After chatting with Adam over a week ago about this blog, it has finally taken shape driven partially by the fact that a lovely friend/client David Wood is getting national media exposure thanks to his fabulous out of the box idea, the  Press release and eBay advert I wrote for him, in order to help him find a job. In light of this I thought that I had better get this post done  as it is very fitting and highlights alot about communicating, personal branding and online reputation.

In the last few days I have been watching more and more people around me talk, interact and post their stuff in many different forms on the web. In particular the social media arena. This all resonates with me as an NLP fundi and my company after all is about communication, branding and marketing in the social media world. I tend to read peoples language patterns and see things that other people have not noticed where their ‘communication’ is concerned and there is one thing that needs to be addressed quite seriously: Your online Reputation management (ORM).

What will happen to the web in the next 5 years or so will show you that YOUR online reputation and personal branding is out there forever. What is this I hear you say, well let me give you a very brief outline about ORM. This article can be found on Wikipedia and is the most comprehensive and the simplest outline of it.

“Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the act of monitoring, addressing or mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) or mentions in online media and Web sphere content. ORM primarily involves tracking what is written about a client on the Internet, then utilizing sophisticated online and offline techniques in promoting positive and neutral content, while at the same time pushing down those links the sponsor (in most cases business or individuals) may not want to show when their name is searched.

Rather than working to raise link results with a particular search term in order to (ostensibly) generate more commerce or page views, the goal of ORM is to push already highly-ranked negative posts off the results pages so that they are seen by fewer people, thus creating a more positive results environment for the sponsor of the effort. ORM is the specialization in prevention and repair of online reputation threats, and has less to do with directly promoting businesses.

The term arose from a recognition of the importance that influencing how someone or something is perceived based on an internet search has to a business. As the amount of user-generated content on the internet grew, it began to affect internet search results more meaningfully, and the desire to change those results naturally followed.”

(Link to the full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_reputation_management)

Now, there are plenty of tools out there to counteract anything negative about you, but is this the real you then? Shouldn’t you be managing this at a base level of communication to ensure that what you see is actually who you are and what  you are communicating out is the good, positive side of you and using anything negative that gets said as an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, correct it or deal with it.

In NLP there is a great line that says: There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. In other words, use the feedback as a positive tool.

I love to use the analogy of human life where social media and reputation is concerned. I see it like a mirror image of who we are when you take the technology away.

Imagine this real life scenario:

You walk into a bar to meet friends, you start chatting and enjoying your evening, occasionally other people walk over who are friends of friends and you get introduced. The conversations gain momentum and the excitement of meeting all these people bubbles all around. Then all of a sudden somebody says something you don’t agree with and you get angry, you are rude to the person and everybody gets upset with you. The most of them leave. That little incident will get talked about to various other people about what an aggressive angry person you are and so your personal reputation in that particular circle is damaged. It is locked into their unconscious forever, if anyone mentions your name again, that memory is retrieved instantly and a bad picture pops back into their minds. Not a pleasant picture is it??

NOW.. the internet and any form of online communication takes this a step further, it is stored forever. Yes.. I said FOREVER. The tools that people use to manage this more often than not it is implemented incorrectly and they don’t work fast enough to counteract it or in an average person case, they don’t have funds to purchase such tools. There are also monitoring tools that can bypass this and they capture information in a nano second! A brilliant example of this was Russell Brand tweeting a picture of Katy Perry first thing in the morning. A screen shot was captured within seconds of it hitting the net. It went viral in a few hours, even though the tweet was only up for a very short time. To prove this point, I give you a link to just one the articles that was run about it:

http://www.inquisitr.com/94352/katy-perry-no-makeup/

If you search it, it still brings up a lot of articles on it. I have to admire them in a sense as there doesn’t seem to be any online reputation software cleaning up after them. It is who they are and they are people too. In retrospect considering their position in society as celebrities somebody should be guiding them as to the damage they do their reputations sending out stuff like that.

In the future and when we achieve Web 4.0 status everything you put out there will influence people around you and your life will not be a secret in any way if you interact on the internet. A lot of this is already happening although it has yet to be a norm. A good example is the recruitment industry where in a few years a possible employer will profile you off the internet before an interview. A few do it already, although when it reaches its peak, you won’t have a choice but to be found.

My suggestion is: Search yourself on Google or any other platform.. are you there? How do you look? If you aren’t at this point being seen and you do not come up in any search results, not even for your facebook page, may I congratulate you for having brilliant security ‘saviness’! In the future, it won’t be so easy, make sure you are putting out the BEST of you now because people around you will want that information on a daily basis, you won’t really be able to do anything without a good online presence.

Dave’s online presence is in the spotlight now and this will be captured forever. Just Google him – David Wood Ebay – to see for yourselves!  Congrats Dave! I hope you find that dream job!