NetReputation CEO Paul M Wilson on Managing Online Presence

Paul M. Wilson has spent over 20 years building and leading digital marketing organizations, including iProspect and RKG, growing them from startups into industry leaders now owned by Dentsu, an $8 billion digital agency. As the new CEO of NetReputation.com, the seven-time Inc. 5000 online reputation management firm, Paul brings that experience to bear on what he sees as the defining challenge for any business or executive today: owning your narrative in search before someone else shapes it for you.

Q1: You've spent 20+ years at the very top of the digital marketing world, building iProspect and RKG into powerhouses before stepping into the CEO role at NetReputation. What drew you to online reputation management specifically, and what convinced you this was the right moment to lead that company?

After two decades in search and digital marketing, you gain an understanding of what actually separates the businesses that last from the ones that don’t. And the answer is less glamorous than people want it to be: you exceed expectations by delivering great work for clients. You start by hiring strategic thinkers with a desire to maximize their learning potential, while most importantly, being team players. You put the processes in place for the team to deliver great work. The result is building a company with a strong track record and a reputation for driving client revenue. The rest falls into place!

I watched this approach play out across everything we did at iProspect and RKG. So when I was looking at what came next for me, the question I kept asking was: where is there a real foundation to build on? Not a turnaround. Not a startup that needs to find its footing. A business that already knew how to win for clients and just needed someone to help it grow into what it could be. NetReputation was that. Seven years on the Inc. 5000. Clients who came in burned by other firms are becoming long-term partners. That’s not marketing. That’s a track record. I’m not here to fix something broken. I’m here because there’s something real to build on.

Q2: NetReputation works with everyone from individual professionals to Fortune 500 enterprises. When a client comes to you in crisis mode versus one who wants to build proactively, how does your approach differ, and which conversation is harder to have?

People tend to assume the crisis call is the hard one. It isn't. When a client is already in pain, the conversation is urgent but straightforward. They know exactly why they're calling. The harder conversation is with someone who hasn't had a problem yet. You're asking them to invest in protecting something they can't see that is at risk, and that requires a different kind of conversation.

That said, the market mindset has shifted significantly since we started. Early on, almost every client came to us reactively. Something damaging had surfaced, and they needed it addressed. That work hasn't slowed down, but the more sophisticated clients now come to us before anything goes wrong. They've seen what a reputation crisis does to a business or a career, and they don't want to find out firsthand. That proactive approach is not only more effective, it's more efficient, and it opens up a completely different kind of partnership. When a client comes to us proactively, the conversation stops being about damage control and starts being about brand building, about what story they want to own in their market and how to make sure that's what surfaces when someone goes looking. That shift in client mindset is actually one of the things shaping where we're taking the company. The demand is telling us something.

Q3: AI is changing how content is created, surfaced, and trusted online. For a company whose entire value proposition is controlling the narrative in search, is AI the biggest opportunity you've seen in this industry, or the biggest threat?

It’s both. The threat is real, and it’s moving fast. Two years ago, we weren’t having conversations with clients about how AI answer engines describe them. Now it’s part of every conversation for every client we take on. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, these tools are shaping how people perceive brands and individuals, and most organizations haven’t even started thinking about it. That’s a real and growing category of exposure. But it’s also where we see the clearest opportunity.

We’ve spent the last year building out what we call our generative engine optimization capability, which is essentially the practice of ensuring that when AI systems surface information about a client, that information is accurate, favorable, and consistent with the narrative they’ve worked to build. It’s new enough that most firms aren’t doing it well yet. We intend to be the ones who define what good looks like in this space. The clients who get ahead of this now will have a meaningful advantage. The ones who wait are going to be managing a problem that compounds every month they delay.

Q4: You've said that the companies that struggle in this industry are the ones that react, and that you stay a step ahead. In a space where algorithms shift, platforms evolve, and AI-generated content is everywhere, what does 'staying a step ahead' actually look like operationally?

It starts with your people utilizing the right tools, technologies, and approaches, and right now that absolutely includes AI. AI doesn’t think through the problem for you. It doesn’t know what your client actually needs or which questions are worth asking in the first place. What it does is help you move faster and go deeper once you’ve done that thinking. The teams that are getting real value from it are the ones that treat it as an assist, not a handoff. The ones that hand the work off entirely tend to produce things that look right but aren’t. Clients notice and expect more from their partner.

We’ve also learned that the people closest to the work catch things before anyone else does. A ranking pattern that doesn’t look right. A platform behaving differently than it did three months ago. A client challenge that didn’t exist last year.

We’ve worked hard to build an environment where those observations actually go somewhere. That early signal, combined with the discipline to run real experiments and document what actually works, is what staying ahead looks like. It’s not a technology. It’s a habit.

Q5: You’ve hired and mentored people who have gone on to lead agencies and start companies of their own. How are you utilizing what you learned in your prior sales leadership roles to now becoming the CEO?

The core principles remain the same for hiring and training: character, work ethic, a desire to learn, and being a team player.  As a sales leader, you’re accountable for a number and developing your team. That’s real pressure, and it teaches you a lot. But as CEO, you realize quickly that the job is really about leading the entire organization. Financial execution, client delivery, marketing, operations, etc. Every department has its own mission, and my job is to lead all of them to move in the same direction at the same time. That’s a different kind of challenge than closing a deal or hitting a quarter.

What I’ve leaned on is the one thing that has never changed across any role I’ve held: it always starts with hiring the smartest people you can find and then actually investing in making them better. Not just putting talent in a room. Developing it. The people I’ve hired and worked with over the years have gone on to start their own agencies and run their own organizations. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you treat people’s growth as part of the job, not a side project. I’m trying to build the same thing here, and I know that we’re on our way.

Q6: NetReputation is already the category leader in ORM. Where does the company go from here, and what would it mean to you personally to see that vision through?

We will evolve as our clients' needs change, which means we will add services to meet those needs. As I mentioned, moving from reactive to proactive. This will result in moving from being the best ORM firm in the country to being the go-to partner for brand building and building that “Perfect Profile” that our enterprise, SMB, and individual clients are asking us to deliver. This means SEO, content strategy, social media, public relations, broader brand development, and leveraging AI and generative search to maximize results. Clients don’t want to stitch together five different agency relationships to protect and grow something that is fundamentally one thing: their reputation. We want to be the firm that meets our clients’ needs and delivers results better than anyone.

On the international side, we have clients in markets we haven’t fully served yet. There’s real demand there, and we haven’t built to meet it. That’s a deliberate near-term priority.

Personally, what I want to see is an organization that is genuinely hard to compete with. Not because of any one person or any one service, but because the systems, the people, and the capabilities compound over time. At iProspect and RKG, I was able to see what that looks like when it is executed for brands. That’s what I’m trying to create here, and I think we have exactly the right foundation to do it.