Be Careful What You Say Online (Anywhere)

Quick post about the fact that your digital footprints can be found everywhere – often in places where you might not want them to be found, if you’re not careful.

Way back when (actually it was only last year) when my main focus was on helping C.H.E.K practitioners market themselves more effectively, I wrote a post which attracted some controversial and frankly quite rude & irritating comments from people who didn’t really know what they were talking about.

The funny thing is that if you now search online for a couple of the people who left those rather rude comments, my post (and hence their rude comment) is one of the first listings returned on Google.

How do I know this?

Because in my blog stats I can see that a few visitors have come to the blog from a search using those names…meaning they quite likely read those comments and quite possibly made a decision *not* to work with those people off the back of them.

The problem is, as a C.H.E.K practitioner you can bury your head in the sand for as long as you want, kicking and screaming and believing you don’t need to market yourself, especially online…but if people are already searching for you online, don’t you at least want to have some sort of say in what they find out about you there?

(…and I can pretty much guarantee that people are searching for you – I get multiple visits all the time from people searching on the names of C.H.E.K practitioners who’ve commented here).

I understand that some of those comments may well have been made in the heat of the moment but, from a marketing perspective can you really afford for that to be the main or even the only presence you have on the web?

P.S. One of those commenters even emailed me when I contacted them directly and apologised for their comment, stating that they’d been “having a bad day”. So the question stands…do you really want something you said on a bad day to represent your total and pretty much only presence online?

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