“Me on the Web” for reputation management

Posted on June 17, 2011 by timethief

Google has launched Me on the Web. It’s a reputation management tool allowing anyone with a Google account to monitor personal information about them appears online, and makes it easier to remove personal information from the search engine.

Your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others. This tool, Me on the Web, appears as a section of the Google Dashboard right beneath the Account details. — Me, Myself and I: Helping to Manage your identity on the web

Part of Google’s Me on the Web feature is a set of directions on simple reputation-management procedures. Users are encouraged to do searches for their own name to see what comes up, create a Google profile, set up Google Alerts, and work to remove defamatory or inappropriate content from the web. via Google’s New “Me on the Web” Feature | Search Engine Journal.

See > Keeping personal information out of Google

The Cloud Computing in Plain English Video
Using a simple story of a growing florist business, this video explains the basics of cloud computing: how it works and why it makes sense for businesses
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The difference between on-site computing and cloud computing
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View the video introduction 3 minutes..

For managing your online reputation, consider these tools:

Google Alerts keep you aware of what’s being said about you, where and by whom.
BoardTracker – a free service helps you locate and track comments made on issues posted to forums and discussion boards.
CoComment - a free service for managing, powering and tracking conversations online. There is a Firefox extension for cocomment too, and you can get a free cocomment: your conversations widget from widgetbox for your blogspot or self hosted wordpress blog as well.
Commentful – This is yet another free service that tracks comments/follow-ups on blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, a new follow-up, you will be notified instantly. To use it, either login to blogflux or register.
Twitter Search – allows you to search terms and subscribe to the RSS feed for the search results. There are also additional free services such as Twilert, and TweetBeep that will deliver search results and updates by e-mail that help you track comments and online conversations.
Yahoo Pipes
Social Media Fire Hose Technorati

A comment policy for your blog

Posted on October 20, 2010 by timethief

Creating a new blog can be an exciting and joy-filled process. Waiting for your first comments to appear can be charged with eager anticipation and emotionality. It can also be a downer if you receive one or more troll comments. Some bloggers fear that if they restrict commenters, they’ll lose readership. I prefer to shun trolls and preserve a safe and comfortable environment for all my commenters.

On one hand, you are not legally responsible for the content in comments posted on your blog – all comments belong to their authors. On the other, everything posted on your blog affects your branding and your reputation.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely in public spaces and places without censorship or limitation, or both. In practice, the right to freedom of speech is not absolute in any country and the right is commonly subject to limitations, such as “hate speech“.

When it comes to comments posted on your blog, it’s your contractual obligation to remain within the Terms of Service you agreed to as set out by your blog host. Beyond that the choice of whether or not to set rules of engagement for discussion is yours alone to make.

Any mature adult can and will approve and post comments containing dissenting points of view, provided they are expressed appropriately. But bloggers are not compelled to approve and post comments containing off-topic ad hominem attacks.

Communicating with civility is not being phony, it’s simply an acknowledgment that all people have value, no matter how misguided or unfamiliar their ideas or actions may be. Being polite is not the road to conformity, it’s the path to understanding. — Brad Shorr

Engaging with internet troll can negatively affect your brand and reputation

You only need to read a troll comment appearing under a well written article once to understand why posting troll comments is a no-no. Trolls are attention seekers. They have no power unless you give your power to them.

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. — Troll (Internet)

What motivates internet trolls?

Trolls have no true interest in the subjects they post on. Trolls don’t want you to post carefully constructed, reasonable arguments in a debate. Trolls crafts comments to emotionally upset you and make you lose your rationality. Trolls want you to completely lose your cool and your ability to sound like an intelligent person who knows what you’re talking about. Trolls derive pleasure from baiting people into highly charged emotional states and making them look stupid.

What trolls desire is our online time and attention, so when we refuse to communicate with them, they move elsewhere and seek out another target. Hence, the maxim: Don’t feed the trolls.

If your blog is targeted by a troll do not be emotionally triggered by the comment. Your blog is not YOU. The troll cannot touch your inner self, unless you give them permission to, so don’t open that inner door and give your power away. Take responsibility, develop a comment policy and either post the comment and refute the contents or delete it and blog on.

Commenting policies contain rules of engagement for discussion

A Comments Policy is a statement defining your policy regarding comments on your blog. It is also a “responsibility statement”. It informs the reader of what you will allow on your blog, what you will not allow, and what they are allowed to do. It establishes publicly the responsibilities of each party involved. — Lorelle VanFossen in a guide to creating a blog comments policy

Commenting policies create a safe environment for civil discussion

Without doubt a good comment policy that’s consistently enforced can make the difference between whether visitors will return or not. And, as creating a blog centered community is your focus as a blogger, developing and posting rules of engagement for discussion will create boundaries and a secure environment for civilized communication. Below are some points to consider when you undertake the process.

Some commenting policy considerations

1. Moderation

Will comments be moderated?
Will all comments be moderated?
Or will first time commenters be moderated?

2. Links

Will you approve and post comments containing links?
Will there be a limit on the number of links in comments that you approve and post?
Will you approve and post comments from commenters who use ‘keywords’ (words or phrases they want to rank in search engines for) as anchor text and insert it as their username?
Will you approve and post comments that include a signature link (a link to their blog) at the end of the comments?

3. Advertising and Spam

Will you approve and post comments which seem to be primarily made as advertising and promotion of the commenter’s site?
Will you approve and post comments which seem to be primarily made as advertising for a commercial product or service?
Will you approve and posts comments from commenters who have their user names linked to commercial sites?

4. Comment Length and Editing

Is there a maximum comment length (character or word limit)?
Will you edit comments and if so under what circumstances?

5. Special rules

Will you approve and post comments containing personal attacks, defamatory and/or inflammatory statements?
Will you approve and post comments containing obscene language?

6. All Rights Reserved

Will you include an All Rights Reserved clause?
If so will it apply to the blog owner’s right to edit, delete, move, or mark comments and trackbacks as spam?
Will you also reserve the right to block access to any individual or group from commenting or from the entire blog?

Discussion

Do you have a commenting policy posted on your blog?

Do you have any suggestions for additional considerations for those who are formulating a comment policy for their blog?

Have you received troll comments, and if so, how did you deal with them?

Related posts found in this blog:

Controversy and Blog Comments

Handle Online Attacks Effectively

Blog Titles and Branding Tools

How to handle negative comments

Libel: Blogging Rights and Wrongs

References:

100 Essential Legal and Privacy Guides for Bloggers

No Tolerance for Trolls

Recognizing and dealing with trolls

How to deal with trolls

How to Deal With Trolls on Your Professional Blog

Facebook Connections and Reputation Management

Posted on June 14, 2010 by timethief

These days one can be either hired or fired based on what employers find on our Facebook pages and reputation management has become a focus for bloggers. The reality is that much of the web is designed, not so much to share information, as to sell it. It’s also a reality bloggers today, more than ever before, have many demands on their time and social media networking to create an authentic online presence can be a time drain.

A new study by the Pew Research Center showed more adult Internet users are keeping track of their reputations online than in years past, with young adults aged 18 to 29 more likely than older adults to take steps to protect themselves.

“Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and lead author of the report, “Many users are learning and refining their approach as they go–changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online.”

I have just read Ben Rothke’s take on Facebook and would like to share his insights with you. (Please click through and read the whole article.)

There is a similar paradox when it comes to Facebook. The paradox is why people openly share such private information as their date of birth (amongst myriad other personal details) in their Facebook profile. … As of mid-June, only 7,539 of Facebook users have liked the official Facebook and Privacy page — 7,539 is but .000018% of Facebook users, not exactly banging down the privacy door. In other words, an infinitesimal amount of Facebook users seem to truly care about privacy. … — The Facebook privacy paradox

“Connections.” It’s an innocent-sounding word. But it’s at the heart of some of the worst of Facebook’s recent changes.

EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) wrote at length about the problems created by transforming personal information into “Connections” to allow far more people than ever before access to it, regardless of whether you want them to.
References:
Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization

I am not a Facebook member. Now that the dust has settled following the big brouhaha I’m wondering how my readers who are Facebook members fared. If you are a Facebook member did you stay? Or did you join the 36,000 departing Facebook members in the exodus?

Handle Online Attacks Effectively

Posted on March 18, 2010 by timethief

A personal attack is committed when a person substitutes abusive remarks for evidence when attacking another person’s claim or claims. This line of “reasoning” is fallacious because the attack is directed at the person making the claim and not the claim itself.

If you’ve been personally attacked online my advice is to consider failing to engage or delaying engagement. If you must respond, then do so calmly. Take the time to demonstrate there is no merit to statements made and others will think better of you for not losing your cool.

Hopefully you will never need have to deal with a serious attack but if you do and want to see it removed, you need to contact whoever controls that content. Most often, this means that you need to contact the author and/or webmaster of the page and ask them to take down the content in question.

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Tag Archives: reputation management

“Me on the Web” for reputation management

A comment policy for your blog