Yesterday, I gave a 7-minute speech about the importance of managing your identity online. Several people told me that they found the information really useful, so I thought I’d share the transcript with you.
Are you aware that what you put online could cost you lost opportunities at best and your life at worst?
Seth Godin, bestselling author and blogger of the most popular marketing blog in the world said that “People watch what you do more than listen to what you say.”
Gone are the days where seemingly cathartic comments like “I downed a bottle of Jack Daniels by myself last night” or “My client is a dumbass” are excused as circumstantial expressionism or innocent venting.
Today, saying something like that on a social network like Facebook could set the impression that you’re an irresponsible alcoholic, or suggest that you often smear the people who are the source of your livelihood. Whether or not that is true is immaterial but that’s what people think you are.
As a digital consultant who has used the Internet for 15 years, I believe it is imperative to create and manage one’s online personal image and data, and today I’ll share with you the reasons why you should care about online identity management.
According to Wikipedia, Online Identity Management or OIM is a set of methods for generating a distinguished web presence of a person on the Internet. OIM is also known as online personal branding, online image management and personal reputation management.
Cyber-vetting
Firstly, the most important reason why you should manage your online ID is the growing emergence of ‘Cyber-vetting.’
Cyber-vetting is another term for a ‘virtual background check’ used by potential employers, clients and business partners usually with tools like Google. The goal of such a check is to determine the suitability of a candidate for a role.
In a survey carried out by CareerBuilder.com in 2009, 45% of employers registered with them has said that they use Google and/or other tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to check out job applicants. This is in addition to background checks that have been conducted by recruitment agencies.
Fast Company magazine published the CareerBuilder.com survey results sharing that among the reasons that employers have rejected candidates, 53% respondents said that their decision were based on provocative, inappropriate photos or information.
Drinking or drug use, bad-mouthing previous employee, colleague or client, poor communication skills, discriminatory comments, lying about qualifications, and leaking confidential info from their previous job were some of the other reasons that employers have used to justify rejecting a candidate and they are getting that information from the very data you allow them to see.
Just over the past two years, 13 people including a prominent CNN Editor, UK Politician, Australian Radio Host, Comedian, Newspaper Editor and even a waiter got fired because of what they wrote on Twitter. There have been several sources reporting that some people have gotten fired over their Facebook statuses as well.
ID Theft
Secondly, you should also manage your online identity to avoid identity theft. Online ID theft is when someone creates an ID using your name or pretends to be you fraudulently to gain the benefits associated with being you. Some of the risks associated to having your ID stolen is reputation damage, credit card and financial fraud.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, 9 million Americans fall victim to ID theft each year. If you don’t manage the sensitive information about you like your birthdate, SSN or I/C number, address, phone number, or claim your ID online, ID thieves could pose as you for their gain and may even take control of your public image.
In 2001, a man called Abraham Abdallah got caught while stealing $22 million pretending to be somebody else. How did he do it? He surfed the web to gather background data on a victim and one of his tactics was to open a mailbox under his victim’s name. Some of his victims may come as a surprise to you. They were famous names like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Warren Buffet, and Paul Allen.
To avoid public ID theft, you should start registering yourself on all the major social networking websites and pay attention to what’s going on in the net space. If you cannot manage all your profiles, you could just create them and point it to your active profile. The best way to prevent people from stealing your ID is to claim it, monitor it, and be aware of where you keep a presence online.
Cyberstalking
Finally, you should manage your online ID for your own personal security. The idea is to avoid cyber-stalkers from gaining information about you that could compromise your safety. With 500 million users, cyber-stalking is now rampant on Facebook, and with the increasing use of geolocation services like Foursquare, the need for OIM has never been greater.
Did you know that in 2009, Facebook removed the profiles of 5500 convicted sex offenders? That’s just the people they found. What about those who they haven’t found yet and those who are yet to commit the crime?
Removing some personal info and photos from your public profiles is one of best thing you can do, as is setting your privacy settings on Facebook to limit access to information about you. This can help keep potential employers, clients, and ex-lovers and former friends from accessing them. If you don’t already know, the default setting on Facebook allows everybody to view everything, so you have to manage your ‘privacy settings’ to change those permissions.
Setting your privacy settings will also deter cyber stalkers and sex offenders from gaining access to pictures, sensitive and personal information about you. Data like where you live and hang out should never be shared, so be mindful of what you broadcast and stay away from revealing about your location for safety reasons.
Best Practices
To summarize, you should manage your online identity because if you don’t, your reputation, credibility, and personal safety could be compromised. Things that other people do that could affect you negatively include (but are not limited to) cyber-vetting, identity theft and cyber-stalking.
The best practice is to treat social networking and profile management sites like PR channels because they are. Any information that you don’t need 800 million people having access to is better kept offline or removed immediately.
Remember not to post anything online that could compromise the safety of your family, friends and yourself. Things like your phone number and personal home address would fall under that category as is provocative pictures of yourself and unnecessary negative comments that you make about people, places, and your work are better left unshared.
Lastly, if you find managing all the existing data daunting, consider deleting your account and start a brand new one. Do reflect on the wisdom of the legendary Warren Buffett who once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” With that I hope you’ll think about what you post the next time you log into your social network.
I wanted to share this blog post, Letting your Community Create your Advertisements by Jeremiah Owyang. I think what Dell has done with their Regeneration campaign and the way they are pointing in terms of how the advertising industry will pick up from this is not something to be ignored.
By now, it isn’t a big surprise that the number of application invites that are being released out into the ether have almost put most if not all its users off. I just ignored 370 invites for time-wasting random applications that do nothing more than illicit clicks that don’t actually coerce you into responding to a call-to-action worth defending. That and removing most of the applications that I’ve added in the past because it somehow appealed to my ego at the time.
Total time wasted to clean my account? One hour and counting.
Money earned or relationships made or severed as a result of adding or ignoring those applications? Zero.
Guys, this is an example of when an open platform means a cesspool of dung which creates more work for its users. One can disable all invites of course, but then one would also lose the chance of getting an invite to use an application of real interest. In addition, the total blockage of app invites on a massive scale would immediately put into question Facebook’s value if application developers are not getting traction out of their efforts, thus rendering Facebook useless as a revenue channel.
But of course, there are a few select applications that are actually pretty useful, for instance the virtual Bookshelf. It allows you to tap into a database full of books that you have read or may read and share thoughts and reviews with your friends. Saying that, besides the few applications that I find useful, I will continue to skim over and purge the majority of it.
Facebook is still in its early days and its revenue model have yet to prove its efficacy. Either the quality of the apps have to improve or behavioral targeting algorithms need to be introduced where app invites are concerned. This means moderation of some sort need to be applied to control what shows up. It is messing about, and spoon-feeding at its best, although, Amazon.com have benefited greatly from behavioral targeting.
Can Facebook really remain open, keep its user base and be profitable at the same time? That is something for you to think about before you spend some serious dollars to develop Facebook applications.
It begins with an invitation from your friend to see who your so-called Perfect Matches are on Facebook. The invite starts off by claiming that they’ve matched you with your perfect matches, at which point if you’re curious enough you’d click to install the app. After you have done so you are basically wrestled to choose 9 people to spam an invitation to proliferate the same madness, and upon completion of those invites the page reloads and shows you a list of your apparent “perfect matches” using a percentage scoring system.
The person that the app scored at first place was a magnificent 96% match with me.
This said person is however:-
a) engaged to be married,
b) physically the furthest thing away from my type,
c) character and personality clashes with mine I doubt we can have a conversation for more than 5-minutes without running in the other direction,
d) has no immediate interests in common with me, and
d) possibly the worse person the app could have matched me up with!
The second guy on the list is no less impressive. Ranking at an impressive 94% would mean that there can be absolutely no mix up with the fact that he was going to be the love of my life. Except that I thought he was gay the first time I met him, and when I was made aware that he was in fact “not gay” I still found his personality too effeminate for my tastes.
That’s just one side of the story, and you haven’t heard the other person’s side yet. I am sure if I feel that way about them, they must not be too excited about hooking up with me either. There are companies out there that are going about their businesses in such a distasteful manner that it threatens Facebook as an enjoyable platform.
Perfect Match has questionable credibility and their effort is no where near as sophisticated as a dedicated match-matching website like Match.com. Thus the limited function of the app would unlikely be able to calculate the probability of your compatibility with another Facebook user. Don’t be fooled…. while there are a lot of apps on Facebook that have entertainment value but this app is for lack of a better word a dud! It was designed to inspire click-throughs so that you can be lead to a page that serves you blinding ads on a paid services along the lines of astrology, numerology, tarot card reading, relationship feng shui, and all that kind of mystical hocus-pocus that claim to reveal the love of your life if you don’t mind parting with some money.
Guys, we all love Facebook but let’s get real for a moment. Grebooca’s Perfect Match just smells funky and it fails as a match-making application so far. This is bullshit scamming in broad daylight and endorsement of such activity just drags the platform’s standard down. Facebook should consider the state or intentions of the app prior to approving them, or they’re going to piss a lot of users off.
People are joining Facebook by the herd, and if you’re not on it yet you probably haven’t heard or don’t care. However if you’re in any kind of B2C business that uses the Internet as a revenue channel, you should pay attention. The success of social networking websites in gathering viewers is something that cannot be ignored, even if you choose to be an anti-social digicrat. With 34 million users worldwide logged in July 2007, Facebook is expected to grow it’s numbers exponentially. Thousands of developers are creating plug-in apps on rails for an ever-increasing number of Facebook users to market their ideas, skills, and products. College dudes aren’t the only people making Ruby on Rails applications for Facebook. Companies have caught on to the potential of this platform and as a result we are seeing more mature applications showing up on Facebook.
One such example that I have come across is the Shopping 2.0 project by Hungry Machine LLC, which goes beyond purposeless graphical haggis and philanthropic esteem-feeding rate-me apps to more sophisticated efforts, where actual business intentions are integrated into the applications. The Visual CD rack is an app in the Shopping 2.0 suite that allows a Facebook user to build and show their CD collection using thumbnails taken from the Amazon.com catalogue. If a user chooses, “want to buy,” the link takes you to Amazon’s shopping engine. If you’re unsure how this is smart, Amazon.com has a very rewarding affiliate program that pays in commission dollars when click conversions turn into actual sales. I’m sure they’ve figured out a more sophisticated way to integrate the app seamlessness into Amazon’s model but one thing is for sure, Hungry Machines is definitely looking at commission dollars. If Hungry Machines simply developed this app for Amazon.com (which I doubt), that’s not entirely bad if you position your company as an RoR development firm, which is exactly what these coworkers from Evolution Health have done.
That is not to say that Visual CD rack will sell CDs. There still are variables like the fact that CD sales have plummeted since the idea of Napster came along and gone, and spawned dozens of other clonish P-to-P music sharing software. People are simply not buying CDs like they used to anymore. No matter how smart your rails application is.
Hungry Machines has also developed (without surprise), Visual Bookshelf, Visual DVD Rack, Video Games, Magazines and Gadgets which of course is basically the same app repackaged with different names because they access a different catalog database. These applications are in no way perfect in functionality but for what it is worth, the business idea makes sense and they are definitely paving the way for others who see the light in RoR. HM needs to work on IA and UA to perfect Shopping 2.0 in order to make the experience seamless enough to convert users into consumers.
In any case, this topic is way too big for me to attempt with one blog entry. I’ll be sure to touch on the subject again soon enough.
If you would like to learn how to create applications for Facebook, a good place to start is the Facebook Developer’s site. You might also like to take an online tutorial on Ruby on Rails, and research RoR in more detail on your own. Then the next step is really to just get down and dirty with it.
