March 29th, 2009
by Anne Orfila
Have you googled yourself or your organization lately? Do it now and find out what your “web-utation” is! Web-utation, more commonly known as your web reputation, is very important these days. Most of us find ourselves googling everything from restaurants to paint stores to elementary schools for more information on them. Unfortunately Google doesn’t index items based on truth and fairness and therefore we are exposed to many opinions from all sorts of sources. And we know in our heart-of-hearts that Google isn’t the Bible, still it makes it hard to try a new restaurant that has received more bad reviews than good ones. Unfortunately the same goes for a person. Someone who is seeking a job may have an impressive resume and awesome references, but the employer may do a Google search on that person and if some questionable pictures or content comes up, that may cost that person the job even before the interview! Sure you can hire companies to clean up your web-utation, or atleast they can create favorable websites about you or your organization that are more search-friendly, hence placing a positive piece about you or your organization in higher search ranking than something negative, but that does take time and money. The best prescription for keeping your web-utation clean is prevention (note to parents: wise to share this part with your pre-teen and teen age children!)
Some tips from Micheal Fertik, of ReputationDefender, to keep your web-utation in tact:
- Know what people are saying about you or your organization: Look yourself, or your organization, up on major search engines.
- What you think is funny in your your state of drunkenness, or youth, (or both!) may not be in funny in five years, ten years, twenty years (or even the next day): Think about your actions and know that once a picture is posted on the internet, it can live there forever!
- Posting something to cyberspace means everyone has access to it: Once a picture is out there, you have no control over who posts it to where.
- Think about what you post: What you post on your website, blog, Facebook or Twitter will live in cyberspace forever. Think about what you want to share with your friends as you may be sharing it with the world (or a future employer, customer, spouse, mother-in-law) too!
The internet offers so many fun, enjoyable ways to reach out to other people, just remember to be smart about what you say and how you say it, so your web-utation won’t come back to haunt you!
Web Marketing Therapy Related Links:
- Small Business: SPRING to Life on the Web!
- Manage your online identity
- Wikipedia Can Work for You!
- Web Marketing Obsession – Google Alerts
Emilia Doerr
(March 30th, 2009 at 3:02 pm)
Web-utation. Love it! You should submit your definition to MarketingProfs Addictionary! http://words.marketingprofs.com/
Web Marketing Therapy » Blog Archive » Small Business: SPRING to Life on the Web!
(April 17th, 2009 at 2:40 pm)
[...] * What’s Your Web-utation? (Reputation) [...]