I looked out at the room right before I started to speak. The first two rows were completely empty. Typical. Why is everyone so shy about sitting closer to the speaker?
I was at Ohio State University to give my presentation, 8 Steps for Creating & Maintaining Your Personal Brand. When I was done and asked if the audience had any questions, the room was completely silent. Again with the shyness. I reminded them I’m extremely busy and this was a great opportunity to ask me anything, even something not related to personal branding.
Questions finally started and went on for about an hour. But the most disturbing question arose after everyone left, except for those who wanted to speak with me one-on-one. “How can I repair my personal brand, particularly while I’m job hunting, while I’m being cyberstalked?”
According to a recent report by Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA), cyberstalking increased by seven percent in 2009. I guess that doesn’t totally surprise me, given the sheer lack of privacy on the Internet and the number of new “geolocation” tools that come out every day. But this young woman’s story was downright frightening.
I won’t give complete details, but someone (she doesn’t know who and the police are actively investigating) is posting inappropriate pictures using her head and someone else’s body daily. When you Google her name, that’s what shows up. And for a hiring manager who either has never met her before or only met her once, it would be easy to mistake the pictures for being very real.
There are techniques to get your results at the top of search engines, but it sounded as though the cyberstalker was already employing them. First, she could start a blog and post often. Second she could learn search engine optimization (SEO) and other Internet marketing techniques to make sure the content that actually is hers appears as high as possible. Third, she could attempt to appeal to search engines (i.e., Google) about the problem. Fourth, she could hire an organization like ReputationDefender to help in ways maybe the police could not.
I’m sorry to say I didn’t have all the possible answers for her at the time, nor do I now. She went on to ask about how to broach the subject in interviews. Like all negative issues, I told her, don’t be the first one to bring it up. Be prepared with a concise response that answers their question and then moves on. Most of all, be mentally prepared because it will likely come up.
