I am also told that our own Michael Fertik is currently roaming the streets of London sporting an “I look this good online” t-shirt.  Track him down and he’ll arrange for one in your size.

“Your professional reputation and relationships matter – and not just to you.  That value extends far beyond your profile itself – it carries over to every interaction, every message, and every piece of contributed content.”

When I present to groups around the country, I always tell them to start their online reputation management with LinkedIn.  In our opinion, it remains the best all-around solution for professionals who want to establish themselves online.  Here are three LinkedIn tips for those who are just getting started and want to create a strong reputation.  I’ll post again later on with some additional tips for power users.

1 – Set a custom URL that features your name and mark it public.  I think that selecting your full name is best (e.g., Owen Tripp) as it lends authenticity and quality SEO to your page.  A senior guy at LinkedIn recently described this to me as “hanging your shingle on the Internet”.

2 – Write a few recommendations before you even start receiving them yourself.  This is important because it a) shows that you’re not somebody who is simply a “taker” within the LinkedIn community and b) gives people who view your profile a sense of the type of people you want to work with, and what traits you admire in them.

3 – Spend a lot of time thinking about the keywords you use, especially in the specialties section of your profile.  As my colleagues here at RD know, I can’t stand the word “strategic” because I don’t think it doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. But I really love seeing specific skills that are “searchable”.   Some good examples: technical writer, business intelligence and data warehousing, food operations manager.  Some bad examples: growth focused team player, excellent collaborator, all purpose marketing contributor.  Sorry guys, but nobody searches LinkedIn for “excellent collaborator”.  You get the idea.

So go on now – get your LinkedIn profile cranking.  And when you see the power behind that tool, please check back with us and we’ll teach you some of the advanced tips and tricks.  You can always give our MyEdge team a call too at 877-720-6488.  They love talking about this stuff!

Everyday, millions of people around the world log on to the Internet to work, to shop, to be entertained, and to connect with others. Unfortunately, only a small percentage know that while they are web surfing, their web habits are being monitored, analyzed, and sold without their consent to companies across the globe. The result is personalized web advertising so precise that two individuals looking at the same website from two different computers will see two different things.

A recent article for the New York Times highlighted why companies absolutely love this kind of marketing, while consumer advocacy groups absolute hate it.

From the article:

For decades, data companies like Experian and Acxiom have compiled reams of information on every American: Acxiom estimates it has 1,500 pieces of data on every American, based on information from warranty cards, bridal and birth registries, magazine subscriptions, public records and even dog registrations with the American Kennel Club.

Patrick Williams, the publisher of the personal finance magazine Worth, recently asked Acxiom to find the names and addresses of 10,000 Americans from each of 11 cities who had houses worth more than $1 million, net worth of over $2 million, lived within a few miles of other rich people and subscribed to business publications.

“They are the scariest data research company around — they know far too much,” said Mr. Williams, who said he was very happy with the amount of information it gave him.

[...]

Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor and privacy expert at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, said the unwitting participation by consumers makes online marketing different from offline.“Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making,” he said. “We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”

In response to criticism from Congress, a consoritum of advertising industry trade groups, sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disney and Verizon, have recently tightened self-regulatory measures for web tracking. While this is a good step forward for protecting consumers, there is still a long way to go.

Here at Reputation.com, we take great pride in helping individuals protect their privacy online. To this end, we will continue to be at the forefront of Internet privacy and Reputation Management issues. Make sure to check back to the Reputation.com Blog, or to follow us on Twitter, for more important news updates.

 Image via TechCrunch

Naturally, the incident brought on much criticism of both Twitter, for insufficiently protecting their sensitive information, and TechCrunch, for opting to post the material despite the fact that it was illegally acquired. While there is certainly plenty of criticism to go around, I wanted to take a minute here at the Reputation.com blog not to speculate as to who was right and who was wrong, but rather to remind people just how important is is to protect your privacy in the digital age.

First, let us examine how Twitter’s sensitive material was leaked. According to an article from TechCrunch, the hacker (known as Hacker Croll) was successful because he treated Twitter’s infrastructure as a “eco-system.” In other words, Hacker Croll viewed Twitter as a whole. Rather than seeking one point of entry, he collected information about everything related to Twitter, particularly employees. During his search, he uncovered access to a Twitter employee’s Gmail account which opened up a veritable Pandora’s Box of information including other e-mail accounts, social networking profiles, credit card numbers, and more.

TechCrunch breaks the attack down nicely in their article:

1. HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.
2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.
3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.
5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.
6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

As easy as it would be to criticize the unnamed Twitter employee for leaving their information accessible, it is probable that he took the same amount of care in protecting his account as 99% of the rest of us. Unfortunately, in a world where personal information is accessible at the mere click of a button, it is not good enough to be partially secure.

So what are some tips for managing your privacy online? First, use common sense. If you have your e-mail account listed online along with information about your favorite dog Bowser, then you shouldn’t make your password recovery question, “What is the name of my pet?” Furthermore, if you don’t already use separate passwords for all of your web-based accounts, start.

Many of us spend our entire day on the Internet. If you use the same password for all of your accounts, you’re literally putting everything in your life up for grabs. Remember, the best passwords are a combination of mixed-case letters, numbers, and symbols. Make your passwords memorable, but also unique. Something like “1p9g8y1″ is a lot harder to crack than “partyguy81.”

As more and more people turn to the Internet to share information, issues of privacy and Online Reputation Management will continue to be pushed to the forefront of popular culture. Taking proactive steps to protect your identity online now will pay enormous dividends in the future.

Quoting from the page:

Libby Sartain, former CHRO at Yahoo! Inc., is now an executive in residence at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the company announced today. Sartain brings more than 30 years of experience in HR and business to i4cp’s expanding array of corporate performance experts.

As an executive in residence at i4cp, Sartain will be available to participate in the major project assignments i4cp conducts over the course of a year. She will also provide her insight to aid in the development of:

· Playbooks, designed to enable managers and leaders to take action based on specific scenarios and situations;
· Pulse Survey Analysis reports, which analyze and interpret the research data from i4cp’s 50+ annual studies;
· Highlight Reports, which take an in-depth look at each of i4cp’s 58 topics of expertise and provide research, corporate examples, scenario planning and more.

Sartain, who was a keynote speaker at i4cp’s 2009 Annual Conference, will also be available through i4cp membership to business leaders seeking input and/or advice on specific projects their companies are facing.

[SNIP]

Sartain is the author of HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business (AMACOM) and Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Jossey-Bass), as well as the recently released Brand for Talent: Eight Essentials to Make Your Talent as Famous as Your Brand (Jossey-Bass).

For full disclosure, Libby is an adviser to Reputation.com. I have recently posted a guest post on her blog, Brand for Talent, that examines how search engines are impacting job searches in the digital era.

Reputation.com congratulates Libby on her new leadership position and is grateful for the insight she has lent to this firm over the years.

At the behest of their professor, Mr. Joel R. Reidenberg, a class of Fordham University Law School students recently scoured the Internet for the personal information of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The project, which was conceived by Reidenberg “to illustrate law and policy issues associated with readily available information, contextual use, social norms and the scope of legal protection,” seems to have upset the notoriously grumpy Justice.

In an article for the legal tabloid, Above The Law, Justice Scalia states that, “It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.”

Whether or not you believe Professor Reidenberg was wrong to give his class this assignment, the greater point to take away from this story is that the Internet has made keeping your personal information private very difficult. Although most people are probably not public figures like Justice Scalia, it is still important that they take proactive steps to protect their privacy online.

You’ll notice that I have managed to train the folder to exclude most pernicious types (porn, ED pills, etc.) of emails, but there’s still a glut of permission based marketing emails in there.  This means that somehow, somewhere along the way, I have granted that advertiser (or one of their affiliates) permission to contact me — probably without my really knowing it.

Here at Rep Def I work with our MyPrivacy team on the best way to unravel these permissions and make sure that the user has *true power* to control the way he or she is contacted.  I’ll try to come back here today to post some of the best tips for proactively limiting these types of emails.

We’ve already made huge strides on the problem of telephone privacy, and more recently started to address unwanted direct mail.  I’ll bet on our crew to figure out email, too.

Step 1: These website owners (“Affiliates” as they are called) sign up for the Reputation.com affiliate program (takes but a couple of minutes) and then we review them to make sure they are good people who operate ethical websites.

Step 2: They tell their website users to go to Reputation.com and our associated web sites (like the Global Do Not Call List) by using easy-to-setup web banners or text links that we supply to them on the affiliate website.

Step 3: They sit back and watch the money flow in.  Seriously it’s that easy – we record the transactions and then pay out according to what types of plans the user chooses.

I wanted to write about this today because I think it’s a dead-simple way to make a lot of money selling in-demand products on the web.  Yesterday I signed a check for $5000 for one week of an individual affiliate’s work.  No joke.

So if you have a website and would like to make money by joining our network, sign up as an affiliate today. And if you found this post interesting, drop me a note and I’ll blog again with more advanced tips for your website.

We look forward to working with you!