The Drunken Pirate: Stacy Snyder wanted to become a teacher. The single mother had completed her coursework and was looking forward to her new career. Then her dream died. University officials told her that although she had earned all the credits, passed all exams, and completed her training that she would be denied a teaching certificate because of behaviour unbecoming of a teacher. What behaviour she asked? An on-line photo on MySpace showed her wearing a pirate's hat and drinking from a plastic cup, which was captioned "drunken pirate."
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| "Drunken Pirate" |
The University argued that the photo was unprofessional since it might expose students to a photo of a teacher potentially drinking alcohol. Even if she took the photo off MySpace, the damage was done as her page had been cataloged by search engines and her photo archived by web crawlers. (Try image-searching "Stacy Snyder")
She unsuccessfully sued the University, and a subsequent appeal was also unsuccessful.
The bottom line is that the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.
This person's particular story has been told thousands of times including in the intro to the facinating book Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger (available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and most booksellers). It's an interesting treatise on the challeges of an "Internet that never forgets", as well as an intriguing proposal to add "a forgetting element to the Internet."
As the author says: "Since the beginning of time, for us humans, forgetting was the norm and remembering was the exception. Today, with the technology of the Internet, remembering is the norm and forgetting is the exception" .
Note: As of this 2010 Facebook now has over 500 million users with personal pages, and MySpace 185 million users with personal pages.
The Art of Reputation Management
At Don Martin Public Affairs, we've been getting an increasing number of calls, especially from executives, wanting help repairing personal or business reputations on the Internet. Fortunately there are several things can can be done, with modest success. But it takes time. Such as:
- Asking the offending web site to take down the material. Believe it or not this is often the most successful option, but the key is finding the right person to ask and in the right way.
- Use of a similarly-worded website such as www.TheTruthAboutJohnDoe.com which will then pop up when the company or person is searched, allowing you to refute the allegations.
- Suing the Internet provider is almost never productive and is almost always a complete waste of time and money. For example, to date no suit has ever been won against Wikipedia.
- Increasing the number of positive stories and articles on the Internet to help "drive down" the negative search results off of the first page of search (67% of people normally don't go to the second page of a search).
- Use of special sites that help general multiple versions of an article that are each their own "original content." (Putting out the same press release to multiple websites will only result in one search engine hit because they are all copies of the same thing. Instead, search bots are looking for new, "original content" instead of copies.)
If you or your company have a problem with something that's inaccurate on the web, an attack posted on someone's blog, or other kind of mis-statement of the truth, give us a call and let us help.
