Читать книгу Manage Your Online Reputation - Tony Wilson - Страница 4

The fact that everyone in the world can now be an author, photographer, videographer, and publisher (and I suppose, obituary writer), creates some interesting legal, business, and social issues.

Some of these issues are for businesses, small and large. It’s the reason a good half of this book is targeted to business. The following are some questions people in business may want to consider:

• What are people saying about my company, my business, my products, and my brand?

• How can I monitor what people say about my company?

• What should I do if people are saying uncomplimentary or even libelous or slanderous things online about me, my company, and my company’s products or services?

• What do I do if someone puts an uncomplimentary video on YouTube about my company or its products?

• What if someone creates a Facebook fan page dedicated to disparaging my brand? Can I sue? Should I sue?

• Are there strategies to adopt to deal with my company’s online reputation?

• What if some of the comments that are posted online are from my employees? Can I fire them?

• What if the comments are from my customers?

• If others mention my trademark, can I take legal action?

• If others disclose copyrighted information, how can I stop it?

• If everyone seems to be online these days, should my company have an online presence beyond a mere web page?

• Should we have a Facebook fan page, a regular blog, or other online ways to promote the company, the brand, and the products?

A good portion of this book will attempt to answer these questions, and at least half the book is geared for small-business people who need to understand they’re not in Kansas anymore. It is important to know what consumers, employees, and critics are saying about your business so that you can deal with it, either with better public relations or better products. You need to know that you could lose your reputation in the marketplace and all you’ve worked for in a nanosecond.

This book isn’t just a “business book” for companies. Online reputation management also applies to individuals and their activities online. In many ways, online reputation management can be even more important to individuals, whose relationships with family, friends, and coworkers can be detrimentally affected by their online conduct. That conduct may have an affect on them in the job market where momentary lapses of online reason, really bad judgment, and, dare I say stupidity, can be seen by millions of people, especially current and future employers. Online communications, photographs, and videos, potentially read by millions of people, can damage personal reputations, especially the reputation of the person making the comments in the first place.

This might not matter so much to people older than 30. This may be because “older” adults tend to share things with others in more private ways than the Internet, though there are always exceptions. As for those younger than 30, and particularly the 13- to 25-year-old age group that make up the mainstay of Facebook and other social media sites, it’s safe to say that there has never been a generation so willing to share its innermost feelings, not to mention outrageous opinions and inappropriate videos and photographs (again, there are always exceptions). The problem is that many of these people don’t seem to understand how the comments, photos, and videos posted online can be publicly accessible, profoundly inappropriate, defamatory to others, mind-numbingly stupid, career limiting, and, in some cases, criminal.

From the 15-year-old high school student’s perspective, it might be a badge of honor to post photos of the weekend’s wayward drunken vodka bender on Facebook, knowing that, as his or her parents aren’t “friends” with the student, they won’t see what people said about the night in their status updates, or the posted and tagged photographs with all the bottles laying around the house. It might be cool to tell the world he or she belongs to groups that are sexually explicit, or that the person likes to swear like a truck driver on his or her “wall,” knowing only his or her “friends” will see it. Or it might be provocative to post (or allow to be posted) digital pictures that are sexually suggestive, or which might belong in Maxim magazine or in a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

However, it’s disingenuous to think one’s parents, teachers, or the people close to them (or for that matter, one’s future employers), won’t one day see the inappropriate photos and comments if the teen or 20-something has 750 friends on Facebook. (How can anyone have 750 real friends?)

The reality is that, despite amendments to Facebook’s worldwide privacy policies in 2009 and 2010 (thanks, in no small way to the actions of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner), it’s still possible to see and copy what many users have posted to Facebook. Maybe it’s because they haven’t figured out Facebook’s privacy policies. Despite activating some of those privacy settings, sometimes it’s still possible to access Facebook profiles through the “back door,” if someone has made comments or posts on public sites. (Who can figure it out? It changes every few months.) Maybe some people don’t care as much about privacy as older adults do. Maybe it’s like the old VCR machines that always flashed “12:00” because their owners didn’t know how to program them. Maybe Facebook’s privacy policy is so convoluted and so ever-changing, people give up on it or hope for the best.

The truth is, if comments, photos, or videos are anywhere online, there’s a chance they can be (or already have been) accessed and saved by others. The more provocative the content, the more friends the user has as part of his or her network, and the more that person is tagged or makes comments on other sites with his or her Facebook account, the more likely the content will be accessible and recirculated to others, and, I should add, retained in the archives of search engines and data aggregators, or on someone else’s computer.

What happens when the 16-year-old who’s made outrageous (and perhaps legally defamatory) comments online or has posted (or has allowed to be posted) sexually provocative photos of herself online, or photos of her drunk, is in the job market at 22, expecting to deal with clients of an employer, all of whom might be able to see what she posted (or allowed to be posted) five or six years earlier?

I can only echo what I’ve been told most of the Deans of Canada’s law schools and business schools tell their new students each year. They are warned to watch what they say and do on social media and on their personal blogs or on forums. They are advised to get more professional email addresses than mojokitty69@whatever.com. They’re told, in so many words, to “protect their reputations” because, quite frankly, “their reputations matter.”

Clean up your Facebook pages. Clean up your blogs. Think before you post or upload. Your prospective employers will be looking for you and at you.

I can tell you firsthand as an employer, we do check online. Almost all employers check the “online footprints” of their potential employees these days. I check my potential employees’ online footprint before I go to the trouble of hiring and training them. As an employer, taking stock of my future (or current) employees is easy to do and information is freely available with the click of a mouse.

Employers like me are in, what I hate to call the “real world,” and if we can, we’ll always check up on our prospective employees because we want to know why we should give the job to them and not someone else. I suppose it’s the twenty-first century’s version of checking out a reference letter, except we do the checking ourselves, online (or we’ll hire an outside company to do it). We’ll look for them on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and Google their names. We’ll even look for them in Google Images. We’ll use Google Alerts. We’ll read their blogs. They’ll be judged, and indeed employed on the basis of their résumés, their education, their skill sets for the job, their personalities, their work ethics, their communication skills, and how they handled themselves in an interview (as well as on mundane issues such as their salary demands and our ability to pay them). They’ll also be judged on the basis of that online footprint in the digital sand they’ve left for the world to inspect; those pictures of them provocatively dressed that were posted to Facebook or MySpace way back in 2008 that are still public, or the nasty rant about the boss in a 2006 blog post, or the vodka bottles lying around the kitchen at a party in high school where they’re tagged on someone else’s Facebook page. Conclusions will be drawn. Judgments will be made. Rightly or wrongly, a job candidate’s “digital tattoo” may well be part of the hiring equation. It may not be fair, but suck it up; that’s how the real world works.

And why not? My competitors are regularly checking the Web to see what I’m doing on it. All my prospective clients do the same thing when they’re trying to determine whether to hire me to do their legal work. They’ll look for me online everywhere they can. They’ll read what’s said about me on my firm’s website, in media interviews I’ve done, and in columns I’ve written for The Globe and Mail and the many other publications for which I write.

Although I may use the Internet to check out a future or current employee or client, the consequences of leaving too large a footprint can be very harsh, as discussed in Jeffrey Rosen’s article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” in The New York Times on July 23, 2010:

Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with LSD.

Rosen also discussed the case of Stacey Snider:

Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was unprofessional, and the Dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her underage students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

He goes on to say:

All around the world, political leaders, scholars, and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets … Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places … the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission.

After reading this, if you haven’t run back to your computer to adjust your privacy settings, delete some photographs, and get others de-tagged, just remember Web 2.0 isn’t as private as you might think, and even if you do adjust your privacy settings today so future employers can’t see anything, there’s still a chance something embarrassing, provocative, or career limiting is available on someone else’s computer where the privacy settings haven’t been tightened, or it’s still archived in Google or another website that collects, retains, aggregates, and stores data.

Think of everything you say and do online, whether on Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, or on other social media sites as your own, personal “digital tattoo.” We all know how hard and painful it is to get tattoos removed, don’t we? And if we don’t, we will.