Google Yourself Lately?

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.

A Lawsuit for an Opinionated Tweet

Recently, a Chicago based realty group sued a Twitter user for $50,000 for a single tweet, a tweet about her opinion about their apartments. Now to me, I think this kind of action is pretty serious yet the Twitter user, @abonnen (who’s account is no longer up) only had 20 followers. The message probably didn’t go too far. With this whole lawsuit emerging, the company now has an even more damaging reputation – being a company who are a “sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization. (as quoted by Jeffrey Michael from Horizon Realty Group in the Chicago Sun Times)

The tweet read as follows –


This whole situation had gotten me thinking about the countless tweets I’ve made complaining about companies. I’ve seen other people do it, and gotten responses from the company personally asking if there was something they could help them with to make their experience with the company better. Horizon could have simply told the Twitter user to remove the tweet before going off and suing her, but they didn’t.

I’m all about good reputation management, but I think this situation has gone a bit too far. When it comes to apartments there is always going to be someone saying something bad, so I think the only thing that could be done is to handle the situation on a one on one basis.