Читать книгу Reinventing You - Dorie Clark - Страница 16

These days, a major part of your personal brand is online. Sure, your friends and colleagues’ perceptions are based on your day-to-day interactions, but if you have even minor celebrity (you blog for an industry website) or you’re job hunting (and people are doing basic background checks), the broader world is forming its image of you courtesy of Facebook and Google. Your first step? Reviewing—and controlling—your online paper trail, because if you don’t do it first, it may come back to haunt you.

In fact, the New York Times profiled a company called Social Intelligence, which “scrapes the internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years” and assembles a dossier on the candidate.² It has ferreted out racist remarks, drug references, sexually explicit material, and weapons fetishists. Hopefully that’s not your shtick. But even if you’re not a gunrunner or trolling for OxyContin on Craigslist (like one job candidate Social Intelligence reviewed), you still may not be in the clear.

Your online presence may be spit-polished, with only your wise quotations in industry journals and incisive blog posts about the future of business. Then again, you may not appear online exactly as you’d like to be perceived. Your plight may be banal—you’re a fanatical runner and the only thing that comes up is your race times. It may be your parents’ fault (if your name is Joe Smith, search engine optimization is a cruel joke). It may be someone else’s fault (one guy I know was plagued first by sharing the same name as a former MTV Asia VJ and later a congressman forced to resign due to a sex scandal).

But sometimes the picture that emerges is downright frightening, as was the case with a young woman I once met with as a favor to a friend. She was obviously smart, just finishing graduate school at an Ivy League university and looking for a position in marketing. We had a good chat, but at the end of the meeting, she leaned in and lowered her eyes. “There’s something else I should mention,” she said. “I’m not sure if you Googled me before we met, but . . . there are some negative things being said about me online.”

It turns out she had a deranged ex-boyfriend who was posting defamatory things about her online. Because of her distinctive name, his rants littered any online search—and made her life and job search very difficult (she was pursuing legal action). Of course, the fulminations of a jilted ex shouldn’t be part of your personal brand. But thanks to the internet, even the most private of matters can quickly attach to your public persona.³