Personal reputation in a social media world

As anyone who knows me knows - I'm a bit of a social media buff. Between that and Internet search that's pretty much what I do all day. I spend a lot of time looking at how search, social and social search are converging at a huge speed, and I like talking about the implications of that. One of the things that people often ask me about - in connection with this - is privacy. For me, privacy is now mixed up with levels of authority, and for most of us, we're going to have to run an interesting tightrope between protecting our privacy and being seen as authoritative.

Websites are decreasing in importance. You have only to look at adverts for new Bond film Skyfall to see that while it has a website, the emphasis is really rather more on the Facebook page. That has 1,335,188 likes with 151,420 talking about it. If I want to interact with a company, I'm not going to go to the website, I'll go to the Facebook page to ask my question, comment, complain or praise. I'll do this for lots of reasons, not only to ask, comment etc but to share that with other people. If a company does something wrong, I'm less interested in a one-to-one email, and more keen on shining a social media light on them. Look at any Google page of results, and you'll often find that most of the results are now coming from social media resources - Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, Wikipedia and the rest of them. What does Facebook boast about? The 1 billion users of the system. Can Google boast about the type of thing? Well, we don't really do the whole 'we index more webpages than you do) thing any longer. True, they can talk about the number of searches run, but we're not really users of Google in the same way that we are with Facebook. I can expand on this (and often do), but Facebook is powerful because it keeps people on its site, and Google is weak because it pushes them away (as they find a good answer to their question and leave), which is why they're trying so hard with the G+ system.

What we're now seeing is a clear move - and it's for search engines to embrace social media. Google is doing it by linking to G+ accounts, by personalising search, by identifying authors, talking about how many circles they are in and so on. Bing and Blekko encourage you to link your Facebook accounts to them so that they can pull in the data from your contacts. News curation sites and apps also want to know who you follow on Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and they also want to know how many people follow you. Showyou wants to give you content from social media sites, Zite pulls content from people who share material, as do many others. Let's be quite certain here; this is not going to go away. It will increase as we become submerged in more and more social resources. I tweeted recently to say that social media is dead, because it's ALL social media now.

How does this work on the authority level? In 'the old days' it was pretty easy to look at a website and tell if it was a fake or spoof. A quick checklist, tick tick cross and you were well away. However, how are we going to do that now? With the rise of the individual within search it's not quite as easy. I found the idea that Stephen Fry was essentially validated British Celebrity Twitter accounts himself until Twitter got around to doing validation very interesting. If we trust Stephen Fry (no need to like, just trust) that if he says a certain account is linked to the person it is supposed to be linked to, then it is.

Now, a lot of the people that I follow on Twitter are followed because I like what they post, what they are interested in, the links they provide and so on. I am much less interested in where they work. Sure, it's nice to know if it's a University or a corporate, a school or if they're a home worker, but that's not the most important thing for me. I'm moving to a position where the authority that someone has is not really associated with their place of employment, and it's much more associated with their presence in social media. If a person with thousands of followers leaves one company and moves to another, do they gain authority because of their new employer? Or could it be argued that the new employer gains authority because they have employed someone with thousands of followers? I'm more interested in knowing that a person is followed by a million others than I am by knowing that they work for a company that I don't know anything about. If I follow someone on Twitter, I'm more likely to notice them on LinkedIn, Slideshare or Facebook AND when I meet them at a conference. In fact, I'm much more likely to try and ferret them out at a conference because I know them via social media.

You can argue this isn't fair, and I'll agree with you. However, that doesn't change the fact that if I can't see someone via social media, I'm less likely to see them at all - or that they are going to have to work a lot harder to be seen. I work at home, not in an office, and I mainly see people via my screen, or on a course or at a conference, so that's how it works for me - your situation may well be very different, and what I've said doesn't apply, particularly if you're in an organisation that you don't have to stretch beyond. Equally though, your employer doesn't owe you a living, and the jobs for life thing doesn't work any more. You have to be responsible for your career, and part of that now means that you've got to be where other people are. That used to be in citation indexes, or at conferences or on the title page of books. Still is, to some extent, but now - social media is where it's at.

Does this mean you have to been on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest (do you want me to carry on, cos I can!) and spend your time updating locations and status? Up to you really - it's your life, your job, your reputation. However, I firmly belive that in the next few years we're going to carry on moving to the importance of the person, and it's best to get in early. Utilise the tools that interest you, and let other people know that you're out there. A potential new employer, if they have any brains at all are going to be looking at your social media footprint as much as anything in your CV. If you were going to employ someone, and two people had equally good CVs, which would you go for - the one with hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers or the one who didn't have a Twitter account? The one with lots of contacts on LinkedIn, or the one with none?

One of my favourite quotes at the moment is from Erik Qualman, who is the author of Socialnomics: "We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it."

Comments

[Rick McDonald]

The downfall to social media, if you could call it that is that it must be a part of your everyday life in order to keep the momentum and attention you need for it to be successful.

[Rosie Hare]

Subconscious bias might mean that you're more likely to employ someone who seems to have the bigger social media footprint, but it would also depend on their answers on the day in the interview. The problem I occasionally have with twitter and Facebook etc is that it's quite easy to overdo it and paint yourself in a negative light without really meaning to.

[Sarah Hinton]

A really interesting and thought-provoking post. I was inspired to base my latest post on this.
The Disruptive Searcher

[Alice Tyler]

But what happens if a person with thousands of followers does not, in fact, know what they are talking about? Or, worse still, deliberately sets out to swindle people out of their money? Or sets out to persuade their followers to persecute a particular group of people?

Such things have happened throughout history. The only difference is that now it can happen more quickly and effect more people than has been possible in the past.

And, in anwer to your question I would not make my decision about which person to employ until AFTER I had read several of the Twitterer's Tweets! See above.

[Phil Bradley]

Alice - you're of course entirely right. And I could equally replace 'person' with website, and your comments would be just as valid. What we - as information professionals - have to do is to work out ways in which we can authenticate individuals, exactly as we did with websites, and then pass that knowledge onto the people we work with. Part of this will be to look at followers, retweets, responses, biographic details, types of tweet and so on.