Ways to Secure and Protect Your Online Reputation
In this day and age, most people have an “online reputation”. This reputation is based on online profiles, tagged photos, Blog Comments, Articles, Reviews, and many other sources. Managing your online reputation is crucial when it comes to future employment, partnerships, or any other social aspect of your life.
Everybody is watching! Protecting your online reputation is crucial at this time in our world. Have no fear; there are some things you can do to make sure your online reputation remains untarnished, and even some things you can do to fix a blemish if it has occured.
Secure All of Your Accounts
Securing any accounts you sign up for online is just a good idea. Using strong passwords and difficult security questions (if available) is the best way to secure your accounts. Stay away from using easy passwords (ie. 123456) and keep away from passwords that use your birthday or some other easily retrievable information.
Be Aware of Your Online Identity
Make sure that you Google yourself often to see what information about you is available, and more importantly what has changed. Also, you may want to check popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter to see what others are saying about you. Google search doesn’t necessarily find everything.
Keep Your Profile Professional
Back in the day, you wouldn’t put pictures of you being drunk or dialogue of you swearing into the phone book! Using social media is not any different as it pertains to the aspect of being in the public eye. The worst thing you can do is create your own problem by embarrassing yourself through improper use of social media and the internet. Think about everything you post online, and ask yourself: “Is this ever going to come back to haunt me?” If the answer is no, then post away! If it is yes, then maybe you might want to not post the comment, or you might at least want to revise your post so It is more appropriate.
Damage Control
Everybody is young once, and it is possible that certain posts about you may have seemed good at one point in time, but is now scaring off employers. If you are one of these unfortunate people, then there are a few things you can do to try and hopefully remove the damage done to your online identity.
Remove the Offending Information
This is the best and most obvious solution to the problem. If you have posted them yourself, then it should be simple to remove your old posts. Even though some posts are never completely erased (Facebook doesn’t get rid of anything) this should at least remove them from your profile and in time, Google search. If your bad post/picture is posted by another person, just ask them to remove it. More often than not they will if you ask nicely.
Drown Out the Bad Information
If for some reason you can’t remove the bad information, then your next option should be to surround that piece of information with good information. Think about it! When you look at a product or service, and see one bad review in a sea of positive ones, unless you’re a pessimist at heart then most likely you will ignore the bad review and believe the good. Take this approach when it comes to “drowning out” the bad information.
Don’t Create Any More
As a good practice from the beginning and a last resort option for damage control, just don’t allow these type mistakes to happen again. Caught drunk on camera? Stop getting drunk in public! Eventually (over a span of years), your posts will fade into the oblivion of the web. This is a very long process and is the only last resort if you cannot find a more acceptable solution.
In the end the best practice is to just live your life online like you would in the physical world. Treat everyone with respect, and don’t act unprofessional. If you stick with this approach then this article will never be any use to you, and nothing would make me happier!
