You have a Global Reputation

Reputation Defined

1) The beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something.
2) A widespread belief that someone or something has a particular habit or characteristic.

From Wikipedia,

“Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.”

In 1994 you probably had a local reputation unless you auditioned on Star Search. The beliefs and opinions about you as an individual were for the most part shaped by those you encountered directly or indirectly.

In 1995 NSFNET was decommissioned and the commercialization of the Internet began. This launched your shift from a local reputation to a global reputation.

It took roughly 10 years for companies to figure out the best way to index all of the information on the internet. It started with Directories and quickly morphed into search engines. Around 2005, Google Base launched and over the next few years became the dominant search engine on the internet. Fast forward to 2012 and there are 10 billion web pages on the internet and traffic worldwide is now measured in monthly Exabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

This is the backbone of your global reputation and it means that billions of people on the planet have instant access to information about you.

Today, someone on the other side of the world can get a quick glimpse into your involvements and possibly details about your personal life in less than 60 seconds. That same person can post information about you at their sole discretion in less than 180 seconds. Compare this to 18th century England where cases of Defamation were rare and limited to information that was published in the local newspaper.

So where does your global reputation start?

Googling people, places, businesses, is a phenomena that is only growing stronger and becoming more ingrained in the lives of everyday people.

It may not always be Google, but it definitely could be. The market share of the Silicon Valley company is mind boggling.

Given this major revolution in Reputation it’s a good idea to become acquainted with your Google results. Right now you have a bit of a head start. In five years there could easily be thousands of web sites that are posting mass amounts of data all trying to occupy the front page of your search results to get an extra slice of ad revenue.

I’m plugging one of our tools here but it fits – Check out Repumatic, it’s free. Even if you don’t want the CORE sites that Repumatic creates for you in your top 10, use them to link to your social profiles which will push them higher in Google and give them more staying power.

So if you are reading this than you probably live in a modern society and therefore you have a Global Reputation. There’s no reason to let that fact freak you out, it’s something we are all adapting to. Fortunately there are some really cool tools out there to put you in control of the process.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com