Grown up cyberbullying & spin control

We’re hearing more and more about the teenage, queen-bee-wannabe kind, but adults are certainly not immune to cyberbullying – not on the user-driven Web, where defamation can happen to anybody, whether a parent or a public figure. The Washington Post describes some particularly tough examples and the reputation-management providers they’ve turned to. “Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don't promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.”

Of course these organizations help with teenagers’ reputations too, but let’s hope it won’t come to this potentially costly fix for them. What these services do is something a lot of people can do for themselves with a little bit of time – put a little positive p.r. out there on the Web about themselves (such as a blog or social-networking profile or two or three to which good friends can post supportive comments to) that search-engine crawlers can find too. I’ve mentioned this in the past, the perhaps unfortunate but growing need to learn and teach our kids how to do our/their own spin control. It seems the choices are becoming 1) stay very anonymous and private online, 2) be less private and more spin-savvy, or 3) be very public and either spend a lot of time spin-doctoring our own reputations or a lot of money paying professionals to do it. Most young people will probably fall somewhere around No. 2 or will be in denial, think they’re in category No. 1, and occasionally need a little spin-doctor help, whether amateur or professional.