Reputation Management is one of those terms that comes wrapped in association with Image Branding and Strategic Brand Management – a business to business buzzword lumped in with all the rest, hollow, and without substance for the individual. However, the internet is, in many ways, a permanent public searchable record that takes in everyone, shadows each of us with a sort of echo – an immanent library
. Depending on your involvement, the internet will invariably have different layers of information attached to your name, some of which might reflect poorly on you in those first impressions when someone you meet searches you out online. ‘Googling one’self’ is something of an ongoing joke in today’s culture, the insinuation being that it’s a narcissistic behavior, a kind of preening before a digital mirror–I say do it, look yourself up, and if you don’t like what you see, online reputation management techniques can help you revitalize your online presence.
This is a by-product of the changes in the overall functioning space that makes up the internet–if you engage online, you engage in the same vectors and modalities that the rest of the entities out there engage in–and there’s only several maps available to the bulk of the online community. The more common one’s name, the more diffuse one’s presence online. A vast number of people are totally disconnected from the internet, yet traces of their presence still exist in different ways. Becoming aware of one’s online footprint, one’s digital shadow, is the first step in managing that shadow.
There is no way I can change the search engine to radically restructure the results it provides – I can only tweak bits here and there, and each case is different. Why Most SEO’s Can’t Do Reputation Management breaks it down like so:
However, that said, a reputation online is usually not something under fire, experiencing a crisis event… usually some people are googling themselves and discovering some spam-trap has siphoned off personal details from some social networking site they’d signed up for ten years ago, filled with irrelevant and irritating details they’d rather a prospective employer discover down the line. A surprising number of college students awake from a drunken haze to wonder what dating site they signed up for over the weekend, years later to be faced with intimate details of their sex lives ranking above their .edu homepage. To you, (and I know by my statpress reloaded plugin that you’re out there) I say Get a Blog. In a week or less, using just a simple wordpress set-up and your real name, you’ll do yourself plenty of good blanketing out old search engine results, bumping them down the page.