What’s your Google profile?
Posted in Commentary on July 27, 2010
Are you interested in reputation management, or knowing what people find when they search for you?
If so, knowing what your Google profile is, how to locate and preserve it, is valuable knowledge.
Your Google profile
First, let’s explain what a “Google profile” is.
It’s the search results when searching online for your name, business name, product name, brand, etc. It’s an online audit of your important keywords.
I heard an interesting interview on NPR where someone floated the idea of “reputation bankruptcy,” a legal action that would function much like a financial bankruptcy, forcing Internet sites to remove information about you and give you a clean online slate.
Think about this concept — a reputation bankruptcy — both from a personal and business perspective.
What privacy?
Basically the idea of privacy is dead. People can learn so much about you individually by searching online, by Googling you.
It’s the same for business. Once people are aware of your company and considering buying from you, you can bet they’ll do an Internet search to learn what others have to say about you. Or, better yet, they’ll login to Facebook or their social network of choice and ask their online friends about you.
Whether you as a business choose to participate or not will NOT determine how much information is shared about you online. People will talk about you. They’ll tell their friends and acquaintances about you.
And they’ll do it in a very public way. That’s something businesses haven’t had to deal with until recently.
The only choice for business is whether or not you will be a participant in the conversation, whether you’ll jump on the train for the ride or be left alone in the station (where staying behind in the station will likely result in financial bankruptcy).
I remember you
The Internet basically serves as a universal memory. It’s the end of forgetting.
Once information is published online, it’s there for good.
In our Information Age there will surely be new laws and ways of dealing with information overload and the fact that what you did in your teens and 20s will be publicly viewable when you’re a well-known business person or elected official in your 30s or 40s, or grandmother in your 60s.
Lessons learned
Hopefully we recognize first that what is shared online, either by us or someone who knows us, is a type of archived, indexed, searchable life history.
And second, that imperfect people will sometimes do silly or offensive things.
We’ll all learn from our mistakes, accept and apologize for them, and move on.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Let’s hope we can be mature enough to be forgiving.
And let’s all recognize the importance of integrity and transparency in all we do, in the real and digital world. After all, the digital world is now our reality.
Still, and your readers will find this a challenge to accept, most of the whole world of living souls–probably the other five billion–has no clue. I turn 70 this month and building a blog and spend a couple hours a day between grandchildren monitoring and Tweetdeck. So, I’m on the fringe of the addicted subculture of the Western world and a small portion of the Asian world. Too many Googled Gary Taylors to even try to find me. So, am I bankrupt or still on the poor side of the tracks? We poor folk are content in our poverty so long as we have a Twitter and Facebook account and can hook up now and then–remember, I’m 70 and that means an online electronic connection, nothing else.
Keep in mind, I’m “poor” though quite near your side of the tracks. You (reader, not host Codella) may have forgotten or never even known how wonderfully blithe the world can be for the utter “impoverished” hordes on the “other side of the tracks” of America and the world who have no clue what a Tweet, text, or download is. In fact, that is the side that thinks those isolated self-indulgent, shallow “rich” people who talk with their thumbs and sit in darkened rooms to see their screen better and who’ve never really meet those they meet are an emotionally addicted subculture who outght to get around now and then.
Having thus said, I got an early birthday gift of a Blackberry, find my “talking thumbs” getting less “fat” and more accurate, and setting up a blog to advise fathers and grandfathers about fathering together.
HMMMmmmm…I think I’m just now crossing over some long shiny things in the ground. Don’t know if that loud sound is a Google train of “reputation bankruptcy” or the cheers of all them thar youngin’s welcoming me to their rich, shallow, wide, noisy, busy, addicted world.