Preparing For Your and Your Kid’s Future Online

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, suggested during an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

The interview isn’t fully about online privacy, but it’s relevant to the future of the search engine and all of our online lives.

A few days later I saw a post from Jessica Gottlieb titled “The Problem With Mom Blogging When Your Kids Are Older.” In the post she gives a generalized example of what I imagine to be a pretty usual conversation that happens between mothers and their near-adolescent daughters. The gist of the post was regarding the need to let her children tell their own story and not do it for them. Even going as far as intentionally misspelling her kids’ names so that the mention of them growing up cannot be found easily with searches in the future. I’ll share a few quotes from her post:

“The stories don’t belong to me any more.”

“I can’t tell you everything, because this is her story, not mine.”

This brings up a very relevant topic in the increase of everyone’s activity on the social web. How do you use the web as a social activity, network, and professional tool and still maintain your reputation with your friends and employer?

There are a lot of complaints out there about people being someone completely different online than they are offline. Often the person projecting a different personality online is identifiable either through an avatar or their real name.

I’m not talking about gaming networks or forum trolls. I’m also not talking about information privacy. I’m talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn users and blog authors and the content they create and add to the web. I’m talking about preparing for your future of search.

What are future employers going to see about you or your kids when they go to Google and search for you or them? Let’s not get into the legality of any of this or the morality of it. That search is going to happen and it’s not restricted or controlled by you or who you allow to run it. What will it display?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t just for companies anymore.

A lot of people whose lives often take place in the digital space already know that they need to keep an eye on the what/where/when/who of who mentions them online. Most of these people likely (or should) have Google Alerts setup for their full name, another for their online name. This is an important first step in monitoring your online presence. However, this only notifies you of anything new that matches what you’re searching for.

The Geek Girls have a great Five-Minute Guide to Google Alerts. If you haven’t setup alerts for yourself yet you should read their post.

Background Check?

While it’s a legal gray area to do a background check via social networks or Google it still happens. I’ve seen different percentages reported as far as how many HR managers are checking Google for background information. Which means that more than zero may be using information they find about you online. However, if they can find it online, so can you. You just need to know how and what to search.

Kate-Madonna Hindes is an expert in helping people not only make their resumes better but in helping them network themselves online, usually for the purposes of job seeking. I asked her about some of the biggest things online job seekers should watch out for.

As job seekers join social networks, it’s important to remember the mantra, “once on the web, always on the web.”  By acting as their own recruiter, candidates can source information about themselves and see what is showing up under their names or other identifiable information.  If information is private, it should not be disclosed to the web in any form.

Being Prepared

Having your alerts and watching what you post about yourself but still being active online can still lead to times when things are posted about you that you don’t necessarily like or that are even accurate. The other possible issue is that something you said is either wrong, strikes a bad nerve, or is taken out of context. If you have control of the content you could delete it, but that’s like trying to hide something. Also, since it was already out there and you already feel the reason to remove it there is reason to believe that someone else saved it as a screenshot or the file.

I asked Jennifer Kane of Kane Consulting how she helps her clients and herself deal with fallouts like this.

The most important thing that we tell our clients, and ourselves, is to be transparent…

Yes, there is a permanence to what you say on the social web and those words and images can come back to haunt you. Increasingly, though they’re coming back to haunt everyone.

When words you say, the things you do and the ideas you think are immediately captured, syndicated and analyzed, lying and reinvention become vastly more difficult. Your best option then is to choose to reveal less, be more transparent and honest about the things you do reveal, apologize immediately if your words come back to haunt you and keep moving forward.

The present is becoming the past so quickly that humility and time will be your best assets for managing your reputation in the future.

Rinse, wash, try not to repeat.

This is all great if you’re working with yourself. The same self that didn’t grow up with Google as a verb or www always around. Today’s kids are always connected and they are going to be the ones creating the awesome stuff in the future when Facebook and Twitter are “that thing my mom uses”. The lessons you teach them now with their life in general could very well help them deal with their own privacy. Jessica had this to add when I asked her how she’s teaching her kids about online safety, decency, and respect for themselves.

When you teach your kids manners it’s simple to incorporate online manners as well. At every age there are different lessons. We teach them privacy fairly early on, as that is a safety issue. Moving forward we teach them the intricacies of privacy, like setting up a fake birthday on your fake email with your fake name that you use for things like online gaming or shopping with gift cards.

The nightmare AND the glory of that web is that we are losing our privacy. My kids love to text, they are far more likely to text than they are to talk, and every parent should embrace this. We gave our daughter a cell phone and explained to her that (like her email) we would very likely read every message going in and out. It is important for every child (and for every adult) to understand that once you have written something down, in any forum, you are responsible for those words. Our children need to know that their words have the ability to elevate or to destroy.

As our children move to more public social networking, our rules, and our guidance will necessarily change and grow with them.

How do you handle your online reputation? What Google Alerts do you have setup for yourself? Have you ever had to deal with fallout from a bad experience online?

What we do online stays online. As we grow into the social web we need to find ways to maintain our reputation online.

I look forward to your feedback.