Book Review: Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You

Philip Young's review of Louis Halpern and Roy Murphy's Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You reminded me that I'd bought a copy before Christmas and hadn't seen it since.  After a search lasting several days, I found that it had become a victim of my daughter's savage 'posting' game and was lying crushed and unloved under a mattress alongside George Monbiot's Captive State, Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler's Monkey Puzzle and Eric Hill's Spot's First Walk.

Now these aren't titles that I'd put in any list of 'books that changed my life.'  But, by writing about them online, I am linked with these books forever -  so perhaps I should change them to something a bit more erudite?  After all, the authors suggest that I should be asking whether what appears online about me enhances my professional reputation, and I'm not sure that connecting myself with Spot's First Walk really helps my cause.

A book focussing on personal reputaton management is well overdue.  As PR academics we're constantly telling students to guard and build their online reputation, but until now have only been able to offer a few blog posts and articles as 'proof' for our argument, thus rather contradicting our usual mantra of not relying on non-peer reviewed sources for justification.

(The only 'online PR' book which had discussed online reputation management with any specificity to date was Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge's Putting the Public Back into Public Relations.  Others might, but thorough indexing appears to be going out of fashion for business books, which makes it slightly tricky to find what you're looking for).

I read Halpern & Murphy's book expecting to have a basic, but interesting, canter through some of the concepts surrounding personal relationship management, coupled with lots of helpful tips and case studies.  On this front it succeeds, and much of the material is useful, but a book about reputation consists of more than just its content.  Unfortunately the book has a feel of one which was rushed to publication due to the number of typos and inconsistencies, detracting from the book's message and in my case, my confidence in it.  There's also a reliance on Wikipedia as a source (see the 'References' and 'Picture Credits' sections), which makes me wince.

Also, as Philip Young points out, this book uses a lot of white space to fill its 200 pages and to me some of the illustrations seem a bit pointless (do we really need to know what the Google home page looks like?). 

This aside, the authors take a strategic and readable approach to building a personal brand (how do you want to see yourself?) and the step-by-step approach to creating an online presence will no doubt be helpful to many.  However, I found that the really difficult reputation issues (what happens if you have a popular name - say, David Cameron - and you want to increase your online presence?  How do you rebuild a tarnished reputation?) were quickly sidestepped.  I would also have liked to see more discussion on the ethics and practicality of changing your online name to increase your 'Google juice' and some practical guidance on the long-term maintenance and development of your online presence.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record the book's lack of indexing and cross referencing makes it tricky to just dip into, which is frustrating  - you really need to read it all in one go and trust that everything will be explained in the end (which to be fair, it usually is).

While I'll be adding this book to my undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists (it does help answer the "why should I bother blogging?" question), it will be to get students starting to think how they create and establish their personal brand.  For maintaining that reputation over the next decade or longer, however, they need to start thinking and working things out for themselves.

Comments

[reputation management]

Those that take the opportunity to protect their online reputation across social networks, blogs, wiki's will be at the forefront of the information century. Now is the time to act.