| February 13, 2009 | Posted By: Trevor Wilson | Category: Personal Branding |
With the proliferation of online social networks you have to be extremely careful about what you are posting about yourself online. Not only that, but you also have to watch out for what your friends and coworkers are saying about you. With so many sites that could have such information (like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter), it can be a daunting task to remove all harmful material. But even though this material can be fair game to recruiters, I’m not convinced that all job seekers are following this advice and managing their online reputations.
But that is about to change.
With Olympic golden boy Michael Phelps getting caught up in a drug scandal a few weeks back, it’s become very clear just how negative pictures or press can impact your online image. Now this may be an extreme case (seeing as he is internationally renown), but it doesn’t mean bad press can’t follow you around online.
But according to Jacob at the Personal Branding Blog, all is not lost:
Once you’ve discovered something on the Internet that could lower your chances of getting a job, there are 2 things you can do to make it disappear from the Web:
- Clean it up – remove or have removed any harmful content.
- Drown it out – create positive content that will appear first in search results, pushing any harmful content so far down search results pages that future employers aren’t likely to find it.
This is excellent advice. For most of you, you won’t likely rank highly enough to have your personal problems show up for all to see, but that doesn’t mean that an experienced recruiter won’t be able to find the pictures of you groping Hillary Clinton.
So make sure that you take a good hard look at all of the personal material that is posted about you from a recruiter’s perspective. If you see something that might look offensive, or that could be taken out of context by a stranger, remove it. It might make the difference between an interview and a prolonged job hunt.
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Hi Trevor
I agree that tracking and responding to issues around your online reputation is key. I find the following 9 steps to be a useful guideline in correcting an online brand attack.
I always believe that one needs to approach the situation with humility, thinking you’re too big, busy or powerful to deal with the issue is a sure way to inflame the situation.
I think listening is the next step, not only listening out for the obvious angry customer, but also making use of ORM companies, like BrandsEye, to track what is being said online. This will allow you to deal with the more silent but equally dangerous disgruntled customers.
Always act immediately; the sooner you deal with the situation, the less the negative message will spread. Furthermore you are more likely to get positive press if the situation is quickly dealt with.
True criticism is harder to deal with, but I find providing your side of the story along with a sincere apology goes along way. Then try your hardest to get the story offline, it’s much less likely to spread. If you can’t get the story offline then push it as far down the search engine results as possible. Good SEO can help here.
Throughout the story maintain communication and continue to engage, responding once is unlikely to make it go away keep the conversation going as long as is necessary to correct the issue, otherwise it will simply flare up again and you will have to start from scratch.
Care about the issue, treat every customer like they are the only one and you will go a long way to maintaining a good relationship.
Finally be prepared, online brand attacks can happen anytime. Preparation includes creating credibility online now, so that when you need to fight an online battle later you have something to work with. Also identifying some vulnerable areas may help plan for attacks later on.
Would be great to hear some tips from you, always good to share ORM strategy.
Regards
Tim Shier
MD
BrandsEye
@brandseye