No recommendations?

Since I spent the weekend reading What's Mine Is Yours, I am interested in the concept of generating an online reputation. From a collaborative consumption perspective this reputation would generate: how good a buyer/seller and loaner/borrower you are, all available in the online.

Using reputation, making an introduction or a referral is not new and recommendations were and are based on character as well as caste. Using an online community to make recommendations may allow us to circumvent the caste aspect of the recommendation--I can see and write a recommendation for my plumber, for example, a person who may not live in my neighborhood or have gone to college with me, but which my social network can access and decide whether or not to hire him, or let him couch surf in their house in London, a privilege not available to previous generations of plumbers.

There are systems in place to keep track of reputation: eBay's star system for buyers and sellers, is just one example. In the realm of business networking, LinkedIn has a reputation manager, the Recommendations field which allows users to write recommendations for people who are in their LinkedIn network. You can vet any recommendations written for you and hide them if you don't want them to be visible, revealing them again when you think they might help. But should an employer be able to stop employees from writing recommendations for their network connections on LinkedIn? Workforce Management has an article on when and why to craft a LinkedIn referral policy, but I think writing referrals, in the age of "collaborative consumption" is much bigger than the people we work and have worked with, and it may not be possible to forbid a person from writing a recommendation, considering the varied places where a recommendation can be input and our coming ability to search and sort individual reputation.

Rachel Botman's TED talk about collaborative consumption and what it might mean

Book Review: Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

The authors of Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier include the CEO and Chief Counsel of ReputationDefender, a company that specializes in online reputation management. Though the book does advertise the services of their company, they also lay out a plan that a reader who understands the nature of the tactics described could use to protect their online reputation. Their plan could also be used to create documentation in case a question every arose about the veracity of the information in the attack, or may prove useful to law enforcement should an online reputation attack veer from malice to harassment or RL violence.


The authors explain the reasons why strangers, acquaintances or customers may use a search engine to look for information on a person. Verifying identity, reputation and claims of expertise may be the most common reasons. Employers, for example, will perform an online search to verify claims and credentials. Since a great deal of public information has moved online, it makes sense to conduct a search via Google, if only to satisfy curiosity.

The authors try to explain the motives of people who destroy online reputations—unfortunately, there may be no reason for wrecking a reputation except boredom—and they describe some of the tactics and tricks that reputation thieves use. Some of the tactics include:

• Googlebombing involves manipulating search results so that a search for other terms will lead to this person’s profile. The example the authors used is the “miserable failure” search leading to the biography of then-President George W Bush.
• Googlestuffing where top level search results are filled with erroneous information about the person searched for.
• “False flagging”, or becoming a double. Some examples include impersonating someone in a forum, blog—as in Fake Steve Jobs—or in a social networking site, like Facebook. Some of these impersonations have highly sinister overtones, especially if they masquerade as a family member.

There are also mistaken identity issues that can lead to online reputation smears. There are cases where a person may deliberately assume your identity online, but the authors also recommend periodic checks to look for “doppelnamers”, people with the same or similar name as yours, who have criminal histories, are a little dodgy or lack good sense. You can use some tactics to distinguish yourself from “dopplenamers”, such as adding your middle initial to your digital footprint, but it is also useful to be aware that these people may end up showing up in your top level search results. It would also be a good idea for any employers who are looking for information online to verify that they do indeed have the correct “Jesse James”.

The book does recommend for fee services, a few affiliated with ReputationDefender, for managing online reputation. However, there is a plan laid out in the book that person, who has read the entirety of the book and who understands the nature of online reputation attacks, can use to protect their personal and professional reputations. Reputation checking will require ongoing effort and it is worthwhile to document attacks and their clean up, in case there are questions about the attack or you need to submit a file to law enforcement.

If I have one big problem with the book, it is that I discovered that the site listed in the references, http://wildwest2.com, does not lead to a companion website for the book. The index/home page leads to the Amazon listing of the book. The links provided in the references at the end of each chapter, such as http://wildwest2.com/go/813 found on page 147, lead only to a broken links. Now a researcher will be able to find the actual references, but the implication of providing links like this is that, well, they will work and will lead the reader to useful resources.

Librarians who are looking for work may want to use the information outlined to check up on their online reputation--and I know for a fact that libraries are checking out their applicants online--and they may need to use it to defend the online reputation of their library. Sadly, only about an hour after finishing this book, I did have to recommend it to a client who was facing personal attacks online; though I was sorry about the attacks, I was glad to be able to give the person a resource to use so they could understand the nature of the attacks and how to resist them effectively.

Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

Thanks for all the fish

At the end of your final term, you not only have to fly away and leave the nest of library school, you're also probably pushed right out of the tree by the nice avians that taught you how to fly: the library that gave you your library student job. Now that you're no longer a student...well, you're fired. Thanks for all the fish.

You know that this is going to happen and there are three things you should do:

1. Ask for a formal, final evaluation. This evaluation talks about your growth as a professional, the tasks you completed and any additional projects that you accepted. It can also talk about valued personality traits--kindness, listening ability or work ethic--that your new employer might like to know that you have.
   
   You're leaving when you have lots to do--finishing projects, finding another job--and your employer is probably getting reading for a summer season which involves new students. It is easy to miss this last step, but you should ask for a formal evaluation and try to get it done now, before you get too busy. You can use this evaluation in interviews and it might work in a pinch if your references are away.
2. Ask for references, verbal and written. Unless they're totally out to lunch, they know you need a new job, but you have to tell them that you're looking and to be prepared for phone calls. You should also ask for a written letter in case they take holidays when you're interviewing or to put into your portfolio. Though it's pretty rare, you should also be prepared for them to refuse to give you a reference.
3. Thank them for having you. No one makes an employer hire a student (well, you're cheaper than a full-fledged professional, great incentive) but you're also a big hassle, though you're tidy enough. Say thank you.

Bellerophon's Reference Letter

If you know the myth, or read the Wikipedia entry, you know that Bellerophon got to ride Pegasus and killed some nasty creatures for fame, glory and chicks. But when he offended one rich queen, she supposedly cried foul to her husband. Since Bellerophon probably filled out his armor quite nicely, the husband sent Bellerophon off to the queen's father with a sealed letter that said, Soprano-style, "take good care of this guy". Bellerophon did not know what was in the sealed letter but the father-in-law didn't want to kill a guest, so he sent Bellerophon off to slay the Chimera. Instead of becoming a light snack, Bellerophon went on to even greater glory.

People who keep no Bulfinches' have been known to confuse Perseus and Bellerophon, and they rarely remember the letter that almost sent him to his death. A sneaky letter, where you unknowingly carry information to another about yourself that will lead to hostility, maybe death, is a "bellerophonic letter".

We are seriously out of Chimeras, but something similar can happen in the workplace. Your references aren't saying what you think they say: first, they can be mediocre; second, the reference is telling the employer that they would not hire you again, the kiss of death. You can have literally everything go right until that point, but if your reference says we wouldn't take you back and we know you, you're Chimera-chow.

What can you do about your references? First of all, don't rely on just three. People go on holidays, they get sick, move away, leave the field or they forget who the heck you were. Have at least five that you can count on.

Don't think that a reference letter is enough, or can replace a person. First, the prospective employer will still want to talk to your references. If you have lost touch with them, they aren't a reference anymore and your promises to maintain professional connections sound like empty talk. Second, does the reference letter say that "you showed up, answered questions and kept your desk in order"? If it does, where are the programs you started or maintained? Have you managed to secure any funds or grants for the library and/or the programs that you began? Did you manage any staff and did they like you? Did you write any policy? Do they still use anything you gave them? If not, it's not a reference letter, it's an attendance form, and it may not help you win a new job. Re-read your references: are you stellar or second-rate? You really just need one thing that you are good at or did well. Keeping a seat warm doesn't count.

What if your references are as cowardly as the king or as unreasonable as the queen, and they have not told you the truth about what is in the sealed letter? If you already know that your boss is a backstabber, don't include him/her as a reference. You can also ask that the prospective employer contact four references, or one extra to counteract your boss, to give a full picture of your work habits. You're probably cringing inside: won't they think I am a bad employee if my current boss has nothing nice to say about me? Possibly, but you're leaving your job for a reason, possibly a couple, and, let's not kid ourselves, the boss' office does not come with halo and a harp. And your bad boss is going to try to grind you into processed meat anyway; at least ask the prospective employer to get a detailed picture of your work habits and ability. This is why we ask for three references in the first place.

Remember the ending of our monster-slayer's story? Hubris got him later. The Greeks knew that we are our own worst enemy.

Getting LinkedIn Recommendations

Jason Alba has a post on his JibberJobber Blog providing some basic rules and giving an example of how to write a LinkedIn recommendation. If you don't use LinkedIn, LinkedIn is business networking that you can use to share information, look for work and get career advice (there are tons of tools that you can check out, and an Answers area that reference librarians will swoon over).

LinkedIn Recommendations are little blurbs or adverts, that you can write for people that you have a business relationship with. You can accept or reject a recommendation; once you accept a recommendation, you can show or hide the recommendation, if you wish (which can be helpful if a former colleague has recommended you, but your boss doesn't really like that person, for example.) Recommendations can help your profile on LinkedIn since people will scan your page and see that you have been endorsed by others for your work. This is great if the person recognizes the person who endorses you and if the person is not a serial endorser (a condition that sometimes affects predatory linkers).

Check out LinkedIn, if only to use the job board feature, if you are looking for work or if you want to while away a few hours on the Answers board.