In the presentation, Stephen gives advice to people working in PR about how to look after their online reputation as a kind of “live CV” (North American reader note: CV = resumé) and how this can help them progress their careers and find new jobs. Even though the presentation was written with PR and marketing people in mind, the advice could be followed by anyone.

As well as summarising some of the advice from Me and My Web Shadow, Stephen also talks about Ben Cotton‘s concept of Personal SEO (search engine optimisation), which gives some good technical detail about looking after what Google says about you.

You can take a look at the whole presentation (which has been showcased on the front page of presentation sharing service SlideShare) below:

Open University blogger Tony Hirst posted today about an interesting way he had of seeing what his “Google impact” was: the automatic Google Suggest service which tries to anticipate what you might be searching for. You’ll notice it especially when you are typing a phrase into the Google home page and it is based on what people most commonly search for.

Tony’s Google suggest profile is pretty long:

My own shows that people looking for me are most often looking for my blog or my Twitter profile:

Tony goes on to thinking about how you might measure your Google impact:

So what ingredients might go into a “Google Suggest” Impact Factor?

Number of correct mentions? Number of incorrect mentions? Explicit association with host university, or subject area?

And what might a Google Suggest Factor measure? Personal discoverability? Personal associations? Personal specialism areas?

In the comments to his post, someone called  R3beccaF suggests a measure based on combining your name with your profession or another qualifying phrase to gauge the size of your Google shadow:

In terms of impact that you can add to your promotion case, number of times you come up in a search for “your name” “open university” could be useful, because it removes all those references to Hollyoaks, Lemonrock and, in my case, the X Factor:
“tony hirst” “open university” – 3500
“martin weller” “open university” – 2890
“grainne conole” “open university” – 3600
“martin bean” “open university” – 14800

Both of these approaches are useful ways of looking more closely at your web shadow on Google. It will give you a sense of who else with your name is out there, how you might differentiate from them and give you a sense of scale.

Comparing yourself with someone famous in terms of shadow size isn’t that useful, so try a peer or colleague as a comparison to see how you’re doing. This will be especially interesting and useful as an exercise as you grow your online presence.

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.

Younger people in America could teach their parents a thing or two about responsible behaviour online, according to US research organisation Pew Research Center. Meanwhile older people are more likely to be careless about how they are managing their personal online reputation.

Partly this may be because, as a senior Pew researcher put it in the New York Times, 18-25 year olds are at “a time in life when there’s a lot of attention being paid to self-presentation”.

It’s likely however, that this is the natural evolution of behaviour on the social web. People who have been on the web longer are developing the skills they need to look after their identity and reputation, and perhaps also have a keener sense of its value.

Pew’s research points out a set of habits which younger people are more likely to have – and they read like a list of considerations for everyone online:

They take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online—44% of young adult internet users say this, compared with 33% of internet users between ages 30-49, 25% of those ages 50-64 and 20% of those ages 65 and older.

They change privacy settings – 71% of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online. By comparison, just 55% of SNS [social network service] users ages 50-64 have changed the default settings.

They delete unwanted comments – 47% social networking users ages 18-29 have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with just 29% of those ages 30-49 and 26% of those ages 50-64.

They remove their name from photos – 41% of social networking users ages 18-29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged to identify them, compared with just 24% of SNS users ages 30-49 and only 18% of those ages 50-64.

Perhaps initiatives to spread digital knowledge among older people like Teach Your Granny How to Text will evolve into “Teach your parents how to restrict access to their office party photos”. Or they could read Me and My Web Shadow, of course…

• The findings come from Pew’s report Reputation Management and Social Media, which is free to download.
• Via New York Times