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Do you need a professional online make-over? [Star, The (South Africa)]
[September 09, 2014]

Do you need a professional online make-over? [Star, The (South Africa)]


(Star, The (South Africa) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The team is camped out in the company's sixth-floor conference room, all eyes trained on a large flat-screen TV mounted on the lime-green wall. On the screen is a scrolling Twitter feed filled with photos of a muscular, tattooed man posing in, variously - a metal-studded leather harness, snug-fitting underpants, precipitously drooping boxer shorts.



Brian Patterson, the young guy in jeans who is piloting the onscreen images via Macbook, shakes his head. "This Twitter account is rough," he says.

The "him" Patterson refers to is a graduate student, one who will soon enter a competitive job market where prospective employers will Google his name before setting up an interview. At the moment, an online search would lead to a few undesirable results, including this Twitter account and its vivid portraits of male anatomy. So the student has sought the services of Patterson and his colleagues at Go Fish Digital, an online reputation management agency in McLean, Virginia.


This kind of digital service has long been favoured by celebrities, corporations and other high-profile clientele. But as graduation approaches each year, Patterson and his team also see a surge of students and graduates who contact the company looking for help.

This is what a professional online reputation management "campaign" looks like: four people - one patched in via video - around a conference room table, jotting notes on laptops, examining every trace of a client's digital existence and plotting a strategy to improve it. Their goal is twofold: stop the bleeding, then polish.

On a whiteboard, a to-do list for this client grows, with the obvious scrawled in bold blue marker: "TWITTER - DELETE".

But Kat Haselkorn, the company's social media guru, argues on behalf of saving the account itself, because of its high placement among the client's search results.

"It makes more sense to just delete the tweets and start from scratch," she says. "Let's get him to retweet things that matter so if people click on it, they see his brilliant insights, not pictures of guys chained up." "None of this is a secret," says Mike Moriarty, a partner and marketing director at Go Fish Digital. The agency has published basic instructions for online reputation management, including how to build positive content and push negative links off the first page of search results; how to find your Google "autocomplete values" to learn what search terms are commonly paired with your name; and how to control your "personal brand" by registering domain names and building profiles on social media and professional sites.

The company also offers tips on what not to do. For instance, when people find something mortifying about themselves online, they tend to search for it over and over. That's bad, and not just for one's sanity and self-esteem: those repeated searches tell Google the link in question is important, says Daniel Russell, a new business associate with Go Fish Digital.

"If there's something bad out there, the first thing to do is stop looking at it," he says.

Where students are concerned, Moriarty says, the company often offers its services at a discounted rate.

"We take mercy on some graduates," Moriarty says, noting reputation management services for individuals start at about $1 000 (R10 000) a month. "Not everyone can afford this." The team's current client is in fairly good shape. He shows no measurable results on Google Trends, meaning he's not a hot search topic online. No one has linked to the opinion piece that he wants to remove from a student website. His autocomplete values are benign. By building positive profiles on sites such as LinkedIn and Quora, he can make that first page of search results shine. The prognosis is good.

Students don't have the digital footprint of a corporate brand; their problems are rarely irreversible.

"Well, unless they really screwed up," Patterson says.

"Even then, you can turn it around," Moriarty says. "What was the name of that sorority girl, the one who wrote that crazy e-mail to her sorority sisters?" Start typing in Google, and you'll get as far as "sorority girl" before autocomplete offers a reminder of how some missteps live forever. There's "sorority girl letter" and "sorority girl rant" and "deranged sorority girl" or "University of Maryland mean sorority girl letter". That's her: Rebecca Martinson, the University of Maryland Delta Gamma sister who authored an infamous screed, riddled with especially creative profanity and went viral last year after the missive to her fellow Greek housemates was leaked to Gawker.

Haselkorn notes Martinson managed to turn an arguably unsalvageable image into a successful, if unsavoury, brand. Since achieving internet stardom, she has penned an essay for Vice about a topic that can't be described in a family newspaper, started work on a novel and writes a regular advice column for the website BroBible.com ("Fat men are disgusting" is among the tamer recent headlines.) Martinson is, of course, a rare case. Most students nowadays are well versed in what not to do online, and the panic-stricken grads of the aughts - the ones who were in school during the advent of Facebook and Twitter and learnt those early lessons the hard way - have been replaced by savvy teens who are less worried about blunders and more focused on how to promote themselves.

"What we're preaching to students now is that you want to develop an online presence and use that as a way to begin interfacing with professionals in your chosen field even before you cast yourself as a candidate," says Kelley Bishop, director of the career centre at the University of Maryland at College Park.

In the Go Fish Digital conference room, the big screen still shows a list of Google search results, but this will be transformed within a couple of weeks. If the client follows their recommendations, he'll soon be ready to pass the Google test with his professional profile beefed up, his Twitter feed revealing his insights - and nothing more risque. - The Washington Post The Star (c) 2014 Independent Newspapers (Pty) Limited. All rights strictly reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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