A recent Pew Research Center study showed us that 57% of adults have entered their own name into a search engine. As far as I'm concerned, the remaining 43% need to do so immediately. It is not a matter of curiosity, it is a matter of maintaining your reputation.
There is so much personal information available digitally about us these days. In many cases, this is not information we want to share with the world. So if you haven't Googled yourself lately, you don't even know if there is negative information about you online. 21st century reputation management weighs heavily on the Internet. In order to prevent your reputation from being tarnished, the first step is to identify the information about you that is available.
Hopefully no one is talking trash about you online, but what do you do if you Google yourself and find some bad publicity? The idea is to push anything negative down the search results and off the first page. The best way to do so is to create as many personal social media profiles as you can. By creating profiles on websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and PeoplePond, these profiles can show up on search results for your name and push down the trash talk. One thing to remember, however, is to fill out your profiles completely. Take advantage of all the space you are allotted and your profiles will be more likely to show at the top of the results.
