Right about now I’m guessing there’s a few hundred thousand folks waiting for Vista and Kinko to have their new business cards ready. SEO Strategist and Social Media Guru are as much yesterday’s news as the Neru jacket I’ve been patiently waiting to get back into style.
Alex, I’ll take”New job classifications that people will pay way too much money to someone to do” for 400 dollars please.
And so we now have the title of Online Reputation Mangement or Manager
Do I actually have an online reputation and if so, do I need to worry about it? Apparently the answer is yes, yes and a resounding yes!
If you happen to be named John McCain for example, it could be a blessing and yet again it might be a curse. Apparently it all depends on whether you’re trying to rent an apartment in Berkeley. Or say your name happens to be John Wayne Gacey. Only you’re not THE John Wayne Gacey.
If your name is Michael Schwartz, your long lost pals from high school may not have an easy time hooking back up with you after 30 years, but then again, that one night stand from back in 1983 looking for child support might not have such an easy time of finding you either.
Of course this is all about personal reputations, where you could live or die by the post or comment you offhandedly made in 2005, but still keeps popping up on the search engines. And if you ARE trying to build up some sort of internet presence, you certainly don’t want your positive efforts to be mistakenly applied to somebody else with the same name. On the flip side, if you’re Joe Smith, an avid Redskins fan and some other Joe Smith just happens to get caught on video exposing himself at a Redskins game, you’d probably prefer that people didn’t think it was you.
Of course, even on a personal level it can go much deeper than this. The vast amounts of information one can find on almost anyone these days with just a few mouse clicks is amazing. You may have had people flaming you or saying terrible things about you online and not even know it. Semi-anonymous posts may say very deflamatory things. If you are an avid blogger, play around on FaceBook or MySpace, etc. it might even be possible for someone to figure out your itinerary. And even if your name is a fairly common one, someone might not be sure that something stupid can be attributed to you, but why take the chance.
Unlike that phoney threat that followed you throughout school about something going on your permanent record, the internet is a huge depository for all sorts of information. In fact, it’s said that more information will be created in 2010 than in all history up until then. And much of that information can be attributed to the internet.
It can affect you getting into the right school, getting a job or perhaps even finding a mate.
Beyond all of this personal sense of branding, the whole world of online reputation management for business large and small, products and services, everything we consume, talk about and think about it is affected by how it is being perceived on the internet.
Recently I had a small town shop keeper tell me that her busness was down and directly attributed to a negative comment left by someone in Yelp. She was in week 6 of trying to undo the damage. 6 weeks is long enough for a business to go broke in some places.
I’m lucky enough to have the name J.S. Gilbert, and apparently among the small gaggle of J.S Gilbert’s in this world I tend to take top position. I wonder if either the Dr. J.S. Gilbert or leading Vulcanologist, J.S. Gilbert have ever had somebody contact them mistaking them for an advertising guy or voiceover talent. It’s pretty doubtful, just as I’ve never had anyone call me and ask me to come and identify some igneous rock or consult on the proper way to treat ovarian cysts. There is however one J.S. Gilbert that pops up from time to time who may get mistaken for me. He’s a youngster and apparently only uses the “J.S.” for his bylines in some small newspaper. It could be worse, he could be a mass murderer. Since he’s only been a “J.S.” for a few years, it would be nice of him to drop the moniker, since I’ve been writing since the dawn of time. However, he refuses. I’ll just have to figure out a way to get the bill collectors on his scent instead of mine and that should do the trick.
Since this blog hasn’t been very handy in giving you any concrete information, I’ll give you a bunch of links to get some more information and actually see how you’re doing in the online rep game.
First stop is the Google Grader. It’s a seperate part of Brand Yourself, whihc offers an 8 day free trial. Even if you don’t go for their subscription services, there’s tons of interesting and useful information http://brand-yourself.com/features/google
There’s BackType at http://www.backtype.com/ This site will run revelance on any URL as it pertains to Twitter and other social media.
Also www.Trackur.com, which is predominantly a paid site that starts around $15 a month, but does have a free version.
For $1 per month, Brands Eye will help the little guy find out who is saying what, although the packages go up an I’m guessing the $1 doesn’t get you that much. You can check them out at http://www.brandseye.com/brandseye-blogger;jsessionid=6F90A9E0BBD8904518187B441482D35B.sybaris_jboss
KeoTag allows you to check in a number of places on keywords, names, etc. http://keotag.com/
Here’s something called Reputation Monitor. http://www.strategicprofits.com/tools/reputation-monitor/
And remember, if you can’t say anything nice, somebody will no doubt find it on the internet and hold it against you forever.
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