ your gait, your talk, your personal bearing _ which go into making others understand you. This requires some discipline. And in reality, it's much different than the popular impression that personal branding is all about pretending to be someone you're not.
For companies as well as brands, this is all the more important. Only if a brand is known to stand for something authentic, can it make that connection which creates loyal followers. And if a brand has that emotional connect with its loyal customers, then it becomes easier for it to draw support when it's facing a threat to its reputation. So online or offline, reputation has to exist first for it to be salvaged when faced with a threat. Therefore, to understand reputation management merely as a firefighting to be done in emergencies is totally misleading. To gain a deeper understanding of the subject, we've to do an overview of the theory of reputation as understood by economists. I hope to take up that soon. Once that's done, I will take up the mechanisms through which reputation is nurtured in the first place, and then consider the tools available for a professional to confront the assaults on reputation.
e.o.m.