Manage Your Online Reputation. Tony Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ go horribly wrong. I do that by relating stories; “war stories” if you like. That’s because people can relate to stories and learn from them.

      I also discuss in general ways, without getting mired in technical detail, what tools you can use to manage your online reputation so that you, your company, your child, or your student isn’t on the front page of the newspaper because something he or she did is now posted on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Parents, teachers, and school counselors might find this book to be useful, not only for themselves, but for the children they raise and the ones they teach.

      It’s written in such a way that you might actually finish reading it in a night or two, and be ready to read other books on the topic. Chapters are broken into distinct topic areas that you can read without necessarily having to have read other chapters beforehand. For example, if you’re a parent, teacher, or school counselor, you might not be interested in corporate branding issues, copyright, or trademark law, or what you should consider when drafting employee social media policies. Those chapters are targeted at people in business.

      However, you might be interested in how to find the metadata in Word documents your students have emailed to you (so you can see if the essay has been written by someone else), or you might be very interested in Chapter 7 on sexting, cyberbullying, and online academic cheating, and the excellent research into those areas being undertaken by Pew Internet & American Life Project (a US-based think tank studying issues on the attitudes and trends shaping modern life in the United States and the world), and the Cyberbullying Research Center (CRC).

      Parents, teachers and business people might be interested in Chapter 5, which deals with the importance of apologies when you’ve made a mistake that affects your brand or reputation, and the tools you can use to craft a better apology than no apology at all, (or one that has obviously been written for public relations or legal reasons). Good apologies can save reputations. Bad ones can ruin them.

      Or you might just want to see the various online tools which I discuss in Chapter 9. This chapter will help you discover ways of finding out what is being said about you, your business, or your products online.

      Chapter 11 includes interesting news, facts, and information that is illustrative of issues in online reputation management.

      One big problem is that things change quickly. By way of example, Facebook’s privacy policy changed at least two times since October 2009 when I first started working on this book, and legal decisions from courts around the world continue to affect and change the online landscape regularly. By the time you read this book, some of the factual information may have changed. The practical advice I give you — the dos, don’ts, and other lessons about online reputation management as well as the sources where you can get further information — won’t change, so I assure you, this book is worth reading.

      Finally, this is also not a law book. The law regarding reputation management is interdisciplinary, complex, full of nuances, and always changing. I try to cover the basic legal concepts in this area broadly, without getting mired in details or legal niceties, and even then, the legal discussion is general in nature. You should not presume that the legal issues that I discuss are meant to supplant or replace the advice of legal professionals who would review the law as it applies to your particular circumstances, or within your particular jurisdiction. If you think something you have posted or otherwise published might be defamatory or might injure another’s reputation, or if you think your own good reputation has been damaged by the comments of someone in an email, a blog post, a message board, a forum, on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, or something as mundane as in a newspaper, you should be talking to a lawyer who knows something about this area. If you don’t know where to find one, email me at [email protected] or [email protected] and I’ll try to point you in the right direction. Or just Google me. I have a fairly large digital footprint, but I always make sure everything (I’ll repeat — everything) that’s said by me or is written about me online is there because I want it there. That’s the first lesson, I suppose, in good reputation management. Take control of it. It’s yours.

      In any event, I hope the book will, at the very least, instill a sense of urgency to monitor and manage, and perhaps even sculpt what is said about you, and indeed, what is said by you, online so that you can protect yourself not only from others, but from yourself too.

      1

      An Overview of Social Media

      Like the telephone in the early twentieth century; the fax machine in the ’70s; voice mail in the ’80s; email and online forums in the ’90s; and blogs, instant messaging, and text messaging on smartphones in the ’00s; in this decade, online communication through social networking and other social media is the way many people relate to each other now.

      The online environment we live in today, when compared with the environment in 1990 or even 2000, is quite unlike any in which we have ever lived. It’s a different world than the one I grew up in. This world has its own customs, protocols, conventions, inside jokes, and taboos.

      The Internet wasn’t invented by former US Vice President Al Gore. It really started in 1969 as a US Department of Defense project called Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and connected four US universities to exchange information across a network of computers. The web browser only came into existence with the development of Mosaic in 1993. In the mid-’90s, commercial services such as AOL and CompuServe started offering access to the Internet through subscribed services.

      A survey done in December 2009, performed by Pew Internet & American Life Project, revealed that —

      • 74 percent of all American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet;

      • 60 percent of American adults use broadband connections at home; and

      • 55 percent of American adults connect to the Internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or related connection on their laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone, or other wireless device.

      As for email, The Radicati Group, a technology market research company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, estimates that 247 billion emails per day were sent in 2009 (of which 81 percent were estimated to be spam, leaving perhaps 47 billion legitimate emails per day). The Radicati Group also estimated that the average corporate user sends and receives approximately 110 messages daily, and around 18 percent of those emails are spam, which includes actual spam and what is termed graymail (i.e., unwanted newsletters, alerts). As of May 2010, there were 2.9 billion email user accounts, and this is expected to grow to 3.8 billion by 2014.

      In The Radicati Group’s “Email Statistics Report, 2010” (available at Radicati.com), in 2010, 75 percent of all email accounts were owned by consumers, and 25 percent were owned by businesses. This 75/25 ratio is expected to stay constant until 2014. Of all the email users, 47 percent are located in Asia and the Pacific (i.e., China, India, Japan, Oceania), while 23 percent of email accounts are in Europe, and 14 percent in North America.

      1. Networking Sites

      In July 2010, Facebook reported that it had more than 500 million registered users; if it were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world after China and India. (By 2015, it may surpass both!) Facebook states that the average user has 130 friends, and that people spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Its users share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month. The average user is connected to 80 pages, groups, and events, and creates 90 pieces of content monthly. Fifty percent of Facebook’s active users log on every СКАЧАТЬ