My ghost likes to travel so far in the unknown
My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space
from “Growing Up” by Peter Gabriel
Almost everyone these days has an online persona. A shadow identity or ghost of our physical selves. Not to get too metaphysical, that’s just what happens courtesy of Google when you decide to have a FaceBook, LinkedIn or MySpace page or blog or even Twitter. While allowing us to reach unimaginably large audiences with our self generated content. According to Security Bloggers Network member Martin McKeay’s web page counter his Network Security Blog has received over 24000 hits in a single day. The blog has 3221 subscribers through Feedburner. Certainly the average internet user is not nearly as well known, followed or prolific as Martin (aka “Captain Privacy”), but neither are they invisible. Laura Spencer in this article for the FreelanceFolder has this to say about your online shadow.
A couple of times every month I browse on over to Google and search for my own name to see what the results will bring. After I’ve done that, I type in the name of my website and run the search engine again.
Checking your online reputation like this is something that every freelancer should do on a regular basis. I wouldn’t recommend stopping with Google, either. You should also check on Twitter and on other social media sites.While it might seem vain to search for yourself online, it’s actually an important step in protecting your online reputation. If you do business online, then you not only be checking on but also working to protect and manage your online reputation.
What You Can Learn From Your Online Reputation
Every time you search for your own name on Google or Twitter, you can learn several important things:
- What people are saying about your business. If you have an unhappy customer, it’s possible they won’t express that dissatisfaction to you. Instead, they may blog about their dissatisfaction or comment negatively about your work on other sites. Sometimes, untruths and misinformation are spread about your company online without your knowledge.
- Whether your work is being used without permission. As a freelance writer, my work is often “scraped” by plagiarists and used on other sites without my permission. Many plagiarists are careless about stealing my work — often my name remains with the piece. A quick search can turn up my articles on sites that I never submitted them to.
- Whether someone else is using your personal or business name. As a freelancer, your name and your business name are important. But, are you the only one using your name? With a few quick searches, you can determine who is using your name online. If another individual or business has the same name, how are they using that name? Do they appear to be reputable?
This same advice is particularly applicable to high school or college students who utilize Web 2.0 as a major source of self expression and communication with friends. I saw a documentary about teens and social networking [I can’t remember where – I’ll post a follow up when I do] wherein a high school girl was bemoaning the insensitivity of her parents who had [gasp!] forced her to reveal her MySpace password. Presumably so they could monitor her activities. The primary complaint with this intrusion into her privacy was that MySpace was a “private place where she and her friends could express themselves freely“. Okay… About all I can say to that is that she better hope that her parents do a really good job of censorship now or she may have a rude awakening when potential employers, years later after college, discover all that wicked cool [to a teenager] stuff that she posted. And her friends posted. And her ex-friends posted. This could get ugly.
Gina Trapani has this article in Lifehacker all about how you can monitor your online shadow in a fairly automated way.
You already know how well your name Googles affects how strangers and potential employers find and perceive you. Short of Googling yourself every week, how do you keep tabs on your name or your product or company’s Google-ability?Most search engines offer feeds of their results, but compiling them one by one is a time-consuming pain in the tuckus. Using a simple tool called MonitorThis, you can get ego search results from over 22 engines into your newsreader in one shot.
Since Google’s not the only game in town, you might want a more comprehensive look at where your keyword appears on the net, across blogs, photo search sites and more. MonitorThis is a simple web page that can construct a subscription list of search result feeds in one click. MonitorThis includes results fromTechnorati, MSN News, Flickr, Yahoo and MSN, among others.
What MonitorThis does is construct an OPML file which you can import to your newsreader.
The article includes step-by-step instructions on exactly how you would set this up. Adam Pash in this Lifehacker article has yet another idea for tracking your not-so-elusive online shadow if you are a Twitter user.
In a post-Twitter world, you can also use something like TweetDeck to create a persistent Twitter search to keep track of what’s being said about you online. (For example, we keep a fairly close eye on what people are saying about Lifehacker this way, so that if people are having issues with the site or complaints with a post, we can address them as necessary.)
Remember, the first step is realizing that you have an online shadow and that like Peter Gabriel, your ghost likes to travel so far into the unknown. You can’t control how far it travels, but you can guide it. Or at least find out what trouble it has got itself into on the way.