Just as you are reading this article, someone may be surfing through the net, looking for your name and no, I am not talking about your childhood crush or former classmate. Let’s get a bit more realistic…perhaps someone like a potential employer or even your current one who is frantically trying to dig out things that your resumes are trying to hide. According to a recent survey done by Microsoft HR Managers, it was found that 70% of companies rejected candidates because of what they found online and didn’t really like…

Let’s read and try to understand what are the common mistakes that we make quite unknowingly about your online reputation.

Polish Your Online Image

Potential employers are trying to understand the real you. They will try to dig up everything right from your web name to old Facebook statuses and photos shared on sites like Flickr. So, revisit those old accounts and delete anything that may show you in an unfavorable light. This is one of the most important steps in online reputation monitoring.

Keep your Private Life Private

Keep your personal comments and private moments to yourself. If it is on Facebook, it is pretty much public. So, if you are commenting on how you broke up recently and feeling completely shattered, then perhaps you are chasing off your employer who was just about to call you. Facebook has done a lot to control your privacy. You can now actually control who sees your posts that you make from your mobile and those you make from your PC. This is a step that we need to take for our reputation online.

Facebook and Twitter Updates

If you are constantly updating your Facebook status or tweeting about every minute then your future employer is sure to wonder about your productivity. So, keep your updates limited and preferably to a limited time zone. This is one of the important things to do in Internet reputation protection.

Go Deep Down

Online reputation management is not just limited to Facebook. So, you would actually have to reach out to some obscure blog comments, cragslist searches and even yahoo groups. Of course, you can’t control every comment that is said about you, but of course you can avoid doing things that triggers off these comments. Also try to delete any silly email id that makes you look less serious. Also, having email id on known websites like Yahoo, Google or AOL will make you look dated. Fix online reputation by controlling your network.

Check What’s Said About You

A common way to checking what’s going on about you on the WWW is simply Google it in and search or look it up on Twitter. But that may not be enough. The other way is to take help of services like reputation.com that control your online reputation but that’s going to cost you around $100 a year. The other cheaper and effective alternative is setting up a Google alert for your name, so that you get email notifications right in your inbox. You can even set up alerts through socialmention.com and tweetbeep.com.

How to Keep it Safe

It is important to keep in mind that when creating websites and blogs or even posting your tweets and Facebook profiles, it should always be full name and then link them together. This way all your good and strong points will always come on the top. It is also important that you keep your Twitter tweets strictly professional. If you want to add something wacky, then create a separate account for it. This will act as an important aspect in fixing your online reputation.