Taking your own online temperature

How much of yourself do you share online, and what feels comfortable to you? Do you even know what information is out there with your name on it, and where it has come from?

If you are working online at all, then you at least need a level of personal reputation awareness, and dependent on the line of work you follow, you may need more than this. Any reputation is a mixture of what you do and what other people say about you, and your online reputation can be a magnification of this, and may not be so easy to confine to a small audience.

To start with, google your name and see what comes up, and the level of any issues you may have to tackle. Is there anything that would concern the people that you are trying to reach or impress? While you may be able to ask for some content to be taken down, the best way to overcome any unwelcome content is to replace it with more trafficked content that will be picked up by search engines and that will knock negative content that can’t be deleted further down the rankings.

If you want to manage your online reputation, you need also to address friends and family and how they are using social sites which mention you; you may not yet have set up an account, and when you do you will lock down the approriate privacy settings, but you may first have to help educate those around you to do the same.

Once you have addressed the current situation, you will need to set up new accounts with a plan for how you will use them and what purpose they will serve for you or your business, bearing in mind which ones you want to be purely business-related and which ones personal.

I will look at this in my next blog; if you would like to subscribe and receive this as it comes out, please do so using the subscription form above right.