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Reputation Management

April 17th, 2009
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We have many ways to view our identity. One way that we are known is by our reputation. Our friends and colleagues know who we are. They know us from our acts and activities. They know generally what kind of person we are. For example, we might be known as a kind or loving person, or maybe a jerk, a know-it-all, or a scoundrel.

smileFor a business, the employees are the first line of the company’s reputation. Sometimes employees are not the most diplomatic representatives. In one recently publicized case, a video posted to YouTube by two playful employees caused a public relations nightmare for the company (and later regrets by the ex-employees).

It’s worth noting that while one event can do damage, it’s not the entire picture. Our real reputation is made up of what we do and say over time, what we are consistent about.

Coaching moment: There’s a great lifehacker article, The Importance of Monitoring Your Online Reputation, that talks about this:

These days, if you want to know more about someone, the first thing most of us do is Google them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that monitoring your online reputation is extraordinarily important.

Go ahead and Google and Yahoo yourself, see what’s out there. Note how much is about someone whose name you share. What picture does this paint? Are you happy with it?

You can’t change the past, but you can change your future reputation. What will you do to paint a better picture of yourself?

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  4. PII 2011: Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy
  5. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders

friends/family, future, history, records, tools

  1. coach
    April 25th, 2009 at 21:13 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    New York Times has a post in Gagetwise on How to Manage Your Reputation Online. (I hate it that this link will be valid for probably 24 hours.) In this article, the author links to Google’s new profile results, then suggests several steps to removing unfavorable content:

    • - Ask the webmaster or host of the offending content to remove it.
    • - Try burying it. For example, register a website, a blog, subdomains, etc. in your own name.
    • - Leave comments on high-ranking blogs and websites.
    • - Piggyback off of social networking sites.

    For example,

    Piggyback off Web sites whose pages rank high in Google. Social networking sites are great for this. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Naymz, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Vimeo, FriendFeed and Ning are great places to start. You don’t have to actively use these sites. Simply park your profile, add the necessary amount of content and make sure to adjust the settings to public view where appropriate so that your profile can be crawled and indexed by Google. Social sites are especially useful in pushing down negative content because some, like LinkedIn and Flickr, allow you to create a unique URL, like flickr.com/johnmiddleinitialdoe, which will further ensure that the site ranks high atop your name search.

    Let the data races begin!

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