Editorial Articles

Come on – admit it. We’ve all done it, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Recruiters and employers do it all the time, and more and more businesses are doing it daily to get a grip on their contacts and clients. In fact, it’s quite healthy to Google yourself – the results can be very revealing.

We ran a brief experiment among our own Red Ants to see who Google thinks we are as individuals, and the outcome brought a number of interesting facts to the surface:

We share our names with more people than we’d imagine

• We’d like to think our names and our online personas are unique, but the truth is that many people with the same name as ours are all over the web (just try looking someone up on Facebook), some of whom we’d be happy to be mistaken for, others not so much. At Red Ant we discovered among our namesakes:
  
  • at least one dealer in illegal substances in Orange County
  • a would-be South American priest
  • a supermodel
  • a footballer based in America (as opposed to an American footballer, which is something altogether different…)
  • the husband of a former Page 3 girl

You can’t get toothpaste back in the tube - we often put content online and then forget about it, underestimating the internet’s ability to spread information into a multitude of nooks, crannies and relatively inaccessible recesses. We unearthed a number of hidden pockets of talent among the Ants:

• One of us ran a fan page for the TV programme ‘Life on Mars’, which was mentioned in the Manchester Evening News, on the Paul O’Grady show and in various fan publications and magazine programmes
• We also have a gifted photographer in our midst, whose images were chosen to appear in a series of ‘impressive photographs using selective colour pop technique’
• One member of senior management spent their youth in high-end clubs and bars, promoting female DJs and looking exceptionally ‘street’

Some of us really are ‘The One and Only’

• One or two Red Ants, thanks to their unique names or expert position in the market, ‘own’ the Google space when it comes to their personal profile.
  • Two of our mobile experts have distinct names which mean that, however far back you trawl through Google, entries referring to them are the only ones which appear. For one person, this stretches to several thousand results – it’s a personal equivalent of the ‘Googlewhack’.

The internet has an infinite capacity for revealing the bizarre

• One of our Ants lends their name to an entire Country & Western festival
• Another has apparently authored a very popular Justin Bieber quiz

But seriously…

The advent of social networks, coupled with a seemingly compulsive desire to share information about almost every aspect of who we are and what we do, has led to our lives becoming ‘open books’ online, there for everyone to see and, increasingly, comment on. Those recruiters and employers checking out our profiles before deciding whether to give us an interview won’t always know that the Joe Bloggs with a passion for owling isn’t the same Joe Bloggs who has applied for a job as a health and safety officer for the local council. And, while it’s possible to limit people’s access to Facebook and so on (though a surprising number of us don’t bother with privacy settings), it’s virtually impossible to purge the internet of every mention of your name or to clearly identify which Joe Bloggs or Mary Smith is actually you in every case.

This has led to the growth of a new industry – the online reputation managers, or ‘cleansers’. It’s really an offshoot of PR – those of us who are wealthy or important enough can hire people to manage our online presence throughout our history on the internet, whitewashing the more questionable bits and highlighting the better ones. The fact that this is going on was made apparent recently when it became clear, thanks to the consistent removal of everything which painted a subject in a negative light, that a person or persons unknown were ‘managing’ the information which appeared in Wikipedia entries for, among others, the Earl of Derby and David Ross, co-founder of the Carphone Warehouse.

And there are a number of potentially less thorough but ultimately cheaper options for us regular folk – for example, Google offers ‘Me on the web’ as part of its dashboard, which allows you to keep tabs on what others are posting about you, and reputationmanagementexperts.co.uk will carry out an effective cleanup for you, for a relatively small fee. For those of us with a long internet history, this could prove to be a very worthwhile investment – at the very least, a weight off one’s shoulders.

Of course, the basic rule of thumb for anything you’re thinking of putting on the internet comes down to common sense – would you want your Mother to see it, and would you be happy for your comment/photo/status update to be published on the front page of a tabloid newspaper? Unfortunately, the immediate nature of the internet and our enthusiasm for sharing means that few of us take the time to allow common sense to kick in.

So, if you haven’t already (and let’s face it, most of you probably have), type your own name into Google and see what comes up. It’s not really a guilty pleasure or act of self-indulgence any more –it’s a necessity.

Steph Yaguer
Communications Manager - Red Ant