Reputation Management in a Transparent Age
Tiger Woods damaged his career by cheating on his wife to an alarming degree.
Tiger Woods damaged his career by building a personal brand he couldn’t support.
Both of these statements are true, but I’d say there is a hell of a lot more to think about in regards to the second, especially given the changes to reputation that our panoptic society is going to go through.
The short version is: be awesome, not perfect.
Tiger built a brand based on not only being the most dominant player in the history of sport, but also on being the All American Guy. Hardworking, polite, humble, family man, always remembering to thank and honour his parents. Which is fabulous, if it’s you. But if you aren’t that robotically perfect, it is officially a ticking timebomb to seem too perfect, especially if your life is lived in public.
If you exist in social media, or spend time around people you do, your behaviour will be documented. Your option is to either live a life in fear of being caught slipping up, or to be frank and honest about who you are, honest about what you do, and accepting of how you will be seen.
But none of this has anything to do with your work, which is what SHOULD matter.
Would Tiger Woods be as well paid if he’d been less seemingly perfect? Of course not. But it would have been sustainable, and relatively scandal proof. And he still would have gotten endorsements, because he’s THE BEST, by a large margin. People argue that part of the problem is the sport in question, and it’s reputation, but I can only think of John McEnroe, a star of a similarly mannered sport who was well known for his outbursts and attitude. If you insist your reputation and accolades be based on your work, they can only be invalidated by your work.
I’m not arguing it’s okay to be a bad person. I’m just suggesting that basing your value on something as subjective as your persona, especially one that doesn’t actually reflect your real-life actions, is a dangerous risk, and one that is becoming less likely to pan out.
I’m not going to fight to delete every picture of me drinking a shot at a bar with my friends. I’m not going to censor myself if I happen to feel a little hungover from time to time.
When it comes to my career, I’d rather people think my work is awesome, than have them think I’m perfect. I’d rather what I do justify accepting perceived flaws in who I am.
At the end of the day, the truth never really comes crashing down on you. And in the social media panopticon, every fabrication comes with a countdown clock.
Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions
“We’re primed and ready now and have lots of experience publishing all those random opinions about people and things on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook already. It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.
This has been on my mind for a long while now. Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.
Sure, we’ve evolved a legal infrastructure to deal with libel, slander and defamation. Those laws worked well in an era of the printing press, and sort of stretched to cover radio and television. But they are as ineffective against the Internet as copyright laws are in battling music piracy.” -Michael Arrington (via Marc D Schiller)
See also: Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically
This has come up a lot lately, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s coming quicker than any of us think - so much of our social contract is possible only without the burden of documentation, we can only ignore the failings of humans when not constantly confronted with evidence.
We’re entering an age where the market on shame will be flooded, and the social value of shame will plummet as a consequence. But right now, the initial reaction will be an attempt to inflate the value and costs of shame, as an attempt to (over) correct what will be interpreted as a conflict between our values and our reality.
Reality will win. A lot of (social) lives will be casualties of a long, and doubtless brutal battle.
Reputation isn’t dead, it’s dying (more accurately, changing). And the death throes will do a considerable amount of damage.
Newspapers should not have comments
This amazing WSJ article that everyone’s talking about, A Manifesto for Slow Communications, has only three comments - all pretty lame ones. People are discussing it on their blogs, via Twitter, in real life. But the three comments sit there wrongly representing the success of the article, newspaper readers’ engagement, the WSJ’s “digital strategy,” and the importance of reader feedback.
If comments were turned off, journalists would be more likely to go to other blogs and Twitter and read the real conversation, infusing their follow up articles with fresh ideas and relevancy. That’s what I do with my blog.
Plus we all know newspaper commenters are completely psycho nutbags so no one would miss it. In fact turning the comments off would make reading a news site more pleasant for the rest of us.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on blogs, or on twitter, are well thought out, often dissenting, and are open to the possibility that they’ve missed something.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on newspaper websites fall somewhere between ignorant and offensive, normally about 1/5th treading close to being racist.
I would not miss comments, were they eliminated from the sites of every newspaper I read. Commentary that isn’t connected to an identity is rarely insightful, as people LIKE to claim insight, and generally cling to anonymity in the face of oppression, or to be a dick.
Facebook Connect and Owning Reputation.
Anonymity is dying, and that’s probably a good thing in regards to online conversation and communication.
As more and more services switch to Facebook Connect as an authentication option, Facebook will become a very valuable arbiter of reputation. A service that will happily delete your profile if your name sounds too fake, Facebook has made no effort to hide the fact that it’s supposed to be about real people, and real lives. Facebook has also been making attempts to tie your actions to their social graph for a while - the first major attempt, with Beacon, scared the crap out of people. Facebook Connect is a better solution, because it’s not packaged as a way to attach your real world identity, and therefore reputation, to your actions. Connect is sold to users as a way of reducing the hassle of logging in to leave comments.
But it solves the reputation problem, which has been plaguing anyone trying to have important real world conversations online, for as long as people have been trying to have important real world conversations online.
Facebook ties your name, and a small (and optional) amount of biographical information to your friends, your actions in the Facebook ecosystem, and images and events. When it starts connecting that identity to all the comments you make online, blog conversations, arguments and opinions, it will be the best barometer available for reputation.
It’s entirely foreseeable that Facebook could functionally own individual reputation online. Which is why, from my point of view, any conversation about them being in competition with Twitter misses the point entirely.
