You may think online reputation management is something only companies with a brand name to protect should worry about, but you’d be wrong. Your very name is out there in cyberspace – your personal brand. Everything you say online is searchable, and if there’s something out there that’s potentially embarrassing then it could be detrimental to your personal and/or professional life. It could even affect your chances of landing that great job you’re looking for.
Increasingly, employers are vetting their candidates very thoroughly, and this includes seeing what they can find out about you online. Microsoft recently commissioned a survey of recruiters and 70% reported they have rejected a candidate based on information found online. So what can you do?
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Monitor
Lifehacker has some great suggestions for finding out what’s being said about you online, but by far the easiest is setting up Google Alerts. You can set up a Google Alert on any search term or phrase and receive an email when it turns up in Google. The idea here being, of course, that you use your name as the search term to see what the search engine is turning up when requested.
Control
It should be obvious that the best way to keep negative or embarrassing things from getting out is to control what goes out in the first place. Be aware of what you allow online. This article makes a good case for maintaining multiple online identities and it meshes well with our purpose here. If you can set up and maintain more than one ‘identity’ online and manage to keep them separate it can—though it takes a bit more effort—make your life easier and safer in the long run. In this way you can keep your personal identity, which you may share with your friends and family, apart from a more professional persona which you can display to the business world.
Recover
As an individual you probably don’t have to worry about getting negative reviews of you or your products plastered over the Internet, but sometimes questionable or potentially embarrassing items might slip under the radar. They could have been posted by you, in which case you are in full control and can simply remove the offending pieces. If a friend decided to share some less than flattering pictures or videos or stories of wild exploits it may be best to simply ask that they be removed, as soon as possible.
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This may not always work as your requests could be flatly refused, in which case it is time to, a) consider finding new friends, and b) enter damage control mode. Having a personal blog really helps here as you can respond to any image smearing items on your own terms and perhaps spin them in a new light. This advice—once again from Lifehacker—has the added benefit of ‘burying’ the offending information under new material in subsequent search results, making it less obvious.
There is plenty of information out there on managing an online reputation, and even businesses which can help clean up and maintain your online image, although these are mainly for other businesses with corporate brands and images to protect. Much of the information, however, can be applied to your own personal reputation. If you’re concerned about your online image and what other people can see and/or find out about you, then you might try some of these suggestions.
We’d like to know if our readers have any other strategies for managing your online reputation – if so, tell us about them in the comments!
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