What The Harvard Meme Students Can Teach Us About The Reputation Economy

In June, Harvard withdrew admissions offers from 10 students who exchanged offensive, obscene and hateful memes in a private Facebook group called “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.”

You might be tempted to shake your head and chalk this up to immaturity, but it’s not just college kids being held accountable for their digital posts. Remember the woman who lost her job over an insensitive AIDS tweet? And earlier this year, a dean at Yale was fired for inflammatory and hateful reviews that she posted on Yelp.

If one thing is clear, it’s that we’re all becoming much more vulnerable to online blunders that can ruin our careers. Already, 50% of US adults say their Google results aren’t positive and that number is bound to increase as we live more and more of our lives online.

The scary thing is that, as our online vulnerability has increased, so too has our reliability on digital searches and screenings — both manual and automated — to make important decisions. Depending on the study, somewhere between 30% and 40% of college admissions officers admit to screening social media accounts to learn more about their applicants. And 30% said they had found info online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.

College admissions officers aren’t alone. Today, 75% of HR departments are required to look candidates up online before offering them an interview. And 70% use social media to screen candidates, up from 11% in 2006. With access to tools that help automate this screening process, can you really blame them? Walmart receives 5 million job applications per year. Even if you only spent 5 minutes per application, it would still take you 205 years to get through every application before you even held a single interview.

Customers are following suit. Even when consumers start the buying process with a referral, Google is the very first place they look to do their due diligence. Online search has become the most trusted source of information about people and companies -- a higher level of trust than any other online or offline source.

The Rise of the Reputation Economy

These trends aren’t going to reverse anytime soon. As data aggregators become more powerful and digital information about our reputations becomes more readily available, we can expect our online reputations to play a bigger and bigger role in whether or not we land important clients, business deals, or job interviews. Even the White House is exploring what it would look like to make “social media screening” a part of the vetting process for immigrants to enter the country.

With our personal and corporate digital reputations so heavily scrutinized during purchasing decisions and big life moments, you might find yourself drawing parallels to how banks and credit card companies use credit scores to make their decisions on rates and loans. The difference is that, as we become savvier at retrieving and analyzing digital footprints, the impact of your online reputation is likely to play a much larger role than a credit score ever could.

Think of it this way: the average young person today will switch jobs 12 times in their career. That’s a new job (and another reputation screening) every three to four years of our professional lives. And by 2020, 40% of the US workforce will be working freelance on the side. All in all, more than 60 million people will consistently rely on the power of their personal brands and online footprint to further their careers and bring in a steady income.

Unlike any generation before, today’s employees must consistently pitch themselves to the next employer. (Hence, the rise of LinkedIn.) Any skills you acquire need to be showcased and visible, both for human and automated screeners. The people that figure out how to showcase themselves well for digital screenings will earn more opportunities. Those that don’t will miss out and wonder why they’re getting passed over.

Online Privacy Offers a False Sense of Security

Importantly, the reputation economy goes far beyond what is searchable and public.

The Harvard students shared memes in a private group message on Facebook, and the posts still ended up in the hands of admissions officers. How did that happen?

It’s simple, really -- someone shared them. Even if you believe in the general goodwill of the tech corporations that host all this data, your online posts and messages are only as private as the people you share them with. (One lesson we can take away from today’s political climate is that private emails have a funny habit of getting unwanted public attention.)

And don’t forget that apps like Snapchat have blanket permission to “store and distribute” your drunk and nude selfies — you agreed to it in the terms and conditions — and Facebook has admitted toplaying games with your privacy settings, offering up your “private” account to potential friends by using your phone’s GPS data.

Online privacy offers a false sense of security because it lulls us into thinking we can post, share, message, or email whatever we want online without repercussions.

My advice? Don’t post or share anything online that you wouldn’t want your customers or employers seeing.

Your Online Presence Can Be a Valuable Asset

When people hear horror stories like this one, their first reflex is to hide. Some folks change their name on Facebook or start spending less time on social media.

It’s a good idea, but unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the main issue, which is that colleges, consumers and employers are all using online reputation screenings as an integrated part of their decision-making process.

Your online reputation is the information people (and machines) find about you online, so hiding behind privacy settings -- or not posting anything at all -- actually puts you at risk. If a hiring manager’s automatic screening tool can’t find anything about you online, it’s an easy reason to move onto the next candidate. (57% admit to doing this.) When clients Google you and can’t find anything about you or your business, they’re just one click away from your competitors.

So while those Harvard students were using Facebook to spread hateful messages, remember that you can choose to use your digital presence to build identity capital, support your career and drive revenue.

Be smart about how you position yourself online. It may be your ticket to success, and it doesn’t require a Harvard education.

The Grinch: What Happened AFTER He Stole Christmas?

Have you Googled the Grinch recently? Go ahead, take a look.

His search results are abysmal. Nearly the entire first page is clouded by allegations of him “stealing Christmas.”

And why? Just because he wanted his neighbors to keep it down a bit?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. And I agree — the Grinch did actually break into all those houses and run off with presents, ornaments, and trees. It was a very regrettable thing that he did.

But the Grinch gave back everything he stole, publicly apologized, and was forgiven by all of Whoville. And despite having righted his wrong, the Grinch is haunted to this day by the online reflection of that act. In fact, he’s famous for it.

The Grinch’s Current Situation

I did a little digging and discovered that the Grinch is an experienced tailor with his own tailoring business. (He’s quite talented too — he made his own fitted Santa suit and Santa hat for that shameful act, complete with flared collars and cuffs.)

Unfortunately, there’s nothing online about his business — just the negative information about his thievery. Given that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase, the Grinch’s online presence is likely a very influential deterrent for most of his customers.

And it’s not a minor issue for him either. The Grinch gets Googled roughly 200,000 times each month — and 5 times that amount come Christmas time! He’s losing tons of business just by virtue of what people find about him online.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If I were to take on the Grinch as a client, I’d propose the following steps to improve his online presence and turn that huge search volume into new business leads.

Opportunities for Immediate Improvement

Before we start creating any new online properties for the Grinch, I’d want to make sure that we fix what’s already out there. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

First, Wikipedia. The majority of the Grinch’s Wikipedia page is inappropriately negative with biased phrases like “grumpy, anti-holiday spirit” and presumptuous statements like “He scorns the Christmas season…apparently irritated by the happiness of others and deriving pleasure from spoiling other people's merriment.”

This kind of language is much more reminiscent of a tabloid than a Wikipedia page.

Wiki guidelines explicitly state that Biographies of Living Persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively, neutrally, and with regard for the subject's privacy. That’s a fancy way of saying that Wiki editors need to be really careful about the kind of information they put online about any living people. Luckily for the Grinch, any material that violates this rule may be removed immediately. So that’s step one.

The other piece of the Grinch’s online presence worth fixing ASAP are his social profiles.

It looks like he already has a LinkedIn and Twitter profile with his name in the URLs. The next steps would be to fill those profiles out with as much information as possible and connect with people in the Grinch’s existing network. These are two critical steps that will help those profiles rise in search results.

Creating New Properties

One of the biggest issues with the Grinch’s online presence is the lack of properties under his control. When people look him up online, the narrative is completely controlled by other people.

I highly recommend we create a website for the Grinch’s tailoring business, perhaps GrinchTailors.com. We’re up against some pretty nasty negatives, so we’ll want to do everything we can to get this site on the 1st page quickly. Building a page all about the Grinch (with his name in the URL) will help, and keeping an active blog will be good too. The content for the blog will be determined based on the Grinch’s audience, something I’ll have to find out when I speak directly with the Grinch.

I’d like to also get access to TheGrinch.com, which would serve as a personal website, a central hub of information for anyone interested in learning more or getting in touch. Visitors would be able to find the Grinch’s experience, his tailoring work, contact information, and client testimonials to mitigate the negative information that’s already out there.

Finally, we’ll want to reserve several social media properties, choices we’ll determine after hearing more about the demographic info of The Grinch’s target audience. To start, I’d recommend Facebook, Instagram, Crunchbase, Google+, and Youtube. Then we’ll need to optimize everything to maximize their potential for ranking in search results.

Press Opportunities and Media Outreach

The Grinch has decades of experience as a tailor and is well-known in the tailoring community but there’s absolutely no positive content out there that reflects that. Sure, we’ll want an active blog on his company and personal websites, but I’d also like to get him published on external publications to build his credibility as an expert in his field.

For starters, I’d like to pitch the Grinch as a contributing author to business publications like Entrepreneur and Forbes, and style publications like GQ and Esquire.

Next, I’d sign the Grinch up for online services like HARO and ProfNet Queries to find opportunities to secure valuable media coverage. I’d also like to connect with mid-level fashion and style bloggers to secure opportunities for collaboration.

And that’s really just the start. Once we start earning a foothold in the 1st page of organic search results, we’ll enjoy a snowball effect. More traffic on The Grinch’s web properties means more people engaging with his positive content instead of the negatives. More engagement means more conversions back to his tailoring website and more improvements in search results. And the cycle continues.

I know I can help turn the Grinch’s online presence around. I just need to get ahold of the guy. Tell him to give me a shout if you see him. I’ll give you a referral bonus.