Online Identity Management

[cyriac]

What is online identity management?

Online identity management (OIM) is a set of methods for generating the distinguished presence of an individual on the Internet. That presence could be reflected by any kind of content that refers to the person, including news, participation in blogs and forums, personal web sites, social media presence, pictures, video, etc

One of the aspects online identity management process has to do with is, improving the quantity and quality of traffic to sites that have content related to a person. In that aspect, OIM is a part of another discipline called Search Engine Optimization, with the difference that the only keyword is the person's name, and the optimization object is not necessary a single web site; it can consider a set of completely different sites that contain positive online references. The objective in this case is to get high rankings for as many sites as possible when someone searches for a person's name. If the search engine used is Google, this action is called “to Google” someone

Online identity management often involves participation in social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Twitxr, Last.fm, Myspace, Orkut and other online communities and community websites, and is related to blogging, blog social networks like MyBlogLog and blog search engines like Technorati.

Objectives

- Maximize the appearances of positive online references about a specific person, targeting not only to users that actively search for that person on any Search Engine, but also to those that eventually can reach a person's reference while browsing the web.
- Build an online identity in case the person's web presence is minimal or nonexistent.
- Solve online reputation problems. In this case, the process can also be named online reputation management.

Motivation

The reason why someone would be interested in doing online identity management is closely related to the increasing number of constituencies that use the internet as a tool to find information about people.
A survey by CareerBuilder.com found that 1 in 4 wanting to hire managers used search engines to screen candidates. Also one in 10 checked candidates' profiles on social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook According to a December 2007 survey by the Ponemon Institute, a private research organization, roughly half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in vetting job applications. Also, Garlik commissioned 2007 PCP market research has shown that, more and more British people are making decisions based on digital status. Already 16% have chosen their new home based on how their prospective neighbours appear online. 1 in 5 (20%) have researched a prospective boss online before accepting a job and 32% have searched online to find out more about professionals before hiring them to do a job.