Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online

Image: Preferable to premium rate phonelines? Initiatives like Teach Your Granny to Text spread understanding of new technology...

As social networks become a part of most people’s lives, all sorts of services are springing up to help them, from mobile phone apps to reputation search engines. There is though a darker side, of spammers, scam artists and money-making schemes.

I came across an advert recently for Social Network UK Helpline, which charges people £1.50 a minute for advice about using social networks.

The service is run by a company whose founder has previously been investigated by Mirror journalists for providing similar “services” providing premium rate advice about eBay and PayPal. A call to the latter by the journalists about how re-set a password cost £15 – information that was readily available on PayPal’s help section.

It’s sad to think that vulnerable people confused about privacy and other social network issues may run up big bills using such a service. It also emphasises the responsibility social networks have to their users to make their support pages easy to use.

Meantime, the best that the more web literate people can do is offer to help those with less knowledge. Schemes like Teach Your Granny to Text and other initiatives from the magnificent We Are What We Do are an optimistic counterpoint to the depressing influx of companies preying on people’s lack of experience in the social web.

Teach yourself how social networks work and then tell your friends and family…

If you have read Me and My Web Shadow you will be familiar with the idea of a Google Shadow, a phrase coined by Jeff Jarvis, and how Google is the most important tool in beginning to get a sense of what your web shadow looks like. Read More…

In the second of our Real Stories articles, we talk to Joanne Dobson who is the Director of Strategic Relationships at Coventry University. Me And My Web Shadow caught up with her to find out how she is tackling the management of her web shadow – and to find out what she has gained from being active in social spaces, both personally and professionally.

Are you able to access social media networks from your work computer?

Yes I am, although it would be frowned upon to spend the whole day playing scrabble on Facebook!

Do you use social media websites in the course of your official work duties?

I am a member on Linkedin, I add contacts regularly and I have used it to contact people, especially when they have moved to a new job.  I think that’s one of the real strengths of Linkedin.  I have in the past been a member on two professional social media websites:  University Business and The Community University Partnership (CUPP) Network, which is a ning network.  I’m not active on either of these sites now. The first is very clunky and not really useful.  I’ve never quite been active on the CUPP one as I keep having to move my involvement in community engagement further down my list of work priorities

I do follow some work related things on my twitter account – the Technology Strategy Board and an information science special interest group.

Does your employer have any formal rules that cover your activity on social networks?

I know that we have an IT Acceptable Use policy, but, do you know I’ve never checked what it says about social networks!

Do you use social media websites to network professionally?

Yes I use Linkedin. I’m not hugely proactive, but I have asked people to connect me to people they have found useful and I am a lurker in a couple of groups. I have also responded to a couple of questions that are relevant to my areas of expertise.  In my opinion you have to put effort in to using these tools in order to get something really constructive out of it.  Very similar to a real life networking event in that way! If you just hang around for a brief period of time, don’t speak to anyone then it won’t be a very successful use of your time.

I’ve also used Linkedin to recruit people to an advisory board in the university.

Answering your questions really made me think about how I might be able to use social media more for work. Whether I’ll follow that thinking up with any action remains to be seen

Do you use social media sites for personal use?

Yes I do. I use Facebook, Twitter, last.fm and have a blog via Blogger.  I have had a Myspace account but I got so irritated with the rubbish layout there that I stopped using it.

Do you have any concerns over the possible clash of personal vs professional on the internet?

I have general concerns but I don’t post anything personally on the internet that could cause me difficulty.  Of course, I’m aware that sometimes we don’t have control over what other people post – embarrassing photographs on Facebook for example.  In some ways this is why I try quite hard to keep my personal and professional presence separate.

Do you always use your real name on social media sites? Or only a nickname? Or a mixture of both?

*grin*  Again, this is something that has changed over time. I used to be VERY reluctant to use my real name online. Now I am much more comfortable with it, but still my default will be to restrict the amount of personal identity type of information I am sharing. My Facebook page is in my real name, but my full name doesn’t appear on either my blog or my last.fm page.

Do you try to keep personal / professional separate online?

I am less concerned about this than I used to be, but I do try and keep my personal and professional online locations separate. So my Facebook, blog and last.fm profiles link together but there is nothing about those on my Linkedin profile.

Do you have any personal rules for topics you will discuss in these places and topics you won’t?

I’ve never considered this; I don’t think so. 

What’s your favourite thing about using social websites and what’s your least favourite thing?

I always find it so difficult to give just one favourite thing! I’d probably have to say sharing photos between friends. My least favourite thing would probably have to be the complexity of some privacy settings on systems such as Linkedin and Facebook.

If you could give any advice to other people working in the university sector who are wondering about the ways they can use social media for professional and personal benefit – what would it be?

I’ve given advice to old friends just starting to use systems like Facebook – my advice has always been around privacy, for example the difference between writing on someone’s wall and sending a message. Probably the only thing that I would say is that you have to invest time to get the most out of such tools.

There are some interesting parallels between the rules at the start of Me and My Web Shadow – advice like “get a thicker skin” and “you’re always on the record” – and the three headline changes Emily Nussbaum calls out in her recent New York magazine feature on how young people are adapting to lives lived in the the age of the open web, Say Everything.

Change 1: They think of themselves as having an audience.

Change 2: They have archived their adolescence.

Change 3: Their skin is thicker than yours.

The rest of the article is well worth a read for anyone interested in this topic. It opens with a couple of horror stories, of young women whose ex-partners post sexual images and video of them online and how they have dealt with it.

This is at the extreme end of online bullying and “bad things” but a very real prospect for many young people today. Interestingly, the victims in both these accounts take very different approaches: the first removes themselves as mucha as possible from the web. The other goes on the offensive and mounts a campaign revealing the actions and identity of the former partner.

Young people are necessarily growing tougher when it comes to concerns about self-image, the article suggests, at least many of them are.

we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy.

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

One young man who opened up to the world about his financial difficulties was Casey Serin. His site, Iamfacingforeclosure.com, was a response to the fact that he was being judged by finance companies in part on his web shadow already.

“Once you put something online, you really cannot take it back,” he points out. “You’ve got to be careful what you say—but once you say it, you’ve got to stand by it. And the only way to repair it is to continue to talk, to explain myself, to see it through. If I shut down, I’m at the mercy of what other people say.”

Casey’s response is an instinctive version of the approach I would recommend for many people (and companies) who are being attacked online: “out-open”: be more open than you have to be, make sure that the most useful, comprehensive and engaging account of you comes from yourself. Openness can be disarming, because no one can accuse you of hiding anything, there are fewer blank spaces for malicious gossip and insinuation to thrive in.

One of the best ways to get to a greater understanding of the opportunities and the possible pitfalls of getting stuck-in online is to talk to other people about their experiences. “Rowteight” is the Head of Workspace Transformation at a major high street financial services provider. (He’s a real person – take a look at his Flickr page to find out more about him.) Me And My Web Shadow asked him some questions about his interaction online. Here’s his take on managing his web shadow.

Research from Google shows that even experienced users of social networks often don’t realise what they are sharing with whom.

In a presentation that has gained a great deal of attention over the past week among in the web industry, Google researcher Paul Adams talks about how we have problems translating our real world social networks of friends and colleagues on to the web.

The presentation goes on to make some sophisticated arguments about social networks, but opens with a true story that is relevant to us all. It concerns a lady called Debbie whom Paul interviewed as part of his research.

Paul shows how Debbie has several groups in her social networks. People she met when she lived in San Diego, ones she met in Los Angeles, her family and more recently kids she teaches swimming to at the local pool.

When Debbie lived in San Diego she used to enjoy going to a bar with some friends where they had wild parties. They sometimes post photos of nights out at the bar which she loves, as they remind her of her time there, and she comments on them.

During the Google research interview she realised for the first time that by commenting or liking the photos they would be seen by the kids in her swimming class. Needless to say, she was really upset.

There are two reasons that this happened to Debbie and has probably happened to all of us. First, social networks like Facebook treat all of our connections as “friends”, the same type of contact. As discussed in Me and My Web Shadow and in the recent post about privacy settings, you can set up different friend groups to control who sees what – but it is complex.

The other reason Paul discusses, is that when we post anything on the web, from status updates to photos and comments we usually do it with a particular set of people in mind, and in fact it will reach much broader group. This is why, Paul says, we get so frustrated with people posting things on Facebook that we think are deadly dull.

The obscure hobby of a colleague can be really dull to hear about for us, but they are posting it with their network of friends who are also into that hobby in mind. (I imagine some of my Facebook friends must yawn when they see me posting about yet another Sunday morning mountain bike ride, for instance.)

It is important to note that Google is trying to find a way to develop a rival service to Facebook, so criticising its service is very much in the interest of it and its employees, like Paul Adams. However, this story and the broad points made in this presentation chime with a key  message of Me and My Web Shadow: it is important to understand how privacy settings and filters work on social networks.

If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at his presentation (below). It is, by the way, an excellent example of how to create a highly useful document and share it on SlideShare – just look at how many views, comments and Tweets it has received: