Judging from frequent posts to the CMA listserv, more and more former students are attempting to get college media outlets to remove news items from their online archives. The Washinton Post may have pointed out a way for college media to divert those requests with an article about online reputation management firms: Calling in pros to refine your Google image.
Google’s ubiquity as a research tool has given rise to a new industry: online identity management. The proliferation of blogs and Web sites can allow angry clients, jealous lovers or ruthless competitors to define a person’s identity. Whether true or not, their words can have far-reaching effects.
Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don’t promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.
The most frequent reason former students seek out the campus press is because of what I’ll politely term “youthful indiscretions” that show up in police blotter stories. Five years away from college, these former students find that those police blotter items show up high in search engine results.
From various discussions, it’s pretty clear that student media outlets aren’t going to erase history, so the only real avenue for change would be for these individuals to push the offending item farther down in the search results by getting online and becoming more of a digital presence - through their own web sites, comments on weblogs, and social networking sites. There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to ensure that relevant, current information shows up at the top when people search your name.
So next time someone asks you to remove something from the digital archives, after you decline their request, you might point them to this article from the Post, which can help explain how they can manage their online identity.
on Jul 3rd, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I think it’s so interesting how the Internet changes so many things in our lives that we never would have imagined that we would care about before…
on Jul 11th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Not that I have any dark stains on my reputation lingering about the Internet, but that is the great thing about having such a generic name as “Danny Sanchez!”
On the downside, it is tough keeping my sites up at the top of Google…