Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

Your online reputation is your reputation. Period.

Your online reputation determines how people look at you. Your

online reputation determines who is willing to hire you, buy from

you, or sell to you. Your online reputation determines if you will get

a second date, or even a first. Your online reputation can be the

source of gossip and rumors that can spin a whirlwind around your

personal life. And you probably know less about your online reputa-

tion than you should.

Your Reputation Shapes Your

Real-World Interactions

Reputation is reality.

—UPDATING A CLASSIC QUOTE

Your Online Reputation

Is Your Reputation

16

CHAPTER

It does not matter whether your reputation is accurate or not; people

are going to judge you by it and make their decisions on it. It is an un-

fortunate fact that the world is too crowded and hectic for most peo-

ple to stop and take the time to make a careful judgment about you or

your business after collecting and weighing all of the evidence avail-

able. Instead, people are far more likely to rush to a snap judgment

based on the first information they see—and then use that judgment

to decide whether they will date, befriend, do business with, hire, or

trust you.

Your reputation is the sum total of how you are seen by the pub-

lic. It is all of the facts and judgments that people make about you. It

can be based on news, gossip, rumors, public records, photos, personal

experience, and anything else people use to form their opinions.

Reputation is more than just “good” or “bad,” although both are

part of reputation. Reputation is all of the judgments people make

about you: Are you considered an innovator or a leader? Do people

think of you as trustworthy and loyal? Do you have a reputation for

being good with details or a master of the big picture? Are you seen

as stoic or emotional? The list of all the parts of your reputation

could stretch many pages.

If you are a small business owner, the same concerns apply. Is

your company compared to a Ford Pinto or to a Mercedes Benz? Is

it seen as down-market like Wal-Mart or cheap-chic like Target?

Positive like Johnson & Johnson or negative like Enron? Growing

like Google or shrinking like Alcoa? A leader in customer satisfac-

tion like Southwest Airlines or a laggard like United? The reputation

of a business drives sales and growth; customers are unlikely to buy

from a business with a tarnished reputation, especially if there are

other alternatives available. Some investors even think that almost

two-thirds of a company’s value is driven by its reputation.

1

This fig-

ure has been confirmed on Wall Street; in many corporate buyouts,

billions of dollars are attributed to “goodwill”—Wall Street jargon for

having a good reputation that encourages consumers to buy whatever

the company is selling.

17Your Online Reputation Is Your Reputation