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Latest "Digital Reputation & Trust" Posts
Are we entering an age where one’s digital reputation is a form of career currency – or are we already there?
That is the subject of an article in Forbes last month that gets some things right and others wrong. It absolutely seems like online histories and reputations could become more important than resumes, portfolios and credit scores.
Our digital footprints are already considered by others when determining if they want to hire or do business with us. And many people don’t even have a traditional resume anymore, but have substituted it with a LinkedIn profile.
Forbes goes through a handful of questions and offers its own answers on the topic. Yes, everything we do on the Web, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, is becoming more and more connected, meaning that they influence one another as well as how others perceive us. But, there are a few things that the article misses the mark on.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: digital reputation, internet privacy, Online Reputation
Let’s start with a tip today. If you fire your company’s social media manager, you might want to disable their access to the business’ official Twitter account first – and every other social media platform, too.
British company HMV learned that lesson the hard way when an employee live-tweeted her firing. Here are some of the tweets she sent out from the company’s Twitter handle before her access was shut off:
“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!!!”
“There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring”
In another amusing twist – amusing at least to everyone but HMV management – the employee tweeted that she overheard the company’s marketing director ask “How do I shut down Twitter?”.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: digital reputation, social media risk management
Okay. All former presidents of the United States whose family members had their email accounts hacked recently, step forward.
That’s right. It was reported late last week that relatives and close friends of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the 41st and 43rd commanders-in-chief, respectively, have fallen victim to a cyber attack. Pictures and private correspondence between families members were stolen and posted online for all to see, including apparent self-portraits painted of George W. while bathing and a letter about planning funeral arrangements for his father (who is still alive). Tell me how much you’d like it if your “artwork” showed up online for the world to see.
“Ah, but it was the former President of the United States that was targeted, not a lowly voter like me,” you say. And in that statement lies the greatest risk of all – complacency. “I’m too small to target,” or “I don’t have enough money or power to target.”. You are wrong, and your attitude will come back to haunt you.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: online privacy internet privacy
Get this. A new study says that your Facebook status updates are more memorable to people today than carefully crafted lines from a book. If that’s not proof that social media exposure has real impact and an insanely long shelf-life, I don’t know what is.
A team of psychologists from the University of California published their research in the academic journal “Memory and Cognition.” They collected hundreds of Facebook posts from undergraduate research assistants and the same number of random phrases from recently published books sold on Amazon.
They made sure that the specific context was taken out so that the status updates and book excerpts stood completely on their own. Study participants were asked to memorize them. As it turns out, those Facebook statuses we throw up all willy-nilly stick with a person 1.5 times more than the words written by published authors.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Online Reputation, social media exposure, social media reputation
“When you put something out there, anyone can see it – from a future job interviewer to an internet creep.”
This was what the title character on the ABC drama “Castle” said to his daughter in a recent episode upon discovering a video blog in which she was sharing personal details about her life. Richard Castle, played by actor Nathan Fillion, was distraught over his 18-year-old daughter’s over-sharing, worried that any number of miscreants could use details she posts online to do her harm.
When he explained this to her and added that he didn’t want something she posted on a whim to haunt her years later, she showed a fractured appreciation of the topic of online privacy.
“My generation grew up in a digital fishbowl,” she said. “No matter how careful we are stuff will get out there. Friends will tag me in photos, inevitably doing something stupid. Why should that define me?”
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: digital reputation, online privacy, online reputation management
Your old web accounts are like digital zombies, stalking you from the shadows. Take a second to think back to all the websites, online services, social media platforms and other accounts you have signed up for over the years.
How many of the ones you no longer bother with have you completely deactivated rather than just ignored like muscles slowly atrophying? Here’s a scary lesson in online reputation management.
A recent PC World article explores the topic of “zombie accounts” and how we so often just stop using them and forget they are there, never actually shutting them down for good. Which means they are still out there.The article even cites one of the head honchos at Symantec Security Response who claims that while these zombie accounts can be hacked, they don’t necessarily present any greater risk than your active ones do. Survey says … wrong.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: digital reputation, Online Reputation, online reputation management
The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board’s recent assessment of the internet as a “wild west frontier” could not be more accurate. As a relatively new “frontier,” the lack of basic governing principles on the internet – what is permissible, who is in control, what constitutes online privacy – has produced a relatively lawless space where chaos is the dominating force.
Right now, you are not in control of your online information; corporations can treat it in almost any way they wish and without legislation, they will continue to take advantage of the wild west.
Lawmakers have tried to bring some control to the internet frontier and reduce widespread copyright infringement through initiatives like SOPA and PIPA, but they’ve been met with overwhelming resistance from a growing chorus of free speech advocates.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: online privacy, Online Reputation
In "Mission: Impossible," messages would self-destruct five seconds after being viewed. But, in real life, any application that claims to do the same should be met with hearty laughter and a salt shaker full of skepticism.
According to a report from a local ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, the Snapchat mobile app has shared more than one billion "snaps" globally. These are text and picture messages, sent between friends via smartphone, that supposedly disappear from the sticky tendrils of the World Wide Web without a trace. However, I highly doubt any application can completely wipe a message from existence once it hits the internet, which means that your digital reputation grows, for better or worse, every time you share.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Cyber Security, identity theft and fraud, online reputations
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed a bill last week prohibiting employers and educational institutions in the state from asking applicants and students for passwords to their email and other online accounts, including social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Cyber security is important to the reinvention of Michigan, and protecting the private internet accounts of residents is a part of that," Snyder said in a press statement. "Potential employees and students should be judged on their skills and abilities, not private online activity."
But, how private is "private online activity?" The sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was enraged recently when a picture she posted to the social media site was sent out to millions of people via Twitter by another user.
Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Online Reputation, online reputation management
