entertainment

Your Online Reputation & 6 Ways to Fix It

A few weeks ago, there was some fierce debate here about the use of Facebook and other social networking sites as one in an aresenal of recruitment tools available to employers. I started the fire when I mentioned I’d checked out a few prospective interns on Facebook and in a couple of cases, I didn’t love what I saw (in an update to this post, I have since hired a sensational site-co-ordinator who you can read about in our new ‘about’ page here and I don’t even know if she’s on Facebook. She fetches a mean banana, though, which is far more important).

Oh, how this subject divided people! Oh the passion!  You can read it all here. Clearly, many people are mighty freaked out at the thought of a STRANGER (ie: employer) reading stuff about them online. Clearly, everyone needs to remember that Google goes both ways.

With all this front of mind, I was interested to see this piece a couple of weeks ago from Leslie Cannold about online reputations and I’ve republished it here with her permission.

Leslie writes:

Would you be happy if your boss saw this picture?

For people to make informed and voluntary decisions about the exchange of their personal privacy for the benefits of social interaction, recognition and celebrity, they must understand the risks and benefits the choice entails.

In particular, they must recognise that the snail trail of their online life can be matched, mashed, collated, broadcast and rebroadcast by anybody, in any context, for any reason, for many years into the future.

What’s out there – however partial, slanted, decontextualised or downright wrong – comprises your online, and contributes to your real-world, reputation.

Reputation is an old fashioned word, but today – as in yesteryear – it still matters. What others think about you is a compendium of what you look like, say and do over time, as well as how these elements complement or contradict each other.

Reputation matters because people must often make decisions about you before they know you. To do this, they must rely on reputation, or its protean precursor, first impressions.

In a world where “no privacy” is the chosen or default setting, there will be a broad range of data out there – a personality test sat long ago, a tweet sent after a first date, photos of a drunken night – from which an interested party can build an image of you. That image may make implicit or explicit claims about your wisdom, competency or character.

That our broadcasts may have consequences for our lives often gets missed. This is because most of what we do online attracts little attention. Usually, we are trying – and failing – to be heard.

But at some point in nearly everyone’s life someone will surface with the time and inclination to track back through the digital detritus of our online existence. They will decide whether to trust, respect, like or do business with us – and advise others to do the same – on the basis of what they see, hear and read.

We can’t control this process, but we can influence it. We can affect it by taking care with what we allow into the public domain in the first place. We can also proactively develop and nurture our personal brand in the hope that if and when others say false or malicious things about us, they roll like water off a duck’s back.

Build your image or others will shape it for you, an image consultant told me. “People will think things about you. You can either passively allow that to happen or get actively involved in shaping your reputation,” he advised.

OK, so how do you fix this?

To give you some specific tips (feel free to add your own in the comments), we’ve done some research on Mashable, All Facebook and Marketing Pilgrim who all suggest you do these things ASAP:

6 ways to Fix Your Online Reputation

1. GOOGLE YOURSELF

See what comes up and you may be surprised.  Make sure you look at the first two pages AT LEAST, to be safe, I’d go to five. Open the links and look at them through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know you, someone who doesn’t realise that you were joking when you joined the “I’d Totally Do Justin Bieber Even Though He’s Young Enough To Be My Son” Facebook group or that the photo of you with the naked man was at your sister’s hen’s night and not just the way you roll on an average weekend.

2. Remove Any Inappropriate Photos
This is a facebook one. Delete or untag any inappropriate photos of yourself. Think of yourself as a brand and remove anything that does not show you in the best light. Go one step further and ask friends to remove these photos and/or not post any photos of you.

3. Keep Up-To-Date with Privacy Settings
Facebook keeps moving the bar on this one, make sure that you are aware of what is public and what is private. You can remove yourself from Google, protect your photo albums and only allow your friends to see your status updates. All Facebook is a great website that shows you how to best protect your privacy settings.

4. Make a No Drink-and-Type Rule
This one seems fairly obvious, but we are all guilty of sending out a text message, tweet, blog post or have updated a status whilst under the influence. You can always remove it once the fog clears, however quite often the damage has been done, and millions of people have already seen it.

5. Create your own website or blog
One way to combat a bad online reputation is to create your own online presence, start a blog or website with a domain of your own name. This is also one way your name will appear in the top ten results in Google.

6. Monitor your profiles
Deal with any negative feedback quickly, the longer it’s there the more it can spread and be archived. If one person has an issue with you, contact them directly and ask them to stop. Again untag any photos or videos that could be bad for your online reputation.

So what do you think? How do you shape your reputation both in the workforce and on the social front? Would you look up a potential date on Facebook?  I TOTALLY WOULD.  Ditto a potential employer or employee. It’s the modern equivalent of ‘asking around’.

What steps have you taken to ensure you present yourself to the world online in the way you want to? Does this whole post make you nervous? What happened when you Googled yourself ? Did you find anything interesting?