Where can I get a lute? How does French Latin differentiate from Italianate Latin? How fast is the Carmen Quintet? What’s so great about Diana Damrau? When is Edita Gruberova’s next Violetta? What’s playing at the Met tonight?
Chances are, if you are at all technology oriented, you know how to find this information. But have you thought about the other side of the coin? What information are people finding about you? Chances are, they’re using the same tools to learn about you as you use when you want to learn something, so it’s not too hard to find out.
Google Yourself
We’ve all Googled ourselves at some point—but if you haven’t done so recently, do it now. The Internet is changing every day, and search results can shift around based on a lot of factors.
When you Google yourself, there are two main questions you want to answer: 1) Are the top few results about me or someone else with my name? and 2) Is the content that is about me what I want people to see?
Question one has to do with “search engine optimization,” which basically means doing what you can to get your website to show up in the top Google (or other search engine, but mostly Google) results when people search your name or a phrase that has to do with a product you’re selling. Search engine optimization is a huge topic that goes beyond the scope of this article, but basics include making sure your name (or the desired phrase) is included in the text a good amount of times and getting a lot of other websites to link to yours.
The rest of this article will focus on question two.
Your Website
The first place your Googlers will usually want to visit is your official website. This is great news for you, because it’s one piece of the Internet that you have complete control over. It doesn’t matter who has posted negative reviews, unflattering pictures, and blooper videos of you, because you don’t have to include them on your website.
In fact, if you have a really well made, comprehensive, up-to-date website, people will often not feel the need to search further, so you won’t have to contend as much with unflattering Web content. However, this is easier said than done. Websites are costly or difficult to design and sometimes a pain to update. I update my Twitter, Facebook, blog, and ReverbNation accounts before I update my website, because it’s such an unpleasant task. Consider this a friendly reminder to actually update your website and fill it with the good, positive things you want people to see.
YouTube
We’ll talk more about this next month, but there’s not much you can do about an online video of yourself that you don’t like. You can ask the person who posted it to take it down, but they are in no way obligated to do so. If the poster doesn’t want to remove the video (such as a duet with another singer), you can simply ask them to remove your name from it. Again, they don’t have to, so you’ll have to hope they’re cooperative.
Other than that, try to post videos you do like of yourself and optimize them to come up first when people search for your name. And always remember: cameras are everywhere these days, so if you don’t want someone to see it, don’t do it!
Blog
We’ve discussed the pros and cons of blogging before (November 2010), but it probably isn’t the first thing that came to your mind when you read the title of this column. Don’t blogs have more drawbacks against your online reputation than benefits? Well, it’s true that you can write something that will stir up unwanted controversy. It’s very easy to offend a colleague or make yourself look unprofessional on a blog. But think about it from the opposite perspective. What if you’re already in a controversy? What if you’re starring in a scandalous régie production, or fired from a high-profile gig, or caught up in a diva rivalry, and the press is all over it? Anyone who has been interviewed (well, not by me, I hope) knows that inaccuracies abound. Misquotes are commonplace, perspectives are imbalanced, and “facts” can be complete fiction. You can send out a press release with your statement, but these will usually be either ignored or expostulated upon by the same reporters who misquoted you in the first place.
This is when you wish you had a blog. Your blog is your chance to tell your side of the story, unedited and independent of any paper, which may or may not heed your pleas to publish your rebuttal or correct their errata. Your blog will become your official statement on the situation, the online community will read it and link to it, and the press may even quote from it.
The catch is that it will seem official only if you already have a blog that you at least occasionally post to, not just throw one up at the last minute. So start now . . . and try not to step on any toes in the meantime.
Your Online Persona
You probably belong to some “closed” networks, such as Facebook, and some “open” networks, such as online forums, where you may or not be anonymous. However, privacy isn’t always so black-and-white. It can take very few pieces of information for someone to figure out your identity in a small world like ours, and the frequent Facebook privacy violation scandals go to show that you can never be too sure what information is leaking. Take neither privacy nor anonymity for granted. Before everything you post, ask yourself, “Would I be comfortable if my mom saw this? If a potential employer saw this? If a current employer saw this?” I’m not saying the answer always has to be yes, but it’s a good idea to have those questions in the back of your mind, just to keep tabs on your online persona.
Remember: always be the bigger person, avoid snark, and have a sense of humor about losers who prowl the Internet picking fights.
Reviews
If you get a good review, congratulations! Link to it on Twitter, share it on your website, add quotes from it to your bio! But what if you get a bad review, and the article is online?
You have a few options. Most articles online have an option to leave comments, so one choice could be to leave a response in the comments section. However, this can be seen as petty. Plus, most people don’t read the comments anyway. And people who do comment on these kinds of articles are usually those Internet trolls who go around insulting people for no reason, so there’s a danger of the discussion escalating into an unflattering flame war.
You could post a thoughtful, fair response on your blog. This would, of course, draw attention to the negative press in a place that people might not have otherwise read it. But, with good writing skills, you can present a good rebuttal without seeming defensive, and you’re more likely to get encouraging responses from your fans than pointless insults from trolls.
A third choice is to do nothing. After all, the more the article is linked to, the higher it will rank in search engines, so why promote it?
The choice you make should depend on how much you really need to say about the review—was it particularly unfair or uninformed or just a matter of taste?—and on how active you normally are online. If you are a prolific tweeter and blogger, it would look odd for you to ignore the situation, while if you are not very vocal online, it would look suspicious for you to jump into the conversation without establishing a presence first.
The key to taking control of your online reputation is to publish and distribute the content you want, rather than leaving it to chance.
