Managing Your Personal Brand Online - Or at Least Your Rep
The recent and frantic digging into the lives of Sarah Palin and her ilk has made me ponder the importance of managing one’s online persona - especially given how easy search engines and social networks have made it for complete strangers to get information about each other.
Although most of us don’t have the vice-presidency hanging in the balance of our online dirty laundry, almost all of us will have relied on our Web persona for a job sometime in our professional lives. Those jobs will almost certainly be worth more than “a warm bucket of spit” as well.
Long ago, when I graduated from college and was looking for a job in the real world, I began to seriously consider how my online presence may help or hinder my attempts to secure gainful employment. At the time, this simply entailed cleaning up a few areas of my Facebook account.
According to the results of a recent survey conducted by Careerbuilder, this was a good move on my part. The report found:
“Of those hiring managers who have screened job candidates via social networking profiles ([22 percent of all hiring managers surveyed]), one-third (34 percent) reported they found content that caused them to dismiss the candidate from consideration.”
This content included the following:
- 41% - candidate posted information about them drinking or using drugs
- 40% - candidate posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information
- 28% - candidate bad-mouthed their previous company or fellow employee
- 27% - candidate lied about qualifications
- 22% - candidate used discriminatory remarks related to race, gender, religion, etc.
- 22% - candidate’s screen name was unprofessional
- 21% - candidate was linked to criminal behavior
- 19% - candidate shared confidential information from previous employers
These are all fairly simple - not to mention obvious - mistakes to avoid when it comes to your web-presence. This is especially true with social networks where the user is the one who controls what content appears on his or her profile. Facebook’s granular security controls put the onus squarely on the user to ensure that their profile reflects well of them.
It’s a slightly different game when the content isn’t so directly controllable, as is the case with much - if not most - information online. I found some good tips for managing this kind of content/information:
- Ask the owners of the site to remove or amend the questionable content. A friend of mine was mortified to discover the first hit for his name on Google was the results from a less-than-reputable athletic competition from his college days. He simply asked the site owners to remove it and offered a brief explanation why and the site was happy to comply.
- Crowd out the bad results by posting comments in blogs or forums using your full name. This is most effective with popular sites that are likely to have a good online ranking themselves. *hint* Make sure the site doesn’t require a login.
- Make online profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and other networking sites. Not only will these help to drive the less-glowing elements of your online persona lower in the search rankings, but a prospective employer is likely to start their information-gathering campaigns on these sites. While crowding out negative content doesn’t eliminate it, for Internet searches, out of sight truly is out of mind. Think about it: when was the last time you went beyond the second or third page of results for a query? Instead of worrying about expunging all negative content, just try to push it onto that fourth page.
- Set up Google alerts for your name. This may sound megalomaniacal (and it is) but you’d be amazed at the variety of old content that gets crawled and dredged up every day. If you see it, it means others can too. At least this way you can be prepared.
This all may be moot if more countries follow Finland’s lead. Finland has dealt with this issue with the simple - if draconian - approach of banning employers from conducting Google searches on potential employees.
The best advice is simply to exercise prudence online - and in real-life situations that may be documented online. Either that or regularly change your name…
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Fayza
Posted on September 20th, 2008 at 10:19 am.
Excellent personal brand management advice!