One of the topics I speak on quite a bit these days is the growing importance of managing ones online reputation. There are two varieties that are becoming areas of impact these days, the first being our personal reputations, and the second being the organizational reputation. I was getting ready to give a speech for a large technology company, that you have heard of, and was chatting with a man who had just sauntered up to me. I asked him what he did for a living because he was asking me interesting questions, and he said he was an online reputation coach. I asked him why he was at the event and he said the VP of this company, who was getting ready to introduce me, had hired him to help craft her online presence. And further, that some other executives at the company were doing the same thing. The company had decided that it was in their best interest to have their leaders online profiles become as robust as possible. Interesting…
Upon dissecting this story a bit more, I learned that the company feels that when their leaders have a high online profile, it is easier for them to hire good people, and do deals on behalf of the company because when people do a search, they get to see a waterfall of content – mostly positive – on the exec. Now, I must admit that I have been carefully observing my online presence, and making sure that I do all that I can to generate good blogs, tweets, and UGC media with the word Klososky somewhere therein. As a speaker, I am clear that when a potential client wants to learn about me, they go to the Internet and instead of just going to my Website, where they will get glowing and eloquent words about me, they run searches to see what others are saying about me. Sites like Addictomatic.com are great at showing what the social sphere thinks of people like me. So I was not too surprised that a company would focus on creating the best online reputations it can for its leaders. I was just a little surprised they hired a third party coach to help with the job.
There are moments of time when I have two minutes with nothing to do, and I will search for someone I went to high school with – and get nothing. I don’t mean, nothing important, I mean nothing. These are people with unique last names, and I should be able to find someone, somewhere, that has mentioned them. Maybe even a Facebook account, or LinkedIn. Nothing… It is as if they simply do not exist on this world. This leads me to think of high school. For some reasons, kids like to categorize other kids. They like to label them as jocks, goth, cool, geeks, or druggies. Girls get labeled in a long list of even more unkind ways. In other words, most kids in high school have a reputation as something –earned, or unearned. Then there are the kids that are just ghosts. They went to your school, but were just non-entities in the reputation land. I guess they have never turned up. We leave high school and for the most part, our reputations are grown out of, left behind, and strangle us. Get ready, your online reputation is going to bring a bit of this back…
On the organizational side, we have a wonderful story that warms my heart. It is a video uploaded to YouTube and now viewed over a 3.5 million times, called United Breaks Guitars. If you have not seen it yet, please click the link and view it before you read on. So now that you have seen it, what do you think pubic relations like this does to United? I swelled with pride for the poor guy that had to spend his time making this video as a way to get even with United. I secretly cheered for he and his whole band as I watched the viewer counts skyrocket. I was uplifted whenever I saw someone email the link to his or her friends, or post it on Twitter. And I wondered if anyone else understood that for the first time in history, a person with a little effort and no money could strike back at injustice. For all the people that the airlines abuse, rip off, and lie to every day – one man got even. One man held them accountable for poor service when he had no choice, or ability to make the do what was right after they broke his guitar. For some reason, the US Congress refuses to pass a flyers bill of rights. Well, I guess I know why, and it is because abused flyers do not have the same kind of lobby the as the airlines. At last, we the people have the ability to deservedly tarnish an online reputation without having to marshal huge resources. This video should serve as a serious warning that social media has the power to impact those that once could hide from poor service, or behavior.
Reputation was once a bit of a mysterious thing that was only known to people that were close at hand, and had associated with us for years. Within a few more years, reputation will be whatever those around us say about us online – and then anyone with Web connection will be able to imply a reputation from afar. There will be good and not so good news about that.