Manage Your Online Reputation. Tony Wilson

quite frankly, “their reputations matter.”

      Clean up your Facebook pages. Clean up your blogs. Think before you post or upload. Your prospective employers will be looking for you and at you.

      I can tell you firsthand as an employer, we do check online. Almost all employers check the “online footprints” of their potential employees these days. I check my potential employees’ online footprint before I go to the trouble of hiring and training them. As an employer, taking stock of my future (or current) employees is easy to do and information is freely available with the click of a mouse.

      Employers like me are in, what I hate to call the “real world,” and if we can, we’ll always check up on our prospective employees because we want to know why we should give the job to them and not someone else. I suppose it’s the twenty-first century’s version of checking out a reference letter, except we do the checking ourselves, online (or we’ll hire an outside company to do it). We’ll look for them on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and Google their names. We’ll even look for them in Google Images. We’ll use Google Alerts. We’ll read their blogs. They’ll be judged, and indeed employed on the basis of their résumés, their education, their skill sets for the job, their personalities, their work ethics, their communication skills, and how they handled themselves in an interview (as well as on mundane issues such as their salary demands and our ability to pay them). They’ll also be judged on the basis of that online footprint in the digital sand they’ve left for the world to inspect; those pictures of them provocatively dressed that were posted to Facebook or MySpace way back in 2008 that are still public, or the nasty rant about the boss in a 2006 blog post, or the vodka bottles lying around the kitchen at a party in high school where they’re tagged on someone else’s Facebook page. Conclusions will be drawn. Judgments will be made. Rightly or wrongly, a job candidate’s “digital tattoo” may well be part of the hiring equation. It may not be fair, but suck it up; that’s how the real world works.

      And why not? My competitors are regularly checking the Web to see what I’m doing on it. All my prospective clients do the same thing when they’re trying to determine whether to hire me to do their legal work. They’ll look for me online everywhere they can. They’ll read what’s said about me on my firm’s website, in media interviews I’ve done, and in columns I’ve written for The Globe and Mail and the many other publications for which I write.

      Although I may use the Internet to check out a future or current employee or client, the consequences of leaving too large a footprint can be very harsh, as discussed in Jeffrey Rosen’s article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” in The New York Times on July 23, 2010:

      Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with LSD.

      Rosen also discussed the case of Stacey Snider:

       Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was unprofessional, and the Dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her underage students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

      He goes on to say:

       All around the world, political leaders, scholars, and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets … Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places … the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission.

      After reading this, if you haven’t run back to your computer to adjust your privacy settings, delete some photographs, and get others de-tagged, just remember Web 2.0 isn’t as private as you might think, and even if you do adjust your privacy settings today so future employers can’t see anything, there’s still a chance something embarrassing, provocative, or career limiting is available on someone else’s computer where the privacy settings haven’t been tightened, or it’s still archived in Google or another website that collects, retains, aggregates, and stores data.

      Think of everything you say and do online, whether on Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, or on other social media sites as your own, personal “digital tattoo.” We all know how hard and painful it is to get tattoos removed, don’t we? And if we don’t, we will.

      2. Who Is This Book For?

      This book is divided between reputation management for individuals and reputation management for businesses. Whether you’re a business person looking for advice on protecting a brand’s reputation or your company’s reputation, or you’re a parent or schoolteacher wanting to know more about protecting individual reputations, I can tell you this book is not for experts in web analytics, marketing theory, branding behavior, search engine optimization, online survey strategy, or for that matter, child psychologists studying the strange animal called the teenage brain. There are other books out there that will help you deal with those issues in more thorough, academic, and detailed ways if that’s what you want. This book is introductory in nature, written to give you a general understanding of online reputation management issues.

      Although this book is meant to be educational, it’s not an academic textbook or a phd thesis either. I like to stay around the 5,000-foot level, so that readers aren’t burdened with too many details, yet they can come away with a good, basic understanding of what online reputation management is, why it’s important, and what happens when things go horribly wrong. I do that by relating stories; “war stories” if you like. That’s because people can relate to stories and learn from them.

      I also discuss in general ways, without getting mired in technical detail, what tools you can use to manage your online reputation so that you, your company, your child, or your student isn’t on the front page of the newspaper because something he or she did is now posted on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Parents, teachers, and school counselors might find this book to be useful, not only for themselves, but for the children they raise and the ones they teach.

      It’s written in such a way that you might actually finish reading it in a night or two, and be ready to read other books on the topic. Chapters are broken into distinct topic areas that you can read without necessarily having to have read other chapters beforehand. For example, if you’re a parent, teacher, or school counselor, you might not be interested in corporate branding issues, copyright, or trademark law, or what you should consider when drafting employee social media policies. Those chapters are targeted at people in business.

      However, you might be interested in how to find the metadata in Word documents your students have emailed to you (so you can see if the essay has been written by someone else), or you might be very interested in Chapter 7 on sexting, cyberbullying, and online academic cheating, and the excellent research into those areas being undertaken by Pew Internet & American Life Project (a US-based think tank studying issues on the attitudes