Don’t Be Paranoid about your Online Reputation – Make it Better

Last week I made fun of the media hysteria about college grads who might lose a dream job because of some stupid things from their college days that haunt them online.

This week, let’s look at the impact of your online presence, and what you should do about it.

Photos, videos, web pages, blog comments and other online evidence written by or about you can potentially come back to haunt you. Conversely, your online presence can lead to opportunities that you would never know about by staying safe and anonymous.

The first thing you have to realize is that online information about you doesn’t come prepackaged, with an explanation. The tongue-in-cheek comment about tying explosives to your body if you have to go to another family dinner may be the only information a border guard has available when your name randomly pops up for more thorough examination. Not everyone can see the tongue in your cheek.

Another possible negative repercussion is a prospective employer doing a name search on you or your easily-found pseudonym (ie. if it’s part of your e-mail address) when reviewing your resume. If the result brings up embarrassing photos or comments that could be perceived to be racist, sexist or any other form of unacceptable public behaviour, your resume could quietly disappear out of the “interview” pile.

So maybe you should take a look at what your online profile looks like.

Tom Drugan suggests six steps to cleansing your online reputation in a downloadable guide. He actually has some pretty good advice, beginning with several vanity searches for your name.

After going through the (straightforward) methods for getting some of your youthful excesses deleted or filtered so that only friends and family can view them, he talks about building some positive online impressions.

Don’t lose sleep over some poorly worded comments you made once about a rival in an online debate. Put some effort into creating a more positive image. Whether it’s your own website, a popular blog, or the site of an organization you volunteered for, it’s fairly easy to generate some search results for your name that put you in a good light.

And there’s no reason to fake it. If you know the kind of work you want to do, find some thought leaders in that field – people you look up to. Make an online connection with them by commenting on their blog, or commenting about them on a site that allows comments.

Better yet, go do something worth talking about in your field, and find a way to raise awareness about it, without shouting about how fantastic you are. Publish some photos of an event you attended that relates to whatever work you hope to be doing.

Or, set about becoming a commentator on your field through your own blog, a community news site, or a social media site that offers a venue for people with initiative.

A side benefit of making an effort to create a positive online impression is that it can put you in touch with people you would never get a chance to meet firing resumes to human resources offices.

If your approach to protecting your reputation is totally defensive, you will end up being invisible, or very boring. It’s much better to try to carve out a positive online profile.

We’ll save the rest of our tips on shameless self-promotion for another day.

Update:  A couple of posts that touch on the student online reputation issue, in case you’re not totally sick of it.  Jane May Online Reputation,  Smogger Social Media Blog, Personal Reputation Management – Saving Face with Social Media Sites.
Tags: online reputation, damage, job hunting, self promotion, image, search