Entries from September 2008 ↓

ReputationDefender Blog recently ran across this physorg article that identifies narcissistic online profiles, as well as the emerging field of online psychology. The article quotes a recent University of Georgia study that looked at Facebook profiles.

The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Untrained observers were able to detect narcissism, too. The researchers found that the observers used three characteristics – quantity of social interaction, attractiveness of the individual and the degree of self promotion in the main photo – to form an impression of the individual’s personality. “People aren’t perfect in their assessments,” Buffardi said, “but our results show they’re somewhat accurate in their judgments.”

Narcissism is a trait of particular interest, Campbell said, because it hampers the ability form healthy, long-term relationships. “Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage,” Campbell said. “They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run.”

[SNIP]

“We’ve undergone a social change in the last four or five years and now almost every student manages their relationships through Facebook – something that few older people do,” Campbell said. “It’s a completely new social world that we’re just beginning to understand.” 

It is clear that people develop a reputation online based on where they post, who they poke and how they present themselves. It is interesting that even untrained observers were able to identify narcissists by looking at their Facebook profiles. This shows that while online psychology and sociology are incipient sciences, people are easily able to understand social and psychological cues online.

ReputationDefender wants to see how zombie bites relate to Myers-Briggs Type Indicator results.

ReputationDefender Blog ran across an interesting story from MSNBC today. According to a study conducted by CareerBuilder.com, the number of Hiring Managers who use social media to screen job applicants has doubled in the past two years. Currently, one out of every five bosses utilize sites like Facebook and Myspace for hiring best practices. Additionally, one third of professionals disqualify job applicants based on what they find online, usually drunken photos or drug abuse. Quoting from the page:

The survey found that 34 percent of the managers who do screen candidates on the Internet found content that made them drop the candidate from any short list.

The top area for concern among the hiring managers with 41 percent citing this as a downfall were candidates posting information about drinking or using drugs.

The second area with 40 percent of concern were candidates posting provocative or inappropriate photographs or information.

Other areas of concern to arise from social network sites were poor communication skills, lying about qualifications, candidates using discriminatory remarks related to race, gender or religion, and an unprofessional screen name.

But the survey found hiring managers scouring social network pages was not all bad with 24 percent of these managers saying they found content to help them solidify their decision to hire that candidate.

Top factors that influenced their hiring decision included candidate’s backgrounds supporting their qualifications for the job, proving they had good communications skills, and having a site that conveyed a professional image with a wide range of interests.

ReputationDefender Blog has covered these types of stories before (see here, here and here) but this story is newsworthy because it shows that the number of HR people facile with web 2.0 is on the rise. It also points out that your online reputation can also help you land a job, not just be disqualified for one.

“Hiring managers are using the Internet to get a more well-rounded view of job candidates in terms of their skills, accomplishments and overall fit within the company,” said CareerBuilder.com spokeswoman Rosemary Haefner in a statement.

“As a result, more job seekers are taking action to make their social networking profiles employer-friendly. Sixteen percent of workers who have social networking pages said they modified the content on their profile to convey a more professional image to potential employers.”

ReputationDefender can help anyone, including students and job seekers, refine their online reputation and present a professional, employable image online. Check out the newly minted ReputationDefender Testimonials Page, to see what others are saying about defending their online reputation.

We saw this parody piece online recently and thought it was funny. ReputationDefender should note that rumors of our acquisition by Google are greatly exaggerated. Still, this is a fun piece and worth a look and a link.

Quoting from the page:

In a perfect example of online business synergy, Google has announced the purchase of ReputationDefender, the online company devoted to helping people repair their cyber-reputation.

“This is an amazing breakthrough,” said a Google spokesperson. “As we all know, Google causes 99.9 percent of the damage to someone’s reputation to begin with, because we can’t be sued for archiving it in our search engine, even though Google is the only reason most people would find the defamation in the first place. I mean, someone gets defamed on a board with a dozen people reading, no one would notice, but when they search the target by name, it comes right up for anyone
snooping. What this means is the need for sites like ReputationDefender will never go away.”

We especially liked the predicted need for defending reputations in the future in this piece.

Online Reputation Management is essential in the digital age. ReputationDefender has the best team in the industry to manage your Google presence, even if the Mountain View search giant hasn’t acquired us (yet).

Following up on the ReputationDefender Blog posts dealing with the Google Chrome End User License Agreement, it seems that Google has changed the Chrome legal-ese. From the Google Blog:

Whenever we release a product in beta as we just did with Google Chrome, we can always count on our users to come up with ways to improve it. This week’s example: several eagle-eyed users and bloggers have expressed concern that Section 11 of Google Chrome’s terms of service attempts to give us rights to any user-generated content “submitted, posted or displayed on or through” the browser.

[SNIP]

But rest assured that we’re working quickly to fix this. The new terms will of course be retroactive, and will cover everyone who has downloaded Google Chrome since it was launched.

Kudos to Google for responding so quickly and professionally to this issue.

Google runs some of the most mature and sophisticated web applications currently available and their development has given back excellent technology to the wider development community. It would seem, as a technology company, Google is more than willing to share the very things that many technology companies consider their core business. That’s because, for Google, technology is only a platform for aggregating data and extrapolating relationships. The value is in the rich data analysis layer that exists beneath all of Googles products. Many people are up in arms about the ownership clauses that grant Google a perpetual licence to anything users create through the browser, but the real cause of that clause is so that Google can use all of the tools people use to harvest any data they can about individuals.

Using statistical, linguistic and contextual analysis they learn about how you live, what you do and most importantly what you are going to do. This intelligence can track your searches, your purchases, your responsiveness to advertisement, the news you read, the places you go and anything available about you on the internet. Now add to that the documents you write, the emails you send, the pages you surf to, the posts you make, the forms you submit, any feed or service you use and almost every piece of text you type.

Through the desire to learn about a user for perfectly legitimate purposes, a well of information has been created which constitutes a pervasive invasion of privacy. With a pool of information like that, it’s only a matter of time before its application moves beyond predictive contextual advertising to more invasive applications.