Right now, online reputation management is critical, and social media has certainly made this both easier to manage, but also easier to dismantle at the same time. A question that has bounced around in my mind on occasion for quite some time has been – will we ever get to a point when reputation management actually becomes less of an issue, simply because the web is so saturated with everybody’s dealings (many of which are bound to be negative by today’s standards)?

I’m thinking about this more from the perspective of the individual rather than the brand. I think about kids in particular that don’t necessarily consider the potential consequences of posting questionable things online. At what point (if any) will employers, schools, etc. accept the fact that questionable material is simply the norm, and let it have less of an impact on decisions like hiring and admission? What is more likely – this kind of tolerance, or an increased sense of responsibility among people (especially the young)?

I thought it would be interesting to find out what some of the experts in the field think about the subject, so I got in touch with Andy Beal, creator of one of the most popular online reputation management tools – Trackur, as well as Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing, and search marketer Dave Naylor.

Following are some thoughts they shared with me, some of which are actually pretty amusing.

Andy Beal: While I continue to see evidence that any negative Google result can hurt your career prospects, at some point employers may find that every candidate has some kind of skeleton in their closet. If this starts to happen, then we’ll likely see employers shrugging-off minor infractions and instead only worrying about those negative events that provide a significant reflection on the candidate’s suitability.

Greg Jarboe: We are all living in a digital fish bowl.  Anybody and everybody can see what we’re doing, or they can find out with a little bit of searching.  So, we’re had better be doing things that we can explain to our family and friends. It’s like living in a small community, where everyone knows who you are.  If you rent a video at Blockbuster, your neighbor’s kid is working behind the counter and the town gossip is standing behind you in line.  So, I’d recommend watching a comedy.

On Kids:

Yes, but they learn about the dangers of that just as quickly as the other dangers that we had to learn about growing up.  I’m more concerned with the business executives who don’t know what is being said about their company online.  Just because they don’t know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting their business.

On Employers/schools/etc.

Maybe a generation from now they [will] be more forgiving, but for the next 20 years, the first thing someone will do is Google you.

It may take a generation before those who are making hiring or admissions decisions remember what was posted about them on Facebook or YouTube when they were younger.  In the meantime, imagine that your mother is reading every post you write and watching every move you make.  By the way, she already is.

Lee Odden: On the one hand, I do think some of what we consider gray area behavior documented in photos, status updates and even video will not be seen as so controversial as far as personal content on the social web. It makes me think of the contrast of how bands like the Clash or even Elvis seemed so controversial long ago and are quite tame by today’s standards.

That is not to say people won’t need to mind their social Ps and Qs. Blatant, overt and inappropriate behavior is timeless when there’s context. Sticking a French fry in your nose and farting on pepperoni before serving them to a customer, for example, is inappropriate in a timeless sort of way. Holding a drink at a party or mentioning generalities about a wild weekend are not as much of an issue.

Competition to get into a great school or a great job should motivate active social web participants to manage their online reputation in whatever way that will give them an advantage. Those that don’t pay attention may find themselves in a timeless search for something better despite loosening standards or more liberal perspectives about what’s ok and what crosses the line.

Dave Naylor: I think it could be an issue. I had a parent call me once to see if I could help get her son’s comments removed from a public forum. In the heat of a flame war, he left a very out of character comment, which in turn ended up ranking for his name. The kid was about to start looking at which university he was going to apply for, when he had some quite major panic attacks and came clean to his mum.

When I spoke to the kid’s mum it was only too evident that both where mortified by one heat of the moment. We all make mistakes in real life but on the net they can stick around forever. Of course these comments didn’t after a few emails backwards and forwards.

I tell my kids and other younger family member that once you hit that send button or that picture gets online it’s damn hard to remove, so just don’t do it. The last thing you need if you are a 16 year girl is appearing on exgfs.com (nsfw) or another site like that. Kids are kids and will make many mistakes! The Internet is not designed to protect them.

It took me weeks to clean up the naked bull riding I did in New Orleans at a conference

Wrapping up

There you have it. While nobody can be certain of how the future will go, all we can do is pretty much be careful and educate our children on how to handle themselves online. As for those looking to be the next generation’s Elvis, you can probably let the times dictate just how far you can appropriately push the envelope.

I’d like to thank Beal, Jarboe, Odden, and Naylor for their contributions to this article. What do you think about the matter? Do you think employers and schools will become more open-minded about what is considered tolerable online behavior in the future? Discuss this here.

Rushing through something that will have an impact on how you business is seen is probably not the wisest idea, but in terms of ROI, there is a general misconception that video production has to be costly. This is not the case. This is something SEO-PR‘s Greg Jarboe and Mike McDonald of WebProNews recently discussed at Search Engine Strategies New York:

Doug Mack on Adobe’s Scene7 Blog highlights

some suggestions Sucharita Mulpuru from Forrester Research recently made in an Adobe Webinar for getting started quickly with videos:

- Easy, short talking points

- Costs are primarily editing labor and server capacity for most basic executions

Video is not just something people are seeking out. It’s something people are sharing with each other, which is a key thing to remember. Yahoo is even embedding video in its SERPs, and Gmail is offering a feature that allows users to view YouTube videos in their email messages. And of course they can be embedded all over the web and shared across social networks.

Like Jarboe says, videos don’t always have to be viral to serve a purpose, but with so many ways for them to be shared, the opportunities for something to break viral are seemingly endless.

There are more tools than ever before available for marketing with video. Take YouTube Insight, which an analytics tool that gives you all kinds of analytical data regarding your videos. They just recently added more features to show you how people are engaging with your videos, and there is plenty of useful data to be gleaned from the tool. I suggest reading my interview with YouTube Product Manager Tracy Chan who discusses not only the tool, but many other ways businesses can use YouTube to their advantage.

If you’re looking to break into online video, don’t rush it. Do some research and use the tools that are available to you. You may find that you can spend a lot less than you think and find new ways to market your business that you didn’t realize you had in you.

Boy, wish we’d have noticed that before Piper Jaffray put out this 425-page report (PDF). Oh yeah, we kind of did, notice it a lot, but we’ll get to back-patting later. The report, entitled The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium, coins the latest buzzword "communitainment" after exploring the upheaval currently in progress.

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, took one for the team and weeded through the report before penning a succinct summary over at Search Engine Watch. "After several years of moving at a healthy pace along well-traveled pathways, the search engine industry seems to be sailing off in surprising new directions," he writes.

The comprehensive report is the result of a year’s worth of research led by Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior Internet analyst, and Aaron Kessler, VP and senior Internet analyst, and is the firm’s outline of how they believe advertising and media models will change over the next couple of decades.

Jarboe quotes an email from them:

"Consider this report as a warning of a storm that has already formed, a storm that will destroy many models and create new ones. Luckily, the full cycle of the storm will still take a few more years to complete, and there is still time to react."

The short and skinny: The user revolution has gone mainstream and is causing increased media fragmentation, putting search, as a portal, at the forefront of branding, and video ads will be funding it all.

It’s good to see this spark of recognition from outside the online marketing world. For the longest time, SEM was considered, from both sides of the fence, quite separate from traditional media and traditional marketing/advertising/branding. Search marketers, at times still, scoffed at branding concepts that didn’t produce direct, measurable results, even if this is the way the advertising world has worked for decades. Ask Coca-Cola.

But traditional Madison Avenue types have also been slow to accept the power of search marketing, and, more recently, the power of user-generated media. Both sides, though, are starting to get it: it’s all going to be one big media orgy one day anyway, might as well start smooching.

We could go into specifics about how this orgiastic revolution will take place, but we’d just be repeating ourselves. Instead, consider this an abridged index of sheer, conceited prescience:

Sweet-Talking The Searcher

YouTube Users and Video Ads

YouTube Optimization

Pure Unresolved Speculation

Google and TV Ads

YouTube Vs. TV

Online Video Reach

What Google Could Do Nielsen

Don’t Expect the FCC to Stay Out of It

Madison Ave. Doesn’t Get Web Video

Online Gaming

Google and In-game Advertising

Quantum Physics and Viral Marketing

Search Engines and Time Reality (just for fun)

Google Media, Inc., 20 years later…

Advertisers Late To the Big Dance

Portals, Google’s One Of Them

Google Should Come Out of Portal Closet

Mainstream Media Afraid Of Blogs

What Bloggers Like

The Associated Blogosphere

Branding In The Age of Wikipedia

Branding Through Social Media

Branding In the Red Light District

Branding In France

Podcasting, Blogging, Monetization

The Googleconomy

That’s all of the horn-tooting for today.