Online Reputation: Keep or Delete?

There's a great post this afternoon by my colleague Carolyn Elefant about online reputation and a discussion making the rounds of the Internet. The story from the Seattle Times reports on a former college student at Seattle Pacific University who is trying to remove a 10-year-old college newspaper story from the Internet. The 1998 story reported on an alleged assault by the student but he was never charged. To add insult to injury, he was quoted in the student newspaper and made some offensive remarks.  The former student turned lawyer says his personal and professional reputation have been tarnished and that he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to get the information removed because the student newspaper's editor is clinging to a First Amendment argument.

Elefant's post and others like it refer to this "grey area" of the Internet, as more and more personal information is spread around the Web year after year. Some of it we control --like the stuff we post on Facebook and other websites -- and other information we don't control, like newspaper articles that may not be favorable to a person or business.

Have you Googled yourself or your company today?  For better or worse, the Internet now functions as a database of our life from the mid 1990s to the present. With social networking sites, vast public records online,  Google, webcams and data mining technology that keeps improving every year, we can no longer expect our lives to remain private or anonymous.

Therefore, anyone concerned about their online reputation must be proactive. Check your name and company in blogs (using sites like Technorati), in news stories and on other websites. Comment when you can online to correct rumors and inaccuracies, particularly when it's a media website. Finally, one of the best ways to counter negative information about you on the Internet and to exert better control over your reputation is to start your own personal or business blog to set the record straight.

Of course, no one may read your blog but that's not the point here. With your own blog (and Facebook profile, for example), you can at least begin to push some of the negative search results down and bring more of the positive search results closer to the top.

So even if you can't erase your personal or professional history, you can revise it regularly and hope for the best.

Comments

[Joshua Fruchter]

Rich - hi, excellent points. Coincidentally, I recently spoke about this exact topic at a recent LMA workshop in Philadelphia. I hadn't see your post before I presented or I would have mentioned the story to which you refer.

Here's a link to the followup post on our blog with the Powerpoint slides from the presentation converted to Flash:

http://www.lawyercasting.com/2008/11/flash-powerpoint-slides-from-lma-quickstart-presentation-on-managing-your-law-firms-online-reputation.html

Thought you might find the slides interesting. Anyway, I am going to link to your post in a followup post on our blog about the issue of online reputation.

Since you're in New York City, maybe we can also meet up at some point to discuss this topic. Basically, I find it fascinating how Google is no longer just a search engine, but a reputation engine (see slides for source for that distinction).

May