Maintaining a Digital Reputation — Notes from a Skeptic
I’ve always been skeptical of broadcasting my background and opinions to a massive audience.
My late British grandfather’s diary had simple advice on maintaining a good reputation. “A man’s name should only appear in the newspaper three times in his life: when he is born, when he gets married and when he dies.”
“A man’s name should only appear in the newspaper three times in his life: when he is born, when he gets married and when he dies.”
Since coming to the Stanford GSB, I have long thought about my grandfather’s advice and wondered about developing and maintaining a positive reputation in the digital age.
This week, Allison Kluger, the Professor for my course on Reputation Management, asked Hari Srinivasan, GSB ’09 and VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, to speak to the class about owning your digital reputation.
I remembered my grandfather’s advice and wondered what he would think about this topic. I think he’d like the challenge and would appreciate the world’s increasing connectedness. I came to the class with an open mind, ready to be challenged on my preferences for privacy and a “word-of-mouth” reputation.
During the class, we discussed embarrassing personal situations, how the path to economic opportunity is changing, how to build a world class LinkedIn profile and how LinkedIn addresses cognitive biases.
Our class asked Hari a variety of difficult questions. Hari was transparent with his opinions and knowledge. While I walked in skeptical, there were several instances where I felt my perspective and understanding of having a digital reputation evolve. Below are a few of those instances:
- Need for Constant Evolution: Attending the Stanford GSB is not a golden ticket. Beyond our capabilities and knowledge, we must demonstrate our proven ability to achieve results. For Hari, LinkedIn provides a platform for everyone to showcase their work product, reputation (via recommendations) and skills. If you want to be the best at what you do, you need to be showcasing your best self and adapting to ever-evolving business needs.
- Potential for Outsized Access: Publishing content on LinkedIn is helpful for sharing your values, reaching a broad audience and demonstrating your expertise. Hari provided a few tips about successful publishing on LinkedIn.
- Use publishing to give credit to your team members. Nothing helps your reputation like helping others.
2. It is okay to be wrong about the opinions that you post — writing your posts in a respectful and humble way helps give you license to change your opinions later.
- Personal and Professional World Collide: During our session, I had the opportunity to ask Hari about the nature of LinkedIn; should LinkedIn be a strictly professional network? How does LinkedIn think about maintaining its professional purpose? Hari challenged the premise of my question. The personal and the professional spheres are becoming inextricably bound together. While we could debate if this is good or bad, the reality is that today’s world not only assesses your professional capabilities but also your character and values
My favorite part of every class at Stanford is the diversity of perspectives. For example, my Austrian classmate Sarah Buchner asked about including academic credentials in her title. Demeng Che noted how Chinese professional networking is very different from Western-style networking.
I really enjoyed Hari’s commentary on the future of international business: “all of us will have to navigate around multiple professional identities and profiles in the different cultures we work in.” I think that Hari’s commentary is especially relevant for students at the GSB as we will be inevitably tasked to develop, manage and lead diverse teams.
Overall, I felt my perspective evolve after the class. Having and managing a digital presence is not only helpful but necessary in ensuring that my professional ambitions are defined and realized. I don’t think my grandfather would have any issue with that!
On a more tactical level, below are five actionable takeaways that I gleaned from the session from both Allison and Hari to own your digital reputation:
1. Be a Conscientious Content Creator: Whatever you post, imagine your mom, your enemy and the Pope seeing it!
2. Explain your work experience: Include your positions on your LinkedIn page and include 2–3 sentences that explain your role and impact
3. LinkedIn “About Me” Section: Don’t write your “About Me” section in the third person
4. LinkedIn is just the technology, the tool: You get to choose how to design your network
5. Add a professional photo to your LinkedIn profile: Users with photos get 9x more connection requests, 21x more profile views and 30x more messages
