Own Your Digital Reputation

Start with LinkedIn

Embarrassing college photos? Immature posts? Too many selfies? We all have made an error in judgment at some point and may have published content online that we regretted later. This week in Reputation Management class at Stanford GSB, we discussed the importance of owning our digital reputation.

According to Allison Kluger, owning your digital reputation starts with being a Conscientious Content Creator. Whenever you post on social media ask yourself: am I ok with my mom, my enemy, and the Pope reading this post? In a Zoom poll, 46% of the class considered themselves Conscientious Content Creators.

Zoom poll in class: Are you a Conscientious Content Creator?

Digital footprints are forever. Therefore, it is important to review your online presence and remove content that no longer represents your views or values. For that, Allison had 3 simple tips:

• Ask: Tell your friend that their tag or post hurts your reputation and ask them to remove it
• Beg: Same as “ask”, but with a more urgent “please” :)
• Sue: It takes a lot of time and money, and it is usually hard to win

If none of these works, populate your site with as much positive content as you can. Newer content pushes down older negative content. With time, you will have more neutral and positive content on your social media profile.

While it is hard to control all pieces of your digital reputation, LinkedIn is the easiest place to start.

LinkedIn logo

Hari Srinivasan, GSB ’09 and VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, spoke to our class about building a good reputation on LinkedIn.

According to Hari, we use our LinkedIn profiles to tell a story. Employment conditions have changed rapidly after COVID-19. If you want to change jobs or industries, now is the time to leverage your LinkedIn profile to tell a new story.

Hari’s framework to tell your story and build your professional identity on LinkedIn has 4 components:

Hari’s framework to tell your story on LinkedIn

1. Use your credentials, such as schools you attended or companies you worked for, to demonstrate knowledge
2. Bring your credentials to life with samples of your work, preferably images and videos, that demonstrate results you delivered
3. Connect with people to build your professional network and demonstrate your fit
4. Take assessments and keep adding skills to your profile to demonstrate capabilities

Beyond telling your story, it is important to keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date. Below are Hari’s 6 tips to build a great profile for today’s economy.

1. Add a professional photo: Members with a photo get 9x more connection requests, 21x more profile views, and 30x more messages
2. Detail your work experience: Update your positions and add 2–3 sentences to describe your role, make them digestible
3. Include samples of your work in photos and videos: Give a visual representation of your professional story, highlight your work with teams
4. Publish articles: Get your work out there! Articles published on LinkedIn aggregate back to your profile and increase your reach both to recruiters and to senior professionals. Pro tip: mention people on your team and drive credit to them to highlight your leadership skills
5. Learn and validate skills: Add new skills and complete skills tests
6. Be direct: Try some new features, like “open to recruiter”, to indicate your interest in new opportunities

Take an hour of your quarantine time to put these tips into practice and to tell a new story on LinkedIn. Take home the job! :) [Also, connect with me on LinkedIn].