Louis Halpern's View

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that allowing players to engage with fans online in the right way can have for the Manchester United brand, especially in light of their current financial challenges. People respond most passionately to other people online, and Twitter provides such a huge opportunity for teams to really tap into their fan-base support. A more progressive approach would have aimed to educate players about Twitter and other social media platforms and put in place common sense guidelines for their usage, harnessing the positive opportunities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated to participate and engage with digital platforms. Unlike adults however, they’re not streetwise, they don’t understand the threats.

In order to get a picture of how UK parents’ perceptions to their children’s online activity, we commissioned the first ever Digital Literacy Report, launched today.

In the poll with research specialists YouGov, we were pleased to find that the majority of parents see a need to teach their children about how to conduct themselves online, and have demanded the Government introduce lessons to improve young people’s understanding of online privacy and the value of their personal reputation with 69 per cent of parents calling for compulsory lessons to be introduced as part of the national curriculum.

This in part is born of the fact that almost half (48%) of adults asked admitted they were worried that their children’s online actions will potentially harm their future chances of getting into a chosen university or landing a first job. Parents recognise that online comment or mistakes made by young people on sites such as Facebook, Bebo and YouTube will go on to impact their adult lives.

Unfortunately the report also showed there is a lack of control among parents over what exactly children are doing when they log onto the web. With more children accessing sites like Facebook through their mobile phones instead of family PCs, parents are struggling to stay on top of what their children do online, with 44 per cent conceding they don’t ever check the content their kids are accessing or what they are posting online.

If we do not proactively teach young people about the impact of their online activity how can they better protect and promote themselves? There needs to dialogue between parents and their children, as well as at school, where online socialising is recognised as a social and technical skill for contemporary society. Schools as well should be looking to ways to encourage children to use the online tools at their disposal in a positive way, such as setting homework that is based around hosting and reporting a group discussion online.

If we want to see a generation of digitally ‘literate’ adults emerge in years to come, it is our responsibility to ensure it.

Have a beef with someone? Why it’s time to wise up on Wikipedia

Wiki-bullying is at the top of the news agenda following the revelation that the Tower of London has suspended two beefeaters as part of a harassment investigation of its first female Yeoman Moira Cameron, with resulting implications for the legal system that will directly affect cases brought to court.

Wiki-bullying could result in criminal convictions that see the bullies responsible put behind bars. With direct legal consequences as a result of an individual’s online actions, internet users need to think before they edit what the ramifications of their conduct may be.

There are now legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Wikipedia, as Scotland Yard yesterday demonstrated when they confirmed that a “56-year-old man received a caution under the Communications Act 2003 on Tuesday October 20 following an investigation by officers from Tower Hamlets. It related to inappropriate use of the internet.” We can expect to see this trend continue and the internet remain at the heart of future harassment, slander and other criminal cases that affect personal reputation.

I happen to agree that bullies should be properly punished for their actions, regardless of whether its online or offline. However, this story just goes to show the increasing importance of online reputation, and why we all must be more proactive in monitoring our online presence.

If internet users are more literate digitally they will be better equipped to protect themselves online. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. In an internet age, personal brands are never off limits and are always available to see.”

Employers and government alike need to be doing more to improve people’s understanding as to the implications of the internet and they can be profiled on it, helping them to take control of their reputation online. The most important considerations for individuals remain:

• Be proactive – Check your profiles online regularly and ensure the content on it is positioning you in a way you want to be positioned
• Have an online base – Create a personal home page (blog or even a basic website) and set up official social media accounts across the major platforms that link into that base, making sure the content across all of them is accurate and true
• Report inaccuracy – If someone has posted untrue or slanderous comment about you to an online site, contact the service’s administrators and encourage your circle of influence to post comment supporting your position

Wide awake at 4 in the morning for the third night in a row, I knew the idea that was niggling at me wasn’t going to go away. I’d have to see it through.

I was inspired to put pen to paper – that’s quite a challenge for me, as the team I work with know; my dyslexia makes it a challenge to write down what I’m thinking articulately. The excitement about helping people harness the explosive growth of search engines, for their own personal empowerment won.

How we find the information that is important to us has changed dramatically over the last ten years. We now live in a world where the internet and search engines dominate our business, personal and professional research. How we are seen by others can be enhanced or degraded in an instant and our personal brand, whether good or bad, can be now globally amplified.

In addition, the ability of an individual’s ‘personal copyright’ to be heard is being diluted by the vast amount of information that is thrown at us daily. Being visible to the people that matter to our professional life – our prospective or existing customers, clients or employers – is becoming harder and harder. Welcome to the brave new world of personal reputation management, where you can be in control of how you are perceived online and can create, plan and executing job hunts, new business drives and all manner of professional and personal projects in a way that was until recently, impossible to achieve

It’s pushing forward these possibilities that have driven me (and my co-author Roy Murphy) through plenty more sleepless nights and days. I want to help you redress the balance. Nearly one year on, I feel the results have been well worthwhile and we’re awaiting the first delivery of our Personal Reputation Management printed book. The whole book eboook is available now from reputation-book.com or the first chapter is available free.

I’d love to hear your feedback about personal reputation management – making the internet work for you – and how you have implemented some of our strategies and tactics.

I hope you enjoy the book, and find it useful, practical and inspiring.

I’ve just been introduced to a theory that I agree with about the impact of the information revolution on mankind.  Transforming the nature of what we are.

The revolutions were:

1. “A round Earth” – The realisation that the earth is not flat
2. “Evolution” – Acceptance of Darwin’s theory that we evolved and were not simply put here by G-d in our current form
3. “Unconscious mind” – Psychology & Freud showing us that is much going on in our minds beyond the rational
4. “Information” – Technology facilitating modifying the way we interact with everything around us

There are lots of things that shape what we are.  The information revolution has changed the constraints of what we do.  We shape ourselves in ways that have never been possible. We represent and define our lives on line.  Every body’s at it: Facebook, Linkedin or at a lower level to “Google” has even entered the English language.  The information reality has become normal.

Technology changes have forced us to change how we interact with each other.  Until recently we were just a body made up largely of water that was constrained in it’s physical presence.  We are now information.

The telephone started this revolution. The persuasiveness and power of the Internet means that we can interact in ways that were never possible.  We can build second, third and fourth identities for ourselves and can even have multiple economic profiles.  We can have multiple conversations where ever we are with multiple people.  Perhaps this is why Twitter has taken off as people have accepted this with out realising it.  Paradoxically the world has shrunk and grown concurrently.

Perhaps we are becoming information organisms.  Defined not by our bodies but by how we interact with the information presenting itself to us.  We may have always been information organisms but we have never before had the opportunity to dress in different skins.  Each one needs careful reputation management.

Reality is now what you interact with and how you present yourself.

[Inspiration for this blog can be found at http://is.gd/1s4yn]