Your Online Reputation: How Are You Being
Judged by Other People?
Blog Text
Introduction
You’re really upset at someone. What
do you do? You pick up your mobile device, get on social media, and vent
bigtime! In your anger you call the person names, perhaps use racial slurs, and
maybe even make threatening remarks. Now you feel somewhat better because you
were able to get it off your chest. Over time, the emotions fade, and all is
forgotten.
It’s now a few years later and you are
trying to get your perfect job. You are well qualified, have a great resume and
cover letter, and even have a networking contact at the company. You wait and
wait, but never hear anything back from the company. You are frustrated and
angry. You pick up your mobile device, get on social media and vent bigtime!
You talk about what a lousy company it is and what terrible people work there.
Perhaps you call people out by name, and maybe even make threatening remarks.
Now you feel somewhat better because you were able to get it off your chest.
Over time, the emotions fade, and all is forgotten.
Your feelings and emotions are real,
and it is healthy to express them. However, expressing them negatively online
can destroy your reputation.
The meaning and
importance of reputation
Marriam Webster defines reputation as
“overall quality or character as seen or judged by people in
general.”
Judging yourself
and why it is important
Please watch this video:
Assuming you don’t know the woman, how
do you feel about her based on this video? Can she really be that insensitive
and racist? What do you think her rant says about her? Based on what you see,
would you want this woman working for you? Was her rant justified? After all, wasn’t she just expressing her emotions, in this case captured in a video?
Benjamin Franklin
said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad
one to lose it.”
What do your emotional rants say about
you? How do you assess the way they portray you, especially to people who don’t
know you? After all, weren’t you just expressing your emotions; in your case in
written form?
In life you have
probably built a good reputation. Those who know you best know your true
nature. What about online? How are you being “judged by people in general?”
Why should you
care about how people are judging you based on what you post on social media?
In 2018, Career
Builder published the results of a survey which revealed that:
1. More than half of employers have found content on social media that
caused them NOT to hire a candidate.
2. Seven in ten employers (70 percent) use social networking sites to
research job candidates during hiring process.
3. Nearly half of employers (48 percent) check up on current employees on
social media.
4. A third of employers (34 percent) have reprimanded or fired an employee
based on content found online.
You might think that what you post on
social media is none of their business. But remember, what you put out in
cyberspace is in the public domain for virtually anyone to see at any time.
Writing for the MIT Sloan Management
Review, Gerald Kane (2015) stated:
Information placed online often takes on a life of its own. When I attended business school in the late 1990s, the rule of thumb was to never put anything in an email that you wouldn't want your spouse or your boss to see. Today, we admonish both employees and children alike to take great care about what they put online, because it is not easily controllable once in cyberspace and may be online forever. Perhaps the adage should be revised in light of current capabilities - never put anything online that you wouldn't want you future spouse or future boss to see.
Information placed online often takes on a life of its own. When I attended business school in the late 1990s, the rule of thumb was to never put anything in an email that you wouldn't want your spouse or your boss to see. Today, we admonish both employees and children alike to take great care about what they put online, because it is not easily controllable once in cyberspace and may be online forever. Perhaps the adage should be revised in light of current capabilities - never put anything online that you wouldn't want you future spouse or future boss to see.
You wondered why you never heard back
from that employer with the perfect job. Perhaps your online reputation
preceded you and caused you to be screened out.
The Society of Human Resource Management
provides examples how people damaged their online
reputations and the consequences:
Remember her?
People Magazine provides other
examples:
Repairing the
damage
Writing for
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Susannah Snider (2014) suggests taking the
following steps to repair your online reputation:
1. Assess the damage by Googling yourself: “Googling yourself isn’t narcissistic. It’s necessary. If you track your digital trail with a quick online search, you may be surprised by the depth and breadth of information available about you.”
2.
Ensure
the web has good content about you: “The joke in the online-reputation biz goes
like this: Where do you bury a dead body? On the third page of Google. Few
surfers ever get that far, so if there’s an unprofessional post that you can’t
delete, grab a shovel and start
digging.” The intent is to ensure there is positive content on the web: “Build
a Web site using a free template… Open LinkedIn and professional Twitter
accounts and a Facebook page, and spend a few minutes every week keeping them
active. If you want to differentiate yourself from someone with the same name,
add a middle initial to your online presence. Put a Google Alert on your name
at www.google.com/alerts to track online mentions.
3.
Lastly:
“If you’re a rare case with an online reputation problem that won’t stay six
feet under, professional help might be the only solution. That’s true in cases
in which your profile is dominated
by unflattering news stories, bad client reviews, details of a lawsuit or negative Web sites targeting you (if
your name is in the URL, such sites will rank especially
high on Google).”
Allan Hoffman of Monster.com
suggests similar steps:
1.
Scope
out the Damage - First,
determine what damaging information exists. Enter your name at Google, MSN and
Yahoo and see what turns up in the first four or five pages of results.
Anything troubling? Mark it for action. Then sign up for the alerts available
at spots like Google Alerts;
when information about you is added or updated, you’ll find out via email.
2.
Bury
It - So you did something stupid
-- maybe a month ago, maybe a decade ago. Now you want to make sure no one
finds that record of your stupidity. Scott Allen, coauthor of The Virtual Handshake:
Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, advocates burying the bad with the good. That means creating new content
about yourself, such as a blog or Web site. “It’s not that you can make the
stuff disappear,” he says. “It’s that you make so much more good stuff that you
can’t find the bad stuff.”
3.
Request
Removal - If you believe you
have a strong case to have material removed, don’t come out swinging. “That can
cause more bad PR for you,” Allen says. Instead, take a soft stance: Explain
your reasons for wanting the material removed
and assume the owner of the site (or the owner’s representative) is reasonable
and will listen. If the information is inaccurate, defamatory or libelous,
point that out.
Just be sure to learn as much as possible about the site before making your move. If you’re dealing with an in-your-face blog, sending an email to the blogger requesting that something about you be removed can backfire. Bloggers have been known to post those emails, so be aware that your request could end up casting more unfavorable attention on you.
As for search engines, don’t bother. You won’t have any luck asking them to rig their results in your favor.
Just be sure to learn as much as possible about the site before making your move. If you’re dealing with an in-your-face blog, sending an email to the blogger requesting that something about you be removed can backfire. Bloggers have been known to post those emails, so be aware that your request could end up casting more unfavorable attention on you.
As for search engines, don’t bother. You won’t have any luck asking them to rig their results in your favor.
4.
Hire
a Service - A growing number of
services can help you manage or clean up your online reputation.
Start smart
There is a
saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” You can repair a
damaged online reputation, but it can take a significant amount of time and
effort. The best thing is to avoid establishing a negative reputation in the
first place.
Since children
have access to social media, building a positive online reputation needs to start
early in life.
The Huffington Post states, “The following common-sense
precautions must be taught before the child enters any social media site, to
protect her against the subtle dangers that lurk.”
1.
Password protection: The teen must be
taught to zealously guard his/her password. It is very easy for a teen to share
her password with a supposed best friend, who may not be careful with it.
2.
Privacy setting: It is best if the
teen chooses a privacy setting that excludes strangers while allowing a trusted
set of people in.
3.
Pruning the contact list: While three
and four digit numbers [hundred and thousand] of contacts on social media sites
may give the teen a sense of importance and popularity, the list can become
dangerously unwieldy.
4.
Unusual message: If a message sounds
unusual from a contact, it probably is. It is essential to confirm with the
contact before responding or acting on the unusual message even from someone
known.
5.
URL/email authentication: The teen
must be taught to check the URL before signing up into any service.
6.
[sic] Updation of security software:
This is self-explanatory. All malware/virus detection software must be updated
periodically to catch hackers before they hack.
7.
Always
consider the WWGS rule: “The teen must be
informed of the permanence of information posted on social media sites. They
must be taught to think twice before posting anything online. “What Will
Grandma Say” is good rule to remember for social media postings.”
If you are about to post something you wouldn’t want Grandma to
see, don’t post it.
Works Cited
Bell, June (2018). Firing for Online Behavior: What happens online
may not stay online. When is
it appropriate to discipline employees for past and
present posts? Society for Human
Resource
Management, August 24, 2018. Retrieved from
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0918/pages/
firing-for-online-behavior-.aspx
Hoffman,
Allan. How to Clean Up Your Online Reputation. Monster Worldwide Inc. RetrievedFrom https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/Clean-Up-Your-Online-
Reputation
Kane, Gerald C. (2015). Digital transparency and Permanence: How can enterprises balance the
good and the bad of digital transparency? MIT Sloan Management Review, Big Idea:
Social Business Blog, October 6, 2015. Retrieved from
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/digital-transparency-and-permanence/
Price, Lydia (2016). 20 Tales of
Employees Who Were Fired Because of Social Media Posts:
These
people should have thought a little harder before updating their status.
People,
July
8, 2016. Retrieved from https://people.com/celebrity/employees-who-were-fired-
because-of-social-media-posts/
Ramasubbu, Suren (2017). Privacy and Teens in Social Media.
Huffpost.com, March 3, 2017.
Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/privacy-and-teens-in-social-media_
b_58b92d56e4b0fa65b844b1de
Snider, Susannah (2014). Fix Your Online
Reputation: You can probably polish your profile
yourself.
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, November 2014. Retrieved from
https://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T057-C000-S002-fix-your-online-
reputation.html
Comments
Post a Comment