Now, a handful of U.S. colleges are snapping up the program for their own students, to make sure that digital blemishes don’t discourage offers from potential employers.

In the last few months, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester and Elon University bought the software for their seniors, in addition to the founders’ alma mater, which purchased the program for all of their students (previously they piloted the program with seniors).

College students are slowly waking up to the fact that searchable photos of themselves funneling beer or tweets that were clearly written under the influence aren’t going to help them get their first gig. But Mike Cahill, the head of career services at Syracuse University, said Brand Yourself helps students not only become more aware of the impression they make online, it can help them actually change their search results.

A more affordable approach to online reputation management

“It used to be that an error on your resume would put you in the do not consider pile,” he said. “Now, if you’re further along in the process, your online reputation [can put you there].”

According to a 2010 study from Microsoft and Cross Tab Marketing, 75 percent of human resources departments are required to do an online search before making a hire. And a study this year from Brand Yourself and Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of online U.S. adults that searched for a person online, did so before deciding to do business with them.

It’s hardly surprising that individuals’ online reputations affect their professional opportunities – and companies like Reputation.com and Integrity Defenders have been providing services for a while that promise to help individuals clean up their digital identity. But BrandYourself’s interesting difference is that instead of charging potentially thousands of dollars, it provides a Web-based program that lets people improve their own results through search engine optimization (SEO) — for about $10 a month.

“The software takes you through the process of making search results more friendly for your name,” said Ambron, BrandYourself’s CEO, and the SEO brains behind the operation.

What’s your ‘search score’?

To start, users can register for free and get their “search score” (or an assessment of the first page of results for their name). Then they can submit links that they want others to find online (i.e. their LinkedIn profile, About.me page, etc.), as well as receive specific recommendations for boosting the visibility of those links (such as connecting a personal website to profile pages or featuring your name more prominently on a site’s URL or page heading). The site lets users submit and receive recommendations for three links but to add more, they have to upgrade to the premium service. This week, the company also launched a Facebook game that lets people compare their search score to their friends’ on the social network because users were already sharing their scores online, Ambron said.

Web publishers and others who do business on the internet may be familiar with the basics of SEO, but Brand Yourself is bringing those tactics to individual web monitoring in a way non-techies can actually understand and apply.  It’s not as comprehensive as Reputation.com, which monitors clients’ digital reputation across a broader spectrum of sites and databases and can provide more targeted services. But it’s a much more affordable consumer option.

The company initially launched in 2010 as a service for managing online reputations on search and social networks but re-launched early this year with a more specific focus on search. Since then, it’s raised $1.2 million (on top of about $300,000 in seed money), won a startup competition at SXSW and grown to include 10 employees. To date, Ambron said, the service has attracted more than 150,000 registered users and more than 3,000 paying members (excluding students at Syracuse, John Hopkins and its other college clients).

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An emerging crop of companies believe that our online identities – and our social data in particular – are valuable sources for evaluating and even managing credit risk. This week, Lenddo, a New York-based startup that helps the middle class in emerging markets use their online social connections to build credit, announced that it had raised $8 million in new funding.

Almost like a Grameen bank for the digital era, Lenddo provides an online microlending platform that uses social dynamics and positive peer pressure to keep people creditworthy and provide capital they might not otherwise be able to access. Members receive loans as individuals, but their trustworthiness — expressed as a FICO- or Klout-like “Lenddo score” — is evaluated in the context of their community.

“Character, for hundreds of years, was really the foundation of lending… [lenders] would talk to people in the community,” said Jeffrey Stewart, Lenddo’s CEO, who launched the company in 2011. “What we figured out how to do algorithmically is quantify and understand someone’s trustworthiness.”

When someone joins the network looking for a loan (which tend to be between $400 or $800 depending on the location), the company doesn’t ask for collateral, a co-signer or financial history. Instead, it takes a deep dive into the member’s online social history, looking at the number of social media accounts he links to Lenddo, the history of those social accounts, the number of friends and followers he has in each network and each of those contacts’ Lenddo scores. The Lenddo “trust graph” gets bigger as more people join the site and add contacts from their social networks to their “Lenddo trusted network,” with the underlying idea being that a person’s social reputation is the best incentive for repaying a loan on time.

As a member repays his loan he not only raises his own Lenddo score but the scores of his contacts. If he starts falling back on payments, it reflects on him and his entire network. Lenddo algorithms also use social networks to verify identity – an important function in developing economies that don’t have same identity infrastructure we have in the U.S., Stewart said.

Startups tie social connections to credit process

But the practice of tying social connections to the administration of credit isn’t confined to the developing world. Neo, a startup that won the Founder Institute’s Showcase in November, evaluates credit risk for car loans by looking at a combination of social and financial data. Movenbank, a New York startup targeting a launch later this year, says that it is developing a score that measures a person’s “credibility as a friend, colleague and customer” in the context of financial decisions. And peer-lending startup Lending Club doesn’t use social data to determine credit worthiness, but can use it to help with identity verification.

In countries where the capital infrastructure we have in the U.S. doesn’t exist or is limited, connecting online reputation to credit is a compelling and potentially very powerful idea. Emerging markets are opportunities for companies like Lenddo, for example, where it won’t have to overcome an established order.  But in developed countries, companies blurring the lines between social networks and financial profiles will need to tread carefully.

“Birds of a feather flock together,” some might say. But creditworthy individuals might not exclusively keep company with similarly reliable consumers. And, even if they do, online social networks aren’t yet at a point where they accurately reflect our offline networks. Privacy questions, already a major digital concern, will loom even larger in a space with financial consequences.

Stewart said that Lenddo is focused on the 1.2 billion middle class people in emerging markets. But, pointing to the rise of collaborative consumption services like Airbnb and Zipcar, as well as the globalization of commerce, he projected that social networks will play an increasingly prominent role in finance.

“There’s clearly a need for a better understanding of trust on the Internet,” he said. “Having a global reputation system becomes very valuable.”

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In last week’s post, I talked about how technology is creating an “always on” social media world. Like it or not, these days, if you’re in public (i.e., out of the safety of your own house and/or in the presence of a another person with a camera or camera phone), you’d better be comfortable with anything you do being captured and possibly even posted online.

For this week’s post, I thought I’d provide some tips from the PR industry to help you feel better prepared for those impromptu publicity events.

1. Stay (at least somewhat) presentable. Make sure that you’re at least presentable most of the time. My solution is to keep my closet up-to-date so that I feel “put together” enough, no matter what I might wear on a given day.
2. Get comfortable with public speaking. Fear of public speaking is often reported as the #1 fear of most people, so it’s no wonder we’re a little resistant to having video of ourselves broadcasted to the world. A public speaking or improv class can help alleviate anxiety and instill confidence for those times when you’re placed on the makeshift stage of the World Wide Web.
3. Spruce up on interpersonal communication skills. Learning to manage facial expressions and body language and to maintain eye contact can greatly improve how you feel, as well as your effectiveness, when communicating with others.
4. Control your energy and attitude. Sometimes we leave the wrong impression with people, even our loved ones, simply because we aren’t in the best of moods or because we’re not quite feeling up to par. Doing things to better manage how we feel overall can improve how we handle stressful situations.
5. Mind your manners. I often wonder about celebrities who are dismissed as rude, thinking, “Did they just have a bad day and get caught on camera at an inopportune moment?” Bad habits, poor manners and language, and being less than courteous can be a big turnoff for prospective clients and business associates, so it never hurts to err on the side of caution in this department.
6. Try not to appear defensive or guarded. If you come across on video like you’re fighting off paparazzi, it can easily be taken out of context so that others think you have something to hide or have a bad attitude. As nerve-wracking as it can be to appear on camera, try your best to relax and be natural.
7. Get comfortable making smooth transitions. You can expect to be asked a question at some point that you either can’t or don’t want to answer. Learn to make smooth transitions to another topic so that you avoid sticky situations or avoid coming across as uninformed or elusive.
8. Watch what you say and do. As many celebrities can attest, one careless slip in judgement can quickly put you front and center of a debate or media firestorm. Even if you think you might not be that powerful or important to warrant that kind of attention, you could still get into hot water with friends or family, your clients, or your boss, so be careful not to do or say anything that might be insensitive or offensive to someone else.

While it was once the job of publicists to manage the images of high-profile individuals and companies, these days, with the ever-present social media and devices to share content like photos, audio, and video, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to take charge of our own publicity and image as it’s presented online. Fortunately, a little preparation goes a long way to keep you in the good graces of clients and business associates online.

What other tips do you have for preparing for social media close-ups?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Carnoodles

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Technology is rapidly changing, becoming more social and is quickly becoming an integrated part of our lives. With ever-evolving devices, social networks, and online video capabilities, we’re increasingly moving toward an “always on” existence.

Yet it’s almost as if a strange dichotomy exists: on one hand, we’re steadily moving in this new direction where Facebook and Twitter are a central part of our lives, but on the other, many of us are still slow to adopt video and video conferencing. While a great number of people are embracing constant connectivity, others seem to be too leery of the close-up.

The spy in your living room

An acquaintance of mine has a bad habit of recording people on his cell phone without their knowledge or consent. While casually hanging out with friends or family, it’s common to catch him capturing video of someone in the group and jokingly saying that he’s posting it to Facebook. It’s really annoying, but it also shows how when we could innocently be in the company of others without worrying that the things we say or do will end up broadcasted online are gone.

We advise teenagers and college students not to post lewd or indecent photos of themselves online, as they might come back to haunt them in future job searches and so on, but what about our own everyday conduct? Are we comfortable having that streamed live to the world 24/7?

In effect, life is becoming an all-access, behind-the-scenes pass where anyone with a cell phone and an Internet connection can follow us wherever we go, watching and recording everything we say and do.

Our resistance to the spotlight

Certainly, one could argue that this brave new world of social media, with no privacy and complete (perhaps to a fault) transparency, means greater truth and authenticity, but for most of us, I think there are certain times when we want to be able to let our guard down, and that doesn’t mean that we’re being dishonest or that we’re hiding our “real selves” — quite the contrary, during those times, we might feel the least like ourselves and don’t want that to be how we are ultimately perceived by those around us or by anyone online, especially those who generally see us in a more professional light.

Feeling as if we’re always in the spotlight also has the potential for leading us to a lack of intimacy and closeness with people in general, since relationships restricted to those created online often lack depth and meaning. For example, if we have sensitive conversations with close friends or family members, we might divulge details or thoughts to that person, as we’re in the process of developing our opinions around the subject. That doesn’t mean that those details are our opinions, but rather are helping us form our opinions, and the conversation itself is very much a part of that process. If we’re never allowed to have those types of conversations, how will that impact us developmentally and socially? At some point, there have to be boundaries to what gets broadcasted to the world and to what is considered for or against our reputations, online or off.

In short, we can’t be polished and professional at all times, nor can we ever be perfect — we’re human, and being human means bad days, bad moods, and even slumps sometimes. Yet the reality of our world today is that everything we say or do is displayed as if on an overhead projector, and we’re keenly aware of the fact that first impressions count, so how do we find the balance so that what we say or do today doesn’t come back to bite us tomorrow and so that we don’t become today’s version of Stepford wives, behaving just so, in order to avoid a bad rap?

How are you handling being “always on”?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Malias

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