An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer – Part 3: Reputation Management and Social CRM

Until this week, Greg Meyer was the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 3 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talked about managing your reputation using Social CRM tools. Meyer began a new job at Assistly earlier this week.

I give career advice to college students, both in my private practice and with a small school here in Georgia, Wesleyan College, and talk to them about what they put out on social media, especially on Facebook. You know, college students think they are tricky. They’ll set up one for their mom and dad and for employers to look at, and then they’ll set up a second one, where they post their party photos and talk to their friends about drinking and whatever else.

What I think is interesting is that tools like Gist can confound that, because all of the relational data allows it to see the related e-mail addresses under which they registered and to kind of “mine” that data in some ways. And so I’ve shown job seekers kind of how to do a “social media audit” using Gist, where they can kind of see that what they think they aren’t putting out there, they still are. So I talk to people about using privacy filters wisely. The other thing is “Don’t think you can really get away with anything these days, because the network is almost becoming self-aware, because of tools like this.”

I would say in response to that is that we honor the privacy controls set by the browser. So if you have locked things down on Facebook or other web service, we wouldn’t see that. And we’re not mining private data. We’re only mining public data. So your advice about having them understand that anything they put online could be seen by someone else is good.What I usually tell people who read newspapers is that if you don’t want to show up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, then don’t post it. If they don’t read newspapers, and don’t want to read it on TechCrunch, then don’t post it. If you are owning your own brand and understanding that when people do a search on Google, or do a search on these other services, that they are going to find you, then that gives you additional power, because you can say, “this is what I want to present.” And if all my social media waypoints are saying the same thing, then it’s going to ring true, and people are going to have a consistent view of me. That’s probably the best defense you have against being seen in the wrong way.

And, as far as having your friends post pictures of you that you would rather not like them to post, I can’t help you with that.

Yeah, there are some people who couldn’t make their friends stop, no matter what. I think that’s a point I always like to drive home. Some people have said to me “This really feels ‘Big Brother,’ and my thought is “it’s in the public stream.”

Yeah, it is really all out there, already, and tools like Gist, tools like Google Reader, tools like Rapportive or Xobni, or any of these other tools are just revealing things that search engines have really known for a long time and you can now search them all in one place. It’s out there, and you may just not realize it’s out there.

I think that in today’s marketplace, and today’s career marketplace, the truth is that it’s harder to spin things, because reputation management is a two-way street. What I tell job-seekers is that you can put anything you want out on the internet, as long as you are willing to stand by it, as how you are, or what you meant to put out there, or explain what your rationale was, or what your thinking was, and maybe even admit your mistakes if people don’t perceive it correctly or if it just wasn’t a case of good judgement.

Sure. You are the best person able to tell the story of you. So the better the story you tell, and the more consistent it is, the more believable it is.

I think that’s probably one of the best things to make people aware of: it’s not a private place. The internet is “public, in overdrive.” If you wouldn’t be doing it on your front porch, you probably shouldn’t be doing it on the internet.

Exactly.

 For more information about Greg Meyer, visit https://gist.com/greg

A version of this article was previously posted on Technorati as An Interview with Gist’s Greg Meyer – Part 3: Reputation Management and Social CRM at http://technorati.com/technology/article/an-interview-with-gists-greg-meyer2/page-2/#ixzz1U1tCeM5L