It is quite a well-known fact that businesses need to work hard on building and sustaining a positive reputation. After all, nobody will shop with a company that has a poor reputation. If someone were to say they have terrible customer service, that their prices are too high or that their products don’t work, nobody else would then decide to give it a try, after all.
However, experts in the industry agree that online reputation management is not just for businesses anymore. While the vast majority of the work done by a reputation management company still focuses on companies of various sizes, they are seeing an increase in the number of individual, ordinary people. So why is this? Why does it suddenly matter what people think about us on an individual level, and how has the internet taken over so much of our lives that every individual does actually have an online reputation that they should concern themselves with.
Why Everybody Has an Online Reputation
Many of us can still remember a world without internet. Yet it seems as if, in the few years that the World Wide Web has been with us, everything has changed. It is impossible nowadays to not be online. The vast majority of us have at least one social media profile. It is becoming very difficult to have these profiles with false names as well. Then, we are often members of certain physical groups, such as student bodies, professional organizations and more, who list their members online. And if you are in employment, your details will also end up on the company website. It simply is impossible to escape the online world.
Why an Online Reputation Matters
So how come your online reputation actually matters? One of the reasons is that the way people behave in the online stratosphere is believed to be reflective of how they behave in real life. Furthermore, they may have certain radical opinions, politics or religious beliefs that others may want to know about. This is particularly true for employers and recruiters, who are checking online profiles as standard more and more frequently. So much so, in fact, that they would class it as suspicious if someone does not have at least one social media profile.
The only problem is that it is all too easy to have an accidental poor reputation online. First of all, some people have made a sport out of hacking Facebook and Twitter accounts and positing abusive messages. Others have a grudge to bear towards someone, such as a disgruntled employee or a jilted wife, and they will go out of their way to say bad things about other individuals.
This is almost inescapable, unfortunately. Nobody is more aware of that than celebrities, who are turning to companies offering reputation management in their drones. But today, it isn’t just celebrities who do so anymore, and ordinary, everyday people like you and me are following suit to have their reputation monitored, managed and repaired.