The challenge of preserving your reputation online

Stuart Corner
Monday, 29 October 2007 12:26

Opinion and Analysis

His recommendation is to fight fire with fire: "The best defence is active offence - publishing new 'desirable' media that is more current than the old material." He argues that "Most searches operate, in practice, on a last-in-first-out basis - with the most recent and popular material tending to filter to the top. Few people scroll past the first few pages of search returns to view older and less popular material. The solution to 'bad' material on the Internet is to keep publishing new 'good' material about yourself until the old material is so far down the search response that in practice most people will never find it."

We should all: "write good over bad [and] respond to critical or negative comments with positive, constructive and authentic responses....Success now requires that we all develop the skills to create and shape our own and our company's brand perception in social networking dialogues. This is done by winning the respect of your audience."

Well I beg to differ. All web sites might be equal but some are more equal than others (just ask anyone who struggles with search engine optimisation in a bid to boost their Google rankings). Not all of us , especially individuals, can control on what website we appear and this can completely nullify the prospect of search results being buried as they age, and render nigh on useless any attempt to counter bad press with good.

I googled myself - Stuart Corner - it's not a common name but Google does not discriminate between a term and its possessive, so lots of the 55,000 hits were references to geographic locations, corner stores etc branded 'Stuart's Corne. Way up there in ninth place, ahead of the mountains of stories with my by-line that have appeared on iTWire in the past two years was a link to something I did for ABC Radio National's 'Background Briefing' programme back in 1998! Such is the online power of www.abc.net.au

Had that reference been something I wanted to 'bury', without the co-operation of the owner of such a high profile web site, I suspect I would have found the task nigh on impossible.

Free speech is one thing, but  'mashability' the ability to cut, paste, edited and re-mix content with minimal technical skill; means  two things: it becomes possible to gather adverse information about an organisation or individual for a concerted campaign against them and, more worryingly: it is incredibly easy to create and post information that is totally false.

For simple text, this is nothing new, but a feature  of newly released Mac OS, Leopard is one that makes it incredibly easy to strip sections of an image from the background and add new background Just think what mischief could be created with that!