Feb

6

Warren Buffet was quoted that it takes 20 years to build up a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it. However if one considers the Internet and social media, one’s name, image and reputation is indeed a fragile thing that will not even last 10 seconds.

If you maintain a professional or personal persona online, either via a blog or a social media account, you and your name becomes transparent and vulnerable to malicious attacks through comments, compromising photos or videos and even identity theft.

One must be aware on how to carefully manage and protect one’s name and image online.

There are Internet tools available online for free that can help you monitor on what is being posted that’s related to  your name and image. Use these to help you keep  a solid defense on your reputation. Here are some of those:

  1. Google Alerts – can be set to notify you, by email or as a feed, about the latest Internet pages that made mention of your name. (http://www.google.com/alerts)
  2. Technocratic – you can use this search engine for blogs to find any blogs that mentions of your name. (http://technorati.com/)
  3. Addict-o-matic – find out the lastest mentions related to your name, from sites such as Bing, Google Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, and more. (http://addictomatic.com/)
  4. TweetBeep – alerts for Twitter accounts, notifies you via e-mail everytime someone tweets your name. (http://tweetbeep.com/)

Other than using these tools to keep track on what’s being said of your online persona, it is advised to best be more proactive in maintaining your personal information that’s available on the Internet.

Create and manage as many public profiles as you can in social media sites like Facebook and Multiply and be selective on the content you post. Though it may be a hassle to manage these accounts, keeping these updated once-a-month is enough to ensure some measure of protection.

However, if you do wish to have a bigger presence on the Internet either for professional and personal goals, best you get active about it and update your profile accounts at least 3 times a week.

If you can’t manage it personally, it is suggest to hire a virtual assistant who specialize in this modern form of public relations.

References:

  1. Burnham, Kristin. “How to Protect Your Reputation Online.” 29 January 2010. CIO Australia Website. Accessed 2 February 2010. Link Here
  2. Burnham, Kristin. “Managing Your Reputation Online: 5 Essential Tools. ” 29 January 2010. CIO Australia Website. Accessed 2 February 2010. Link Here
Outsourcing Solutions, Inc. – Virtual Assistance Outsourcing

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