Blake Cahill gets it exactly right when he says that social media is playing a larger role than every before in our lives. The article says that social networking takes up 11% of the time that people spend online these days, which is a powerful driver of traffic. In December of 2009 Facebook had over 112 million visitors. This kind of traffic can be a game changer in the delicate world of search engine results.

Unfortunately, as social media has become more prevalent in the lives of consumers and a more important tool for businesses, it has become much more difficult for companies to effectively manage. Digital communications channels have multiplied, and the amount of social media data available in 2010 – from tweets to blogs to customer reviews – is already huge. This customer feedback treasure trove continues to grow exponentially, meaning that companies interested in monitoring and leveraging such data (and that should be most) need to invest significant planning and resources into their social media strategies.

This is absolutely true. Web libel will only continue to increase as social media’s importance does.

http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/social_media-10017688-1.html

One of the newest social networking websites to break onto the scene is Unvarnished. The site, which has yet to move out of beta testing, is attracting a lot of attention. However, for a site that is focused on online reputation, the site sure does have a bad reputation itself. This is as interesting as it is ironic. The article below is written by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark:

People can write whatever they want about you, and vice versa. They do have some controls around that, and maybe that’ll be enough. Might work, given what I’ve seen in fifteen years of customer service. People do look out for each other.  It’ll probably depend on having enough people looking at reviews, to overwhelm any disinformation.

I hate to join the choir–but it sounds like Unvarnished is just an awful idea. All too often in the brand reputation management industry we see the negative effects of anonymous commenting.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/newmark/detail??blogid=67&entry_id=60586

We have known for a long time that hiring managers use the Internet to look up information on their job applicants. Microsoft has done another survey called Online Reputation in a Connected World with over 1100 hiring managers and HR professionals in Germany, France, the UK, and the US.

“Now,” it states, “recruiters can easily and anonymously collect information that they would not be permitted to ask in an interview, and the survey found that recruiters are doing just that.”

Among the more surprising survey findings: 75 percent of U.S. recruiters say their companies have formal policies in place that require hiring personnel to research applicants online. That figure drops to 48 percent for U.K.-based hiring managers and 21 percent for both the German and French counterparts.

It should be interesting to see whether any legislature moves to make a law forbidding this. It would be very hard to police/report, so I doubt it. Still, it is something job applicants should be aware of. Their Internet reputation can tell employers all sorts of information that they didn’t want known.

http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=374699407