Building an online reputation

Credit: Leon Gettler for The Age

How often do you Google yourself? In this day and age, online reputation is everything. Actually, it’s become quite normal for me to meet people I’ve never met me before who have already sussed me out online. It’s not just because I am a journalist. Friends from other industries tell me the same thing has happened to them. And in an era when recruiters are vetting candidates by checking them on Google, a good online reputation can open doors. Even more so when you consider this New York Times report that 45% of employers in the US are using social networks, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, to screen job candidates and that a survey of 2667 managers and human resource workers, found that one in three employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content they discovered on a social networking site. In other words, a bad reputation, including some of the more stupid things you’ve posted, can damage your career prospects. Unless of course it’s picked up by the kind of company or industry that wants to employ types who are on edge all the time.

All this is consistent with the way technology has intruded into our privacy, something I blogged on here. There is a profound and fascinating tension here: we all want privacy but many people are now creating shadows of themselves online. And in many cases, their career paths demand nothing less. Still, there’s not much we can do about it. What’s the best way of protecting your online reputation?

Journalist Helen Coster says self-googling is not an act of narcissism. It’s about career management and working out how the world sees you. “Google ranks content according to relevance - how closely it resembles the search term - and popularity - how many other sites are linking to it. If your name is mentioned in a police blotter or jilted lover's blog post, let alone a negative article in The Wall Street Journal, you have very little chance of getting that content removed from the web. Google won't remove content just because you ask it to. Your best option is to overwhelm the bad content with the good, so that the embarrassing links are less likely to rank high.”

To crank up your online presence, she suggests starting out with blogs and social networking sites although she advises not to overdo it on Twitter as some prospective employers might question your commitment to work.

In The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Levit suggests building up a strong Google presence by creating a LinkedIn profile, going on Twitter, commenting on blogs and incorporating some key words along the way and creating the kind of content that other sites might reference. Consider setting up your own web site. It’s not that expensive if you know where to look and what to do. As for the negative stuff, Levit suggests the obvious: just don’t produce stuff that would get a negative response and generate material that would draw positive attention to yourself.

If you do go down the social networking route, experts give one good word of advice: choose your networks carefully. It’s better to connect with people you know or who you’ve met because if a recruiter chooses to contact one of your connections to ask about you, it’s better that person is someone you know and trust. Using social networks for career purposes is more about quality than quantity.

How often do you Google yourself? What have you found? How important is online reputation? Has it helped you get work or business? And how do you manage the stuff that gets put out there?