Do a digital clean-up and protect your reputation online

Have you checked your online profile? Prospective employers almost certainly will. Enter the ‘Reputation Managers’, digital clean-up crews that bury negative search results. Lisa Twomey reports

PEOPLE’s private information is a hot commodity these days, so much so that it has been called the new oil. Virtually every detail of our personal information, our age, address, even income can be available online. With technology such as facial recognition, we can be tagged and identified without even knowing it.

Everything that is posted about us online, whether by ourselves or by someone else, can be preserved. Negative reviews of a business can dominate search results. An embarrassing photo from a drunken Christmas party five years ago or a late night Twitter rant can surface … it is hardly going to make front-page news, but if someone wants to find it they can.

All of these things are being woven together to paint a profile of us online, and when people search our name or business, the results they find define our online reputation. This is something that can work for us, or work against us, and something we may have little control over.

Protecting and branding our online reputations has become big business for a new breed of hybrid technology/public relations companies called online reputation managers. They act like a digital clean up crew, burying negative search results about you or your business, and making sure that what you want to see about yourself online is what appears when people search for you.

Companies such as Reputation.com have seen their business explode over the past few years. “Never before in human history has so much information about each of us been so ripe for the taking,” says Richard Harrison, the UK head of the California-based company.

Online reputation management is not a service reserved for highflying CEOs or celebrities with a past to hide. They help a wide array of clients. “Our technologies support Global 2000 companies to small local restaurants. We help influential people like business leaders and celebrities, as well as college students, doctors and parents,” says Harrison.

It is not only about cleaning up the negative either. A positive online reputation can create significant opportunities for you. Some companies accept job applications direct from your LinkedIn account, so making sure your online profile comes across as positive and professional is more important than ever.

Many companies in the US now require their hiring personnel to search your name, and they can form opinions of you based solely on how you present yourself, or your business, online. In fact, a 2009 study for Microsoft found that 70% of the US hiring personnel surveyed said they rejected candidates based on information they found online. On the flip side, 85% said a positive online reputation influenced their hiring decision to some degree.

Alternatively, if a search on your name reveals little, then this can also be indicative that you are not using your online reputation to your best advantage. “The thundering silence you might hear is your best indication that your digital profile isn’t doing the work it should,” Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik told financial services company LearnVest last month.

The importance of posting goal-driven content to our online profiles is clear. “It’s important to establish yourself online; to think about how you want to be perceived, and to only share content that supports that goal. For example, you may be looking for a job as an electrical engineer — but if everything that shows up highlights your obsession with Downton Abbey, that doesn’t help you communicate credibility and experience,” Richard Harrison explains.

So, should even the most tame of online sharers be concerned? According to Ivana Taylor of DIYMarketers.com it is important for the average person, as well as the business owner, to create and own their social media profile.

“People forget that the online world is a giant forever billboard. And that makes it essential for people to control their names and reputations. They think that if they don’t participate online, they shouldn’t have media profiles. This is not true,” she says.

“You don’t have to live online or participate in social media. But understand that there are other people out there who do — and they don’t always have your best interests at heart.”

So what types of problems are people looking to clean up? Reputation.com sees people who have problems with their search results, such as a person whose ex-spouse writes a nasty blog that shows up prominently.

According to Harrison, new research suggests that almost 70% of people never look past the first four search results. “This can be debilitating, especially if you think of all the contexts people search for other people — checking out a date, looking at a job candidate, deciding whether to rent to someone,” he says.

The cost of all this digital clean up, or spruce up, can range from a little to a lot. Reputation.com starts at a few euro a month for a simple privacy service, to a few thousand for a more complex ‘Reputation Defender’ service. A basic package from the New Jersey-based company, Integrity Defenders, starts at just under €500, to clear unwanted information from the first page of search results on your name of business, for one search phrase. There are also many free services from reputation companies that can help you do a little DIY safeguarding of your own, such as BrandYourself.com.

So what can the average person do to gain control of their online reputation? Ivana Taylor’s top three tips are to buy the domain name for your own name and your children’s, especially if you can get the .com and .net versions. She also recommends creating a full social media profile on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and perhaps Pinterest, as they are currently the largest spaces where people will look to find you or attack you. She also says it is important to create a Google Alert to make sure you are notified when someone mentions you online.

Fertik echoes the importance of setting up a Google Alert to safeguard your online reputation, and advises not over-sharing on social media.

His company offers four free privacy protection tools that can help you control your online reputation and privacy. uProtect It encrypts your Facebook messages, while Privacy Check helps you find out who has your personal data. For ultimate control over your Facebook privacy, Reputation.com recommends combining uProtect.it with their other free app Privacy Defender.