Robert Agresta

On March 6, 1974, Ayn Rand gave the commencement address to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Among other salient points she is credited with the following profundity:

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

Not unlike philosophy, Google is a mass collection of data about the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.  — This includes you or your organization. 

The question has become, what is the Internet’s philosophy about you and does it mesh with who you are?  Preemptive reputation management has become a critical vocation.

If someone searches for your name in Google, what would the results tell them about you? How would this affect their opinion of you professionally or socially?  It is clear.  You need a strategy.  If you choose not to manage, you still have made a choice. 

So, how can you manage what is out there about you?

Google results are generated by a trade-secret, dynamic and proprietary algorithm that Google owns and shares with no one.  However, a handful of programmers, web developers and hackers have established some of the more influential factors that Google uses to evaluate the relevance of a page to a search.  Google is so good at what it does that most users will rarely go past page 1 of Google results before clicking on one of the results, nevertheless page 2.

Although taking something off the Internet is nearly impossible, burying it in the noise isn’t.  ( Try this Internet time machine out http://wayback.archive.org/web/ )  With this knowledge in mind, one of the best strategies is the following. 

It is called Positive Cache Management. (“PCM”)  If you think of your Google results as a live resume about yourself, you want it to be constantly updated so that searchers get the most accurate depiction of who you are and how you want them to see you.  The side-effect of PCM is that you push negative items downwards in the results and off the page and onto the subsequent pages where they are less likely to be seen. 

So what keeps certain items at the top of a Google search and what can fill those  critical first 20 results with your desired information? 

Get the newest, most relevant content you have, on the oldest domain names you can find.  In other words, a page on a www.google.com/profiles for example would be very high on the list because google.com was registered a long time ago. 

Google likes old domain names. So get a facebook page, get a Google profile, get a twitter account, get a foursquare account, get a Wikipedia page if you can.  Start and regularly update a blog on either Wordpress or tumblr.  Load up those first results with pages about you on websites that have been around a while.  This will drive up the content listed. 

Coordinate your posts and status updates across all services, twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, etc.  Use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact to email out the updates that you write every time you write one.  Think of these like press releases when you write them.  They should be sobering, analytical and of interest from a journalistic perspective. If there are negative articles that exist about yourself in major media publications, like the New York Times for example, those articles are given a very high page rank.  To push something like that onto another page of Google results  requires other posts with the same or higher page rank to compete with it.  The only way you can be effective at this is by exposing yourself to the press.

It is important to note, that by most standards you will then become a public figure under the law.  By becoming a public figure you are being exposed to a greater level of publicity and therefore are expected to bear the consequences of negative publicity, even if untrue.  This would make it very hard to sue the character assailant because you would have a higher standard of proof than the average private individual.  The truth is, it is getting harder and harder to stay a private individual as anyone can blog about you or your organization on the Internet.  As long as you want its power and opportunities, the Internet demands that you trade some of your privacy.

For more information or help with anything in this article, please contact Robert Agresta at ragresta@agresta1.com. 

The take away: Quite simply you have to keep it fresh and relevant.