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November 22, 2005

Moveable Reputation

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Posted by Elizabeth Albrycht

Neville Hobson shares the story of a friend who is leaving his company and the challenges that such movement presents to his reputation/identity/connectivity. He offers a variety of tips on how to manage your "personal presence" (as he calls it) culled from a couple of sources, including Tom Foremski and Mitch Ratcliffe, and adds a couple of his own.

The question of a global, persistent online identity (and corresponding reputation) is a challenging one. One of the big issues is how to measure reputation (not easy). If you are anything like me, your online reputation is fragmented or multiple. I blog in a variety of different places, on a number of different subjects. In each, I have some roughly visible level of reputation. But I don't think I have any global/aggregate reputation. And I can't carry any of those reputations with me easily if I move into a new topic area, for example.

Or to put it another way, say you are the expert blogger at a company. Maybe you are the CEO. And you leave. This throws a wrench in your former place of work's online reputation, and leaves you fragmented. And what about history? Is your past reputation-generating device archived? Does it disappear? Is our reputation so ephemeral?

We are increasingly moving away from easy titles or recognition devices. Our identities and reputations are works in progress, a process if you will. Multiple. Changing. Today there is no really easy way to track and/or manage that. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Maybe something like Squidoo's lenses is a good start.

Update 11/23: Allen Jenkins adds some more ideas.

Comments (1) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: Career Management


COMMENTS

1. Frank Walsh on November 22, 2005 11:45 AM writes...

This issue can and should be observed through a much broader lens. Of course I understand the focus on mobile workers given the context, but as my company re-defines work for our "Western Centers" I can assure you that many people are uneasy about how their professional identity will be maintained.

In a recent presentation on the subject of the corporate culture, I included a statement that we need to shift away from having a person's identity and role associated with their "department" to having it associated with the customer(s) they are serving, the project(s) they are serving it on, and the stage of that project. As we expect our people to cross traditional boundaries (physical, organizational or otherwise), we need to address their professional identities. This is certainly a bigger challenge for the mobile professional, but there are important lessons to be learned for everyone.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Moveable Reputation:

Multiple Identities Part 2 from CorporatePR
Last week I wrote about managing your identity, with a focus on reputation:The question of a global, persistent online identity (and corresponding reputation) is a challenging one. One of the big issues is how to measure reputation (not easy). If you a... [Read More]

Tracked on November 30, 2005 6:54 AM


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