Your online reputation is your reputation. Period.
Your online reputation determines how people look at you. Your
online reputation determines who is willing to hire you, buy from
you, or sell to you. Your online reputation determines if you will get
a second date, or even a first. Your online reputation can be the
source of gossip and rumors that can spin a whirlwind around your
personal life. And you probably know less about your online reputa-
tion than you should.
Your Reputation Shapes Your
Real-World Interactions
Reputation is reality.
—UPDATING A CLASSIC QUOTE
Your Online Reputation
Is Your Reputation
16
CHAPTER
It does not matter whether your reputation is accurate or not; people
are going to judge you by it and make their decisions on it. It is an un-
fortunate fact that the world is too crowded and hectic for most peo-
ple to stop and take the time to make a careful judgment about you or
your business after collecting and weighing all of the evidence avail-
able. Instead, people are far more likely to rush to a snap judgment
based on the first information they see—and then use that judgment
to decide whether they will date, befriend, do business with, hire, or
trust you.
Your reputation is the sum total of how you are seen by the pub-
lic. It is all of the facts and judgments that people make about you. It
can be based on news, gossip, rumors, public records, photos, personal
experience, and anything else people use to form their opinions.
Reputation is more than just “good” or “bad,” although both are
part of reputation. Reputation is all of the judgments people make
about you: Are you considered an innovator or a leader? Do people
think of you as trustworthy and loyal? Do you have a reputation for
being good with details or a master of the big picture? Are you seen
as stoic or emotional? The list of all the parts of your reputation
could stretch many pages.
If you are a small business owner, the same concerns apply. Is
your company compared to a Ford Pinto or to a Mercedes Benz? Is
it seen as down-market like Wal-Mart or cheap-chic like Target?
Positive like Johnson & Johnson or negative like Enron? Growing
like Google or shrinking like Alcoa? A leader in customer satisfac-
tion like Southwest Airlines or a laggard like United? The reputation
of a business drives sales and growth; customers are unlikely to buy
from a business with a tarnished reputation, especially if there are
other alternatives available. Some investors even think that almost
two-thirds of a company’s value is driven by its reputation.
1
This fig-
ure has been confirmed on Wall Street; in many corporate buyouts,
billions of dollars are attributed to “goodwill”—Wall Street jargon for
having a good reputation that encourages consumers to buy whatever
the company is selling.
17Your Online Reputation Is Your Reputation
18 Wild West 2.0
Sometimes, reputation is earned through a combination of many
observations over time. Your reputation among your close friends is
likely formed this way; they have seen you through thick and thin,
and they know your true character. But, other times, a reputation can
be made or lost on one event: Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, pilot of
the U.S. Airways jet that landed safely in the Hudson River in early
2009, has a reputation as a skilled airman solely because of that one
incident.
2
On the other side of the ledger, the supermarket chain
Food Lion suffered from a bad reputation for years after one report
that the company was selling expired meat. Many athletes have made
their reputations on the basis of just one failure success or failure in
the clutch: the name Bill Buckner reminds all too many fans of a cru-
cial error in the 1986 World Series, rather than his consistent play
across his twenty-year, 1,000-RBI career, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic
hockey team is remembered for its “Miracle on Ice” win over the So-
viet Union in the medal round instead of its uninspired play in in-
ternational exhibition matches.
Reputation Matters Because
People Take Shortcuts
Every day, thousands of judgments are made on the basis of reputa-
tion: Is this person trustworthy? Does this company make reliable
products? Will this politician be honest in office? Will this adviser
manage my money responsibly? Those judgments lead to countless
real-life decisions with serious consequences: whom to hire, what
products to buy, how to vote, whom to befriend or date.
This heavy reliance on reputation is probably inevitable. Reputation
gives us a fast way to make decisions. We all interact with so many peo-
ple and companies on a daily basis that it would be impossible to thor-
oughly investigate each interaction from scratch. And, many times, there
is no way to take a person, product, or business partner for a “test drive”
to experience them firsthand; you can’t safely test the food from a restau-
rant known for food poisoning, and you certainly would not test en-
trusting your children to a school bus driver known for alcoholism. In-
stead, we rely on the collected wisdom of others. This distilled wisdom
is known as reputation and makes it possible to make fast decisions.
In more scientific terminology, people rely on so-called heuristics. A
heuristic is nothing more than a rule of thumb used to make a decision
in the face of uncertainty. Some heuristics are easy to spot: when all else
is equal, most people assume that expensive products are of higher qual-
ity than cheaper products, even to the point of telling their doctors that
a $2.50 sugar pill was more effective than an identical $0.10 sugar pill.
3
Obviously, the heuristic is wrong when applied to the sugar pill, but it is
understandable how it came about: our life experience tells us that ex-
pensive products are usually of higher quality than cheap products.
Sometimes, real-world use of heuristics can be manipulated to
comical result. The “social proof ” heuristic—a rule of thumb sug-
gesting that there is often wisdom in crowds—has been heavily used
by “candid camera” TV shows. The formula is simple: place the un-
suspecting target (the “mark”) in an unfamiliar environment, sur-
round the mark with actors who behave strangely, and then watch as
the mark conforms his own behavior to whatever odd manner the ac-
tors are adopting. The mark might face the wrong way in an elevator
because everyone else is also facing the wrong way,
4
or walk right past
a world-famous artist playing a $2.3 million violin in a subway be-
cause everyone else is treating the violinist as a common busker.
5
The
application to reputation is straightforward: Most people will follow
the crowd when deciding whom to trust, whom to befriend, and
whom to do business with. If you ever need proof that this works in
practice, then look at the way that many nightclubs artificially create
a line outside their front door in order to appear more popular and
exclusive; many people subconsciously assume that the club must be
better simply because so many people are willing to wait in line to go
inside.
Another common heuristic related to reputation is the so-called
halo effect. It was first studied by the psychologist Edward
Thorndike in the U.S. Army in 1920.
6
He discovered that once a
19Your Online Reputation Is Your Reputation
military officer formed a positive impression of a soldier, the officer
was likely to give that soldier good scores in all evaluation categories,
even if an objective observer would have scored the soldier lower in
some categories. And once the officer formed a negative impression
of a soldier, the officer was likely to give that soldier a negative eval-
uation across all evaluation categories, even if the solider deserved
high marks in some categories. The explanation was simple: the of-
ficer dealt with hundreds of soldiers, so he formed a mental image of
each soldier as either a “good” or “bad” soldier and viewed all of the
soldier’s actions in that light.
Combining social proof with the halo effect creates a powerful
basis for social reputation. It is a common rule of thumb to trust
people with a good reputation in the community and to distrust
people with a bad reputation in the community. This heuristic
makes sense: It is efficient to learn from the experiences that other
people have had. If a poker player had a reputation for cheating,
only a fool would sit down and play a high-stakes game with him. If
a company had a reputation for selling unsafe products, it would be
foolish to trust its product without inspecting it first. The halo ef-
fect makes this form of social reputation even more powerful: Just
like most people would not play poker against a gambler with a rep-
utation as a cheater, most people also would not trust him to watch
their children.
Unfortunately, this use of reputation as a heuristic is not always
accurate. Many reputations are undeserved, especially in the age of
digital media and Web 2.0 socialization. There are people and com-
panies that have been unfairly smeared and that do not deserve their
negative reputations. And there are people and companies that have
positive reputations beyond what they have earned. But the inaccu-
racy of many reputations does not stop people from using reputation
to judge each other. Instead, let this serve as a reminder of why you
must carefully guard your reputation if you hope to succeed at any
pursuit in life.
Wild West 2.020
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.