We’ve heard a lot about Facebook privacy issues over the past year – and those are real concerns – but have you been monitoring your overall online reputation? Do you know what it is? If not, you need to take the following steps to be sure your reputation is what you think it should be, and to be sure you keep it that way.
Why should you care? Because employers (both current and prospective), identity thieves,
property thieves, insurers, and others, are all mining this information and will use it against you if they can.
- Find out what’s readily available about you online.
• Search on Google, Yahoo! and Bing for your name, with and without your middle initial, as well as any nicknames you may have.
• Search for your business name, if you have one.
• Be sure to search for images as well as for text. (Each of those search engines has this option at the top or left side of the page.)
• Even if everything you see is what you expect, you’re not done yet!
• (If you find something questionable here, skip to Step 5 now!)
• Set up Google Alerts to let you know when something new is published online about you.
• Periodically reassess your presence. - If you are on Facebook, consider having separate privacy settings for family and close friends, and tighter settings for your professional friends. Control who can see your photos when others tag you by further customizing those settings.
- Build your online reputation by joining professional networks such as LinkedIn.
• Add valued content to the community by answering questions.
• Get, and give, endorsements to those you recommend (which presumably should be everyone in your network!). - If you own a business, have your happy customers and clients publish positive ratings. You already routinely ask them for referrals. Positive online reviews are important for a number of reasons.
• First, as the web becomes increasingly THE place to go to get information, reviews of products and services are becoming more valuable for those searching for those products and services. Testimonials are great, but reviews are generally considered more independent, particularly when they are not all written in the same “voice.”
• Second, Google has started using online reviews as yet another factor in their algorithm for ranking your website. Just as links into your site are counted as “votes” for your site,
reviews are also indicators of your site’s value to the community. - Act quickly to mitigate the negative.
• If you find photos that show you in a negative way, request that the poster remove them. Unfortunately, once something is online, you can’t control who has already seen – or downloaded – it.
• If you find negative reviews, it may be possible to contest them.
• If you can identify the customer or client who wrote the review, try contacting them with an apology and an incentive to “try you again.” Usually reasonable people who feel you genuinely want to make things right for them will be willing to write a new review, or remove the negative one.
• Some review sites (for example, Google Places) also allow owners to respond to reviews, both positive and negative, so explore that possibility as well.
And understand that you can’t please everyone, so sometimes you are going to get negative reviews that won’t go away.
As the saying goes, a good defense is the best offense. Be proactive and get positive information out there about you. The more positive information you have, the less effect anything negative will be. Be very careful about what photos are taken of you, too! Whether we like it or not, we have an online reputation, and it’s our job to guard and manage it.
