Online Reputation

Everything you say and do online can have impact on your online reputation. You might be surprised at just how much information on you, can impact how you look and how you are perceived as a person and a professional.

Why should you care ?!

Online reputation matters, and this is couple of facts why you should care about your online reputation:

• Future Jobs: 78% of recruiters check search engines to find out more about potential employees.
• Social Media Sites (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs,..) are checked by 63% of recruiters.
• Current Job: Your digital life is a mirror of your professional success, even internally. Digital behavior is followed by employers, and abusing it can be bad for you.
• Abusing: 8% of companies have fired someone for abusing social media.

Always ask yourself, “How would I feel if my boss, parents, grandmother, and spouse saw this piece?” Chances are, they probably will see it

What should you do about it?!

Now that you know how important your online reputation is. This is how can you start improving your online reputation:

• Avoid poor spelling and grammar.
• Share things that are fun and productive. Avoid posting while you are in bad mood, and always think before you click.
• If you can, do not share your full birth birth dates, addresses, phone number or other personal information.
• Monitor postings and tags of your image on social media; use image search if possible.
• Ask others to remove photos or unflattering mentions of you from social sites.
• Search your self and see what is coming back. Are you happy about the outcomes? try to improve it
• Be proactive. Not having online presence is sometime equal to having bad one. So get online and build your strong and proactive digital image.
• Modify privacy settings on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ensure that only friends with whom you don’t mind sharing your personal or photos will have access to that information.
• If you don’t want your boss or coworkers to see your profile, change your privacy settings to reflect that.
• Take responsibility for the images, information, stories, and videos that you share online. Your friends, followers, and family expect this, just as you expect it of them.

“According to Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, personal pages on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all rank highly in Google searches. LinkedIn especially sends a positive message to potential employers, since it’s widely viewed as a highly professional network. Beal says that 78% of recruiters use search engines in their research when they screen new candidates. 35% of recruiters say they have eliminated a candidate because of something they found on the Web“

Google yourself

The best way to see how you are represented on the digital world is to simply google yourself. You will be amazed where your name is appearing, and what pictures of you are available online. Assume that you are about to hire yourself, do you look what you are seeing so far?.

How to protect your online reputation poster

I found this great blog post talking about online reputation, and they have a nice poster showing how online reputation can be protected.