IS YOUR REPUTATION ON THE LINE?
Comments (0) Those of you who follow this blog know I advise extreme caution about anything you post anywhere on the Internet; that prospective employers may vet you prior to even an initial contact. This is practical and is not illegal or discriminatory since you are not yet in the running for a job.
Political, religious and any extreme point of view, reference to drunken orgies or worse are easily found. Let us say for example, I am founder of a small company with fragile funding. I need a CTO and a CFO who will fit the conservative culture in my company. If I discover someone I had considered courting to be involved with and commenting on anything of which I disapprove, I simply don’t contact them; and if they contact me, I don’t follow up.
Or I am interviewing and then research the individual. If I find something that alarms me, I remove the person from consideration saying I need someone with an area of expertise you don’t possess, or other acceptable but bogus reason. The end result is the same. I researched and discovered something about you on the Internet and you didn’t get the job.
Over 64% of the HR professionals polled said they vet people on the Internet. I believe the number is much higher because more than just the HR department is involved in vetting/interviewing prospective employees. I think I made my point. Anything you say on the Internet can make you vulnerable.
Want to do a reality check? Job Mob did an excellent job of listing sites that track your Internet activities. I borrowed the list here. Visit their site for other good info. Try random searches to see how the world sees you.
- RapLeaf – a website that scours the Internet to find information about a given person based on their email address. Sign up for free and tell Rapleaf about any email addresses you use. Within a few hours, RapLeaf will have results to show you. No longer as impressive as it used to be, the results about me were minimal after weeks of searching.
- Naymz – a “reputation network” that lets you create a profile and then invite people to vouch for you, earning you points and improving your “Repscore”. Once you sign up, use the Naymz Reputation Monitor as another method to see what the Web knows about you. A nice touch is that Naymz lets you see who has visited your profile, which might be handy in seeing which companies are interested in you.
- Wink – claiming to “find people”, Wink pulls in results from a number of sources including Google.
- Spokeo – another people search, this one covers dozens of websites.
- Whoisi – a people search over social media sites like Flickr. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work too well- it couldn’t find any of my public social profiles.
- Usernamecheck – just what it says, this tool will check dozens of websites to see if your username is being used there. A good way to find out if someone is posing as you or just has the same name.
- socialmention – a search engine across social media. Use the ‘All’ option first. Annoyingly, putting your name in quotes doesn’t seem to improve the results, making this site almost useless right now.
- RSSmeme – a tool for following the public RSS feeds generated by your social profiles at sites like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. See what people are saying about you (by searching your name in quotes) or check what you’re sharing publicly.
- Repcloud – a Facebook app that allows you to see what’s being said about yourself or anyone else.
- StartPR – an online reputation tracker that follows keywords and lets you manage the results with favorites, read/not read flagging and other handy features.
- pressflip – create searches and save them for updating over time. You can then ‘flip’ the results that aren’t relevant and pressflip will learn your preferences and improve future search results. For the learning to work well, you’ll need to come back often to check for new results, which is probably not worth the time.
- FaveBot – track your name or keyword across different types of information like blogs, news or even local events (based on Eventful.com) and follow FaveBot’s results via RSS feeds. As of this writing, there seems to be a problem with the site finding results although it has worked in the past.
- Swamii – a continuous search engine like FaveBot but more general in the types of information searched. Get results via email alerts.
- Trendrr – track a term or keyword across many sources, compare results (the most interesting feature) and even share them.
- AllTh.at – calling itself a “search agent”, AllTh.at saves searches and lets you follow via email or RSS as new results appear over. You can also choose which sites AllTh.at searches and even add your own, plus you can fine-tune your results with some filtering to remove irrelevant items.
- Yotify – create “scouts” that search for relevant information and notify you when they find it. Has some good features like the ability to include friends in your searching but the site is clunky and slow.
- PageTiki – a simple site for following web page updates via email or RSS, useful for watching a webpage that mentions you.
- ChangeDetection – track any webpage for changes and be notified when the page changes.
- WatchThatPage – another webpage watcher but one with many features like letting you decide what will be shown in alerts.
- TrackEngine – another site for tracking changes on the Internet, this one is feature-heavy but easy to use.
- Versionista – might be the king of following website changes. Versionista checks for updates hourly and will keep up to 5 versions of a page (paid users get more) while allowing you use the site to compare versions or to receive change notifications by email.
- FeedWhip – gets updates about any webpage via RSS or email.
- Notifixious – a handy service that you can use to keep updated about changes anywhere on the Internet and in the way you choose: email, RSS, even Yahoo Messenger, etc.
- Pingie – will send you an SMS whenever an RSS feed is updated (US-only for now).
- ZapTXT – does both of what Notifixious and Pingie do but with more features.
- UpdateScanner – “A FireFox extension (add-on) to monitor web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.”
- Google Alerts – a very simple service that sends you an email whenever it discovers search results for the terms or keywords you chose, such as your name.
- Yahoo Alerts – like Google Alerts, but with many more types of alert to choose from. Also, alerts can be sent to Yahoo Messenger or even via SMS (US cell phones only).
- Windows Live Alerts – Microsoft’s alerts service, similar to Yahoo’s in features but based on their own search engine.
- Technorati Search – generate an RSS feed based on what people are saying about you in blogs.
- BlogPulse – search the blogosphere and follow the results via an RSS feed.
- Alerts.com – another free alerts service with even more features and kinds of alerts (including job alerts). Use their RSS Feed alert to follow sites that might have negative things to say about you and your work.
- TweetScan – set up alerts based on what people are saying on Twitter. Can also search over Twitter and Identi.ca (another micro-blogging site).
- Plurkerati – search across users of Plurk, another micro-blogging service like Twitter.
- TweetRush – “aims to provide estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time.” Another way to learn about someone via their Twitter usage.
- Twitter Search – search for a name on Twitter and subscribe to the results via RSS feed.
- TwitStat – search Twitter by user or keywords, and follow results via RSS.
- TweetBeep – get email alerts based on results from Twitter searches.
- Twitter Search Sentiment – an offshoot of Twitter Search, this tool tries to give you an idea of what people are talking about right now. Searching on your name (in quotes) will hopefully return a sentiment of wretched which means that no one’s talking about you.
- TweetTrak – track what’s being said about you on Twitter IN Twitter.
- Monitter – lets you track up to 3 terms in Twitter in parallel. Either subscribe to the results’ RSS feeds on watch the tracking live on the fly from the Monitter website. I like this one.
- 24oclocks – see what someone – e.g. you – has been doing in Twitter over a period time.
- Blogdigger – a search engine for blogs that lets you subscribe to an RSS feed of results.
- IceRocket – a search covering blogs, MySpace and a few other sources, I like how the results are ordered by date.
- Blogscope – another blog search engine.
- Technorati – a past champion search engine of the blogosphere, Technorati still indexes millions of blogs and also lets you create an RSS feed based on a search of your name, for example.
- TinEye – an image search engine, TinEye lets you upload an image and will tell you where it can be found on the Web. Hopefully nowhere if the image is one you’d like to wish away.
- Serph – a buzz tracker, use Serph to see what people are saying about you right now.
- Chatter – a blog comments search engine, follow results via RSS feed.
- Chatterguard – a paid service, Chatterguard watches social media sites for you and provides alerts and reports. Might be worth the price if you’re very active online and have lots of information to track and filter through.
- Yahoo Pipes – with this free service you can create an ego feed, a customized RSS feed that pulls in search results about you from many different sources.
- MonitorThis – this tool takes a keyword and generates searches of that keyword across 19 different search engines, with the results being generated as RSS feeds in one downloadable OPML file that you can import to your RSS feed reader.
- Rich Schefren’s Reputation Monitor – does the same thing as MonitorThis but some of the search sources are different. Also, Rich has included his business-oriented blog feed in the generated results, so remove it right away but keep the rest.
- Filtrbox – funnels and filters any sources of information you choose. Pick the Free option on signup.
- Trackur – an “Online Reputation Monitoring & Buzz Tracking Tool” created by Marketing Pilgrim and reputation guru Andy Beal, Trackur was initially aimed at companies worried about what consumers and competitors might be saying about them online. Trackur is a paid service but there’s a free 14-day trial which might be enough time to discover things that other tools couldn’t find.
- Attenalert – “a web service that allows you to find out who is talking about you, your brand, company or products on websites, in videos, the news and on blogs.” 7-day free trial. Like with Trackur, use the free trial to see if you can find any nuggets that the other (free) tools couldn’t.
- Distilled Online Reputation Monitor – this paid service lets you have a whole free month to test how well it can find information about you.
- ReputationDefender’s MyReputation service – a paid service (currently US$9.95/month) that generates a report of all information it can find about you online and gives you tips on how to react. Don’t be surprised if some of their tips try to get you to buy more of their paid services.
- ReputationHQ – another paid service that scours the Web for information on whatever you choose.
- BoardTracker – a search engine that will help you see if anyone’s said anything nasty about you in discussion forums. Many features.
- Big Boards – a forum search engine that covers international sites, it either has many results or none at all.
- BoardReader – a forum search engine with a very wide reach.
- Omgili – another forum search, this one with a full-featured advanced search. There’s even a Hebrew version.
- Yuku Find – yet another discussion forums search engine, it doesn’t work very well.
- Twing – this site also lets you find out what people are saying in forums.
- Linqia – a forums and “communities” search with a nice interface and useful filters, I wasn’t very impressed when it couldn’t find my name and adding quotes had no effect on the search results.
- DataPatrol – originally intended as a way to prevent identity theft, DataPatrol’s alerts and reports can be used to find information about you online. There’s currently a free 30-day trial offered, but the site is only available to UK residents for now.
- BackType – search through comments people – you? – have made on blogs. This is useful because many sites block search engines from indexing (taking into account) reader comments. You can search by commenter’s name like a potential employer would do, or by comment text e.g. to see if anyone has written about you in blog comments.
- Keotag – a site that makes it quick and easy to search blog post tags across many different search engines. Try searching on your full name in quotes and without quotes.
- Commentful – track responses to your comments on blogs.
- myComments – another way to follow responses to your comments, but requires blogs to be compatible and most aren’t.
- co.mments – track your blog comments via RSS feed or email alerts.
- coComment – yet another way to keep track of the conversations you’re having on blogs in one place. Their practical Firefox extension automatically records where you leave comments. Stay notified by responses via the Firefox extension, a Google Gadget, email alerts or RSS feeds. Plus, you can decide whether your RSS feeds should be public or private.
Themocracy