The online reputation — or e-reputation — is the image digitally conveyed by the Internet throughout websites, contents, pictures or videos. Whether you’re active or not on the social networks and web in general, one post from you — or from one of your friends — can have a positive or negative impact on your professional life, especially if you’re looking for a job. Here are some tips you can use to take care of your online reputation! 📱
1. Google yourself
To know how to take care of your e-reputation, you need to see your online presence and what kind of information Google has about you. So, the first step is to type your name and surname, browse through the five first pages of results and see what appears — don’t forget to take a look at the images section. Rest assured, we’ve all created a profile on a site without realizing that our data would be made public and maybe complicated to erase.
2. Manage your content
Once you’re aware of your online reputation, you can start improving, updating or even deleting the desired content. Then you have several options: you can do it on your own, get in touch with the author of the content or contact the platform which manages the website. Usually, you’ll find some websites which disclose confidential information — content that may offend your dignity — and you’ll need to modify it. Remember to often check to see if the content has disappeared from the search results or if new ones have appeared in the meantime.
3. Manage your privacy settings
In order to avoid bad content — or bad buzz — the best way is to not generate any! To do so, you’ll need to know how to manage your own privacy settings — especially on Facebook because it’s crucial to control the diffusion of your posts, the comments on your page, the notifications, etc. Be careful, the “danger” can sometimes come unintentionally from your friends by identifying you in a photo or a video for example and have a negative impact on your e-reputation. I’m sure there are some drunken night photos you want to hide from your work colleagues or a potential recruiter. You can also manage that.
4. Define your storytelling
After cleaning the first results from the meta search engines, you’ll take a view on what information you want and don’t want to see online — the information you want to be public and the one you want to remain private. To define your storytelling is to choose the content you’ll allow Internet to show to everyone. You need to ask yourself: What do I want to share with strangers? Who’s going to read it? How useful is it to me? After answering these questions, feel free to publish relevant content on the suitable social networks.
5. Keep your social networks updated
While searching for a job or an internship, you give your CV and also several personal data to the recruiters or job sites. It’s then important to keep consistency between this information and the one available on your social network accounts. Nowadays, recruiters attach more and more importance to the digital profile of candidates. They want and need to be reassured. Keep in mind to update your data, because there’s nothing worse for a recruiter than a CV without any modification since 2013. Not taking care of your online professional presence is an indicator of neglect, don’t forget it!
6. Stand out from your homonyms
If the first results where you appear are blend with those of a homonym, make sure that you can be distinguished from them — to avoid that the online reputation of a homonym tarnishes yours for example. A good way to do so is, once again, to keep all of your data updated — as we have seen in the previous tip — and to specify on your CV the URL of your LinkedIn account, website or personal blog so there are no misunderstandings.
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