As someone who works with multiple projects and hundreds of social audiences: social network management  requires me coordinate a multi-faceted personal brand and engage with hundreds of different conversations.

Clients I work with are often in the same boat, especially when I work with executives who need to maintain a “face of the company” and a personal life as an executive.

I personally believe we all have the right to have our own relationships, to make personal decisions on how we mix our ideas, ethics, morals, and relationships into our conversations.

The problem with this is that we no longer have singular conversations; we now have mutated conversations that possibly stem from thousands of conversations that happened before them.

With Facebook and Google collecting mixing together everyone you know, you suddenly have an influx of viewpoints from different groups. The core problem is that all of these people don’t have the same backgrounds and beliefs, nor do the have the relationship in place to balance singular statements that may seem simply seem inappropriate, or even appear racist, sexist, or “off the deep end” extremist.

Most of us would like to live in a world that is devoid of prejudice and negative assumptions, but the simple fact is that people online have only a few seconds to perceive who you are… and only a fraction of a second to make an observation about who is in your network. Continue Reading »

Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal briefly covered the fact that reputation management and privacy oriented start-ups are beginning to see investment turn-around. I’ve posted the video below for educational purposes.

From my perspective the interesting issue is that there are companies out there “ruining” reputation in the name reputation management, yet individuals using the service and investors of these firms have no idea what the long term personal, business, legal, moral, or ethical ramifications will be. Our digital identity is being cultivated, harvested, and stolen without even thinking about it.

Yet the regulation in this space is completely non-existent. Continue Reading »

If you care about your career and the people you know, I’m simply going to say this: do yourself a favor and spend an hour reading the links below.
There is A LOT of change happening in the business world: with big opportunities and risks materializing every day.

Aside from personal gossip and business rumor, the topic of reputation management is one of the biggest areas of opportunity and risk. It is a topic that  have been very involved with over the past decade: working on roughly a dozen or so projects revolving around reputation and personal name (it also included working on several personal projects examining niches of the more general problem.)

In my last two articles covering background checks and online privacy, I was voicing some of my observations about the critical nature of this beast we call the web. Continue Reading »

As a professional, many of us are troubled by the notion that we may be judged by our actions, our history, our lifestyle, or the people we associate with.

In some cases we go through great lengths to create separation between our personal or public lives, even creating multiple silos within our personal and professional lives to create harmony and goodwill in our conversation.

Using myself as a personal example: I am the person who can have almost any conversation on almost any topic. I have a thick skin that is supported by a multi-faceted personality with humor, morality, and respect at its core. I have had the benefit of dealing with life and death crisis situations, personal tragedy, and industry changing business problems. With that said, I can talk to almost anyone on any subject.I know when to admit to things I do not know, and when to ask the hard questions.

The social media world creates a strange track history of my interactions with these conversations. I have a personal poetry site that doesn’t have a thing to do with my business life, and like every other person: my friends have a myriad of personal beliefs ranging from extreme religion to activism.

With such a varied personal and professional background, the web audience at large could dig into any particular silo and eventually find something they do not agree with… but they can also see a breadth of experience. Continue Reading »

What if you could take anyone you know and ask a question about them, without them knowing it? The digital world has created a virtual version of Pandora’s box, a secret treasure trove of information and insight that only a few people know how to use. If you had keys to this vault of information, if someone gave you a map to nearly infinite knowledge… would you use it?

Probably not.

In reality, every person who lives in the modern world has access to such information. The simple fact is that many of us are completely overwhelmed by the amount of information we need to sift through… having few or non-existent methods for qualifying how we spend our time sifting through it.

It is a simple fact that hundreds of millions of people use web-enabled cell phones, and that 3G / 4G units are quickly covering the world (on June 24th, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs stated the worldwide 3G users surpassed one billion.)

Consider your network.

Imagine how much information exists for you online, created both by you, your family, your friends, your co-workers, your competitors, and everything that has been done in the past.

Now think about the people you care about: your family and friends. Multiple the information that you have online by the number of people you consider “close to you”

Now ask about Pandora’s Box.

If Pandora’s Box (the web) could answer these questions… would you want to know? is it your right to know?

• Where was my spouse last Saturday night?
• How many parties did my employee attend in 2010?
• Is my new business partner in any risky groups?
• What did this public employee do for fun yesterday?

These are all incredibly complex questions that could be rooted in entirely reasonable viewpoints… but they all define the “double edged sword” of information freedom and personal privacy. We know more about each other than we ever did… and that information is being used by our our family, our friends, the public, and our enemies.

In a perfect world many of us probably wouldn’t complain too much about our family and friends using Pandora’s box, but seeing as the profit of our personal information is being driven by the public and by our enemies… Pandora’s box has been arguably flung open by the loving term “social media.”

What do you think of Pandora’s Box?

READ MORE: Background Checks Pt II – Discrimination, privacy, accuracy and compliance.