Have you ever tried to Google yourself and a photo of someone else with your name shows up? It may not seem like a big deal, but when a recent client told me her story, I thought it was worth sharing.
She is a lawyer and she doesn’t have a photo of herself on her social media profiles or her website. The “hard goods,” the degrees and accomplishments, are listed but the “soft goods” — the photo — were missing. She didn’t think it was a big deal until she received a panicked phone call from a client saying, “I Googled you and I didn’t see your photo. I could only find some other woman who doesn’t look professional and I am afraid opposing counsel will look you up and find the other person’s photo and they won’t take our case seriously.”
3 Reasons Why You Need to Google Yourself Today
To prevent misidentification. Make sure the photo of the ‘real’ you shows up on Google Search. If it doesn’t, be sure to add photos to your profiles.
To observe your brand. See what comes up when you search for your name or your company. Verify that your website and profiles populate the first page of a Google search.
To protect your reputation from negativity. If there is negative content about someone with your same name you may not be able to remove the content. But you can raise your online profile by adding more content and pushing the other material down the page.
What do you find when you Google yourself?
Did you find that your website and social media profiles show up on the first page? Are all the articles and content related to the “real you”? And is it the “real you” that is showing up or someone else with your same name?
What to do if your photo doesn’t appear when you Google Yourself?
Go ahead and try it now. If your photo doesn’t show up, visit Google for help on how to correct it.
Alyssa Peek specializes in professional portraits and branding of women over 40. She is an expert speaker and coach regarding how women can project confidence and presence in all situations. This article originally appeared on her blog.
The Risk Assistant Network & Exchange (RANE), which enables risk and security professionals to more efficiently respond to emerging threats and manage complex risk, has published this article by our founder and CEO: “Online Reputation Management: The Essential Internet “Digital Defense.”
In it, she explains how online reputation management campaigns strategically tell your story online and make sure that story appears in all the right places on the internet. That narrative may be about a business, a CEO, a new product, or an organization. It can be told using text, video, audio, images, blog posts, Facebook, a website, and many other platforms.
Shaping Public Perception Where it Matters Most
“Today, amid the massive growth of social media and fake news, ORM is an essential proactive tool to shape public perception,” she says. “It entails establishing, maintaining, repairing and monitoring the publicly available online information and Google search results of an individual or organization.
“It is vital for subjects to “tell their story” before someone else does. Otherwise, they lose control over the conversation. Competitors, employees, the media, and internet trolls are all capable of altering the truth about an individual online. Attempting to keep a deliberately low profile online is not a solution. On the contrary, if you lack a strong “digital footprint” – a significant, informative and current body of material about you on the internet —you have no “digital defense” against online attacks. That means whatever anyone says about you goes straight to the top of a Google search— and stays there.
Creating a Personal Brand is the First Step in Reputation Management
“Creating a personal brand is the first step in reputation management,” she explains. “This brand establishes a foundation for showcasing your value, differentiating you from your competitors and affirming your reputation. Given that you may dread the idea or prefer to keep a low profile, there are ways to take ownership of your name online while saying very little.
“The single most important step you can take to establish, build and protect your online reputation is to register your domain name (“yourname.com”) online. Many companies provide that service, but Google Domains is the least expensive. If you are an expert, a blog is the most effective way to publish consistent, quality and extensive content. It will occupy a considerable amount of valuable online real estate because it can be amplified on LinkedIn, Twitter and numerous other sites. (We create such content for clients who are experts but lack the time to write their own posts.)
“If there is already substantial information about you online, those steps alone are insufficient to restructure top Google results in a search of your name. (For more tips, read The Essentials: Online Reputation FAQs.) But if you are not a high-profile person, they are the first actions to take. Nine times out of ten, the prospective clients who contact us lack such critical content. Please don’t be one.”
The formula search engines use to rank websites and determine whether they merit appearing on page 1 or elsewhere in search results.
Authenticity
The quality of being genuine; a valued quality among bloggers and the larger online community.
Astroturfing
Writing fake comments and reviews.
Branded Content
Content that promotes and cultivates a rapport between a targeted audience and a brand’s products and/or services.
Black Hat SEO
Using unethical methods to attempt to raise the ranking of websites in search engine results.
Content
Information delivered in any medium, whether text, videos, podcasts or images. (When two or more media are juxtaposed it is described as “multimedia content.”)
Content Aggregator
A software or web application which collects, combines and publishes a range of syndicated web content (such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts and video blogs).
Content Farms
Companies which create low-quality Internet content with the goal of having their content rank highly in online searches.
Digital Assets
Online images, multimedia and textual content files.
Domain Squatting (also known as cyber squatting)
Registering or using a domain name with the intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cyber squatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns the trademark contained at an inflated price.
Doxxing
Tracing someone or gathering information about an individual using sources on the Internet, then publishing their private information with malicious intent.
Forum
An online discussion site.
Link
A URL name or description providing an instant connection to a different Web site or section of a Web site. A Web site’s page rank on Google (and other) searches is influenced by the number of links pointing to it (“inbound links”), and the quality of the sites they are linking from.
Linkbait
A marketing technique to increase a website’s popularity by providing content that entices visitors to include a link to the website at their own sites.
Link farms
A website created solely for the purpose of increasing the page rank of other sites with indiscriminate outbound links. Most search engines penalize sites connected to link farms.
Name space
A person or company’s name online.
Online audit
An assessment of a subject’s online image: typically a person, business or organization.
Online communities
Social networks where people communicate online. Also called “virtual communities.”
Online image
A subject’s online reputation. Mainly determined by the content appearing in top results in a Google (or other search engine) search of the subject’s name.
Online monitoring
Real-time monitoring of the information available about a person, business, organization or other topic on the Internet, including on social media.
Online reputation management
Establishing, improving and monitoring the publicly available online information about a business or individual.
Page rank
A continually changing value based on a complex algorithm assigned to a Web site or page to determines its position in a search engines’ results – the higher the page rank, the more likely people will find the web site or page.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Strategically designing a Web site so it gains a higher page rank and consequently attract more new visitors.
SEO-optimized
Website or page that has been designed to be accessible to search engines and improve the chance that the website will be found and ranked by search engines.
Social media
Online communication between people using a variety of platforms, including blogs, forums and Twitter.
Social network
A network of individuals connected through a social media platform such as Facebook.
Sock puppet
An email or social media account set up to publish fake online content.
Transparency
Openness and sincerity in online communications.
Troll
A person who sows discord on the Internet by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.
White Hat SEO
Search engine optimization techniques that involve no deception.
Viral Media
Content that attracts new viewers mainly through word-of-mouth in social networks and possibly result in significant and rapid visibility.
Maybe you have a new story you want to tell the world. But the Internet is telling an old one. You’re ready for more media coverage and interviews. But you don’t have a strategy in place for achieving that. Or your company’s online image is harmed by biased, untrue or outdated information. This could be from old media coverage and legal notices. Perhaps you know you need to update to a contemporary, digital-savvy online image. You also want to become active on the social media platforms that matter in your industry. You may not have the in-house resources to handle these projects, but you’re also concerned about your budget.
Here is what you need to know.
The Internet is the world’s best tool for promoting your personal and corporate brand. When you aren’t in control of that brand online, you have left it in the hands of the world at large. That is like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition.
Google values quality content. It wants to direct users to the best content…like well-written blogs. A strategically written blog can reduce your PR costs because, done right, it attracts journalists. (This blog, which began as a xeroxed online reputation management FAQ hand-out, has attracted interviews in Consumer Reports, The Houston Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal and many more influential media outlets. Yours can, too.)
The Google results you hate don’t need to stay at the top of searches. The solution is a strategic plan to replace them with new material. If you haven’t been able to displace the old results, the new material isn’t sufficiently optimized.
Reporters now get as many story ideas from social media as from traditional pitches. Journalists are often introduced to organizations and stories on Twitter and other social media platforms. So if you aren’t using Twitter strategically, you are missing many opportunities for increased recognition.
“Suppressing,” “wiping” and “whitewashing” unwanted Google results is not always an effective approach. Early in the Internet’s history, online reputation management providers found ways to trick Google into hiding unwanted results. These tactics worked for a while, but now more often earn penalties for the websites benefiting from them. What does that mean? It means Google can drop those sites in search results when it recognizes attempts to game the system with poorly written content “dumps” and a multitude of fake links from meaningless sites. So if any provider tries to sell you on “suppression” techniques, learn more about what techniques they plan to use.
Social innovator and technology consultant Rachel Botsman is the leading global authority on the new era of trust. Her name often surfaces during conversations about the reputation economy. She’s an award-winning author, speaker, university lecturer and media commentator. Her specialism is an engaging and intelligent long-view of how technology is transforming human relationships and what this means for life, work and and how we do business.
A recent EUobserver article, Trust is ‘gold’ in digital age, quoted her on this topic. “Many parts of the world do not appreciate that trust is society’s most precious and fragile asset,” she said.
As early as 2012, she observed that we are at the start of the shift from trusting people more than corporations or government. She called for a measure for this new era, “reputation capital,” defining it as the ‘the sum value of your online and offline behaviors across communities and marketplaces.’ That year at the annual TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, she posed this question: “If someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say?”
Botsman has spoken of a time where you won’t need to answer with a traditional “elevator pitch,” or even a list of references or credentials. Instead, she sees “a future in which resumes and even credit scores are irrelevant, replaced by an aggregated digital reputation based on our interactions in the collaborative economy.”
“I believe we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the industrial revolution,” Botsman told the TEDGlobal audience in Edinburgh. She has further explored such ideas as the co-author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Pointing to services such as the vacation rental hub AirBnB, errand outsourcer Taskrabbit and community-based learning marketplace Skillshare as examples of how “the old market principles of sharing, swapping and bartering” have been “reinvented for the Facebook age,” Botsman notes that “we have moved from sharing information and music online to transferring trust about how we get things done.”
She forsees an “age where reputation will become your most important asset” and “reputation dashboards” will provide “a real-time stream of who has trusted you when, where and why.” Botsman acknowledges that privacy would be a major concern and a simple algorithm or score wouldn’t suffice, but she still believes the outcome would be worth it: “When we get it right, reputation capital creates a massive positive disruption in who has power, influence and trust. Reputation data will make the resume seem like an archaic relic of the past.”
You may not realize it, but computer “bots” continually scan the Internet and collect your personal information…including information you don’t even realize is online. Like your address and phone number. It is scoured from such public records as online telephone directories, driver license bureaus and the local courthouses that maintain legal records of property ownership. That has an impact on your physical security as well as your privacy…especially if you are a high-profile CEO.
Losing Control Over your Public Image
Maintaining a low profile in business or in their personal lives is a longstanding tactic used by individuals with high professional positions. Minimizing the visibility that results from too many media interviews or too frequent a presence on social media prevents overexposure and can add longevity to careers. Many celebrities and industry professionals in all sectors have maintained their standing for decades because they — and their managers — have carefully ensured they never become overexposed.
Unfortunately, in the Internet culture, such tactics also means that there can be little online about them that they or their representatives have placed online and have control over. This means that whatever else is said about them online rises to the top of searches and stays there. When you are responsible for the majority of the factual information about you or your organization that appears on the first two pages of a Google search, you ensure that no matter what else is said, it is counterbalanced. When you don’t do that, you have lost control over your public image. It is far harder and more time-consuming to regain it than to establish it in the first place. As a specialist in online reputation management for “influencers,” including advising Forbes and Fortune 500 clients, many of the issues we have resolved for our clients result from exactly that situation.
If You Don’t Tell Your Story, Someone Else Will
Bottom line: telling your story is a vital aspect of managing the reputation of an individual or an organization online and off.
If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. Effective online reputation management entails “telling your story” online in an authentic way, then making sure that story appears in appropriate online platforms. Your story may be as short as you want it to be. If and when someone attempts to establish a different story, yours will provide a more factual and credible reference. If you are a high-visibility individual and your story has already been told, there are many ways to add a fresh page to it – or a new chapter.
Celebrities have a range of options to do so. With TMZ paying a reported $5,000 for tips and paparazzi following many 24/7, they face continuous privacy challenges online and off. That is a great motivator.
Wikipedia is often a source of puzzlement to people who wonder why others have entries on it…and they don’t. The key to contributing to Wikipedia is to understand Wikipedia’s rules — and follow them. Most important is determining if a potential Wikipedia subject meets Wikipedia’s criteria for notability. If it doesn’t the result is that Wikipedia editors will remove it, often within minutes.
These tips will help you determine if you are an appropriate subject for a Wikipedia entry.
How to Publish a Wikipedia Entry
Having an entry for yourself or your business on Wikipedia is an invaluable online reputation management tool. As one of the most highly ranked Internet sites, Wikipedia entries are usually the first to appear in a Google search.
However, doing so requires navigating a strict set of rules and principles. Here is what you need to know.
Wikipedia requires that entries be about notable subjects and defines notability as:
“…the property of being worthy of notice, having fame, or being considered to be of a high degree of interest, significance, or distinction. It also refers to the capacity to be such.”
To prove notability, entries must cite authoritative sources.
Examples of authoritative sources include books, academic papers, reports published by credible organizations and articles from news organizations. Self-published books and promotional materials are not considered credible.
If the notability of the subject you are considering for Wikipedia cannot be supported by citations, Wikipedia editors will remove the new entry, often within minutes of its posting.
Anyone can edit, write or remove information on Wikipedia.
Many people are intimidated by the thought of having a Wikipedia entry about them because they fear damaging commentary will be added. But Wikipedia has a rule against featuring contentious material about living people – and this rule is actively supported. Wikipedia’s editors will quickly remove negative commentary unless it is accompanied by solid factual support.
Your entry must adhere to Wikipedia’s core principals.
Wikipedia requires editors maintain a neutral point of view, in addition to providing sources for all statements. Wikipedia will reject material that is written in a promotional style.
Follow these rules and success in publishing on Wikipedia is yours.
“Content” is text, video, photographs, podcasts and any other form of information placed online.
It is the biggest influence on a webpage’s rank. Your webpage’s rank determines where it shows up in Internet searches of your and your organization’s name.
Ranking also determines the prominence of third-party content about you, which is a large part of the reason it is important to understand where that content is coming from. Understanding those sources will play a key role in deciding how to manage that content—which is the heart of online reputation management.
Generally, the sites with the most daily visitors and views have the highest rankings, and the most prominent content. Top 10 websites include Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as major media sites. But there are other factors that influence where a webpage shows up. Even obscure sources can show up in the first page of searches.
Strategically crafted headlines
People often see an article about them – or their brands — from a little-trafficked blog (or some other relatively obscure source) on the first page of a Google search. This can often be the result of the way the headline is written, making the article seem especially relevant to the search terms. The longer the article stays near the top of search results, the harder it is to dislodge.
Tags
If you notice pictures of you showing up prominently on Google, it is because someone has tagged them. A tag is a caption that is added to the metadata of a photograph or to an article, blog post or other piece of text that is published online.
Internet data scraping
Data scraping is how your home address, age, family members’ names and age and satellite pictures of your home end up online. Programs (called ’bots) continually scrape the web for data from publicly available sources like county courthouses, telephone directories and other sites. It is then collected by public databases that package, publish and sell that information. If you find a lot of references to your address online, that is how it got there.
Aggregated content
Aggregated content means content that is republished from another source. The Internet is full of sites that republish content, especially content that will attract a lot of viewers, which includes celebrity- and VIP-related content. When you see versions of your photographs or other content about you on multiple minor sites (including sites that look junky or low-quality), they have aggregated that content.
Anonymous commentary
It is difficult to have anonymous comments about you removed from an online forum or other platform—but it can be done, especially if the material is clearly defamatory. Increasingly, websites are revising their comment and user policies to prevent libel. (The more obscure and independent a site, the less likely it is that they have such practices in place. See our safe browsing tips below.) If you are the topic of such content, look for their user policy. Often they will not only remove the offensive material when requested to do so, but they will block the user who posted it from their site.
Ultimately, you want to control as much of the online content about you and your organization as possible. The more high profile you are, the harder that is. But with strategic online reputation management, it is not impossible. Content drives Google results. It is now the most influential aspect of restructuring them. We are highly experienced in advising clients on what type of content to employ to reboot their Google results. We are experts in creating it, too. To learn more, please visit our Services page.
Alyssa Peek specializes in professional portraits and branding of women over 40. She is an expert speaker and coach regarding how women can project confidence and presence in all situations. This article originally appeared on her blog.
