Those of you who have met me know that I expect that my permission is asked each and every time someone wants to use something that has my name – be it a post, story or photo. You’ll also know that I often don’t give that permission as I am always conscious of how I ‘brand’ myself and my reputation. The newspaper reports we saw last year of people using the online world to get a complete picture of a person prior employing, are back again this year. Here’s a quick link to one printed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January 2011. Many people are blindly thinking that this is ‘discrimination’ and laws would protect against it. Or so say many ‘learned’ people of the blogosphere. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and as many court cases are proving – if you post something of yourself on a public page that’s what it becomes ‘public’. If a picture of you appears on Facebook or somewhere else on the Internet, it is likely that just about anyone can see it if they search for you. Did you know that right now there is a Facebook application called Photo Finder, powered by Face.com. It uses facial recognition and social connections software to locate a photo of someone – even if it wasn’t identified by name (tagged). Yikes. What about that fun party last weekend where a bunch of adults were karaoking yeah, better not put those on Facebook or YouTube…
You want you and your business to be searchable, but are we too searchable on the web? According to the exceptionally insightful (& scarily titled) article in The New York Times Magazine, “The End of Forgetting,” by Jeffrey Rosen (July 25, 2010), as facial recognition software becomes more sophisticated, people will be able to find any picture of you located anywhere on the Internet. Someone could simply take a picture of you with a phone, plug the image into Google, and pull up all photos (whether identified or not) of you that are on the Internet.
The lesson from this is to remember that our public image and our reputation are not just in our hands to control. If you are your business or you’re a key player in your brand and your business then you must use caution with your online presence. Make sure you know what is out there about you – pictures, reviews, and everything else. This guard (or phobia as some of you have told me) is something that I have done for so long I can’t remember not doing it.
“It takes 20 years to build a good reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffet
