10 Ways to Manage Your Online Social Media Reputation

The Internet has made our personal and professional lives very transparent. We now live in the fishbowl. Despite what many will argue, your privacy is no longer fully in your control. Your online identity is also something that others can control, and you need to do your best to manage it. Managing your online reputation and protecting it is equivalent to marketing your personal brand, YOU.

A colleague of mine is an adjunct professor of writing and communications at Boston University. He’s very intelligent and excellent at what he does. However if you were to look up his name on the web you would find some pretty horrible commentary on a professor ratings site from some of his former students, many of which flunked out of his class.

He of course, was devastated. I would be too. When awful things about you show up on the first page of search, that’s nothing to take lightly. Especially if you are submitting applications for jobs, schools, running for office or going out on date for that matter. Anyone who Googles you then sees the negativity.

Recently I was contacted by a consultant who specializes in marketing of consultants. OK, I’m listening. So I get the pitch and it sounded like a great deal. We hashed out all the terms and conditions, I checked her references and was ready to write a check. Then my security instinct kicked in. As soon as money is to leave my bank account and head towards another, I begin to think differently, its how I’m wired.  I did a search online of this consultant and the company she works for before I sent the check.

Immediately on the first page of search, reports from the Better Business Bureau, Complaints Board and the dreaded RipoffReport show up. There was also a blog set up by one very upset customer who felt slighted by this company. The blog was started over a year ago and he still contributes to it.  This company had 16 registered complaints with the BBB and only 10 were solved. Based on my research and what I had originally thought was a to good to be true offer in the first place, I chose not to do business with this company.

I know that companies with high volume and lots of customers are bound to upset someone. So there is certainly room for error. If you have a million clients and 1500 complaints, you’re doing pretty well.  Frankly, as a professional speaker I know that in most presentations I give that 5 percent of the room will absolutely loath me. They may not like my Boston accent, or I look like an ex-husband, or the bully who tortured them in school or simply because I’m breathing. But 95% want me to come back and teach them more. So you can’t please everyone.

Left unattended, the wild wild web and “search” is a relatively uncontrollable aspect of your reputation, unless of course you make and attempt to control it.