When I was growing up, we wanted to avoid being someone with a “reputation.” Today, we want a reputation, but we need it to be positive. However, maintaining one’s reputation is getting harder and harder. As social media and social networking sites continue to flourish, the power of the individual voice is growing greatly. We have to protect our reputations, and have someone (it’s probably you) that is fully in charge of managing our online reputation. It may seem insignificant now, but new things on the horizon will make this a part of any businessperson’s life.
According to an article in The New York Times Magazine, “The End of Forgetting,” by Jeffrey Rosen (Sunday, July 25, 2010), in the near future, people will be rated on reputation (trustworthy, good parent, good insurance risk, etc), similar to the credit report rating services of today.
There are services now that can aggregate information about people from the Internet and social networks. Not your private information like social security or credit card information, but information that is readily available: the movies you like, books you read, search terms you use, blog posts you write, videos you post/watch on YouTube, and people you follow. These reputation and trustworthy ratings could eventually be used to determine employability and other factors. And it can be incredibly positive or incredibly detrimental to your career.
There are services that can help. Check out Reputation Defender or other similar consulting services that, for a fee, will monitor your online reputation and help you remove inaccuracies, etc.
Although no one (absolutely no one!) is perfect, it may be best to keep the imperfections away from the web. Is what’s out there about you having an impact on your business?
Maribeth Kuzmeski
Maribeth Kuzmeski, MBA is the founder of Red Zone Marketing, LLC, which consults to Fortune 500 firms on strategic marketing planning and business growth. She is the author of 4 books, has frequently appeared on TV and radio, and has written articles on marketing strategies for hundreds of publications including Business Week and Entrepreneur. She regularly speaks to audiences on topics relating to business development, marketing, and sales strategies. Maribeth is author of The Connectors: How the World’s Most Successful Businesspeople Build Relationships and Win Clients for Life (Wiley, September 2009).
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Good points – a different take on managing your brand from a grass roots perspective. (Would love it if you would hyperlink to the other articles you reference though!)
Maribeth,
Thank you for taking the time to highlight the important issue of online reputation management on your blog. I’m glad you had the opportunity to read Jeffrey Rosen’s most excellent New York Times Magazine piece. It is definitely one of the most thorough and clear-headed examinations of the issue of Internet privacy to date.
As you state in your post, ReputationDefender can help individuals monitor and manage their online reputations. I would encourage anyone interested in learning more about our company to check out our website at ReputationDefender.com or follow us on Twitter at @RepDef.
Thank you,
Rob Frappier
Community Manager
ReputationDefender