HS 83 – “Violated Online” with Steven Wyer

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My pleasure to welcome Stephen Weyer to the show. He is an expert on reputations and you know, I always have believed that you only get one chance to have a good reputation. He's got a couple of different websites and a book out about being violated online and he's a reputation advocate. So if you've ever been concerned and if you haven't, you should be about your online reputation. This show will be of particular interest to you. Steven, welcome. How are you?

Thanks so much for having me.

My pleasure. So you're coming to us today from Franklin, Tennessee, it looks like, huh?

That's right. The Nashville metropolitan area in the southern part of the U.S. great place.

Well, I love Nashville. Have had a lot of good times there. Tell us about the problem, first of all, if you would, with the Internet. I mean, there are obviously first amendment, free speech issues here, but the question is, how far does it go?

Yeah. And it's such a broad topic that we could talk for hours about it because there are so many facets. Everything focuses around a very narrow body of law. For all that our government has done and all the laws that have been put in place, everything that we experience online is basically regulated by two laws that were passed in the mid-90s. Now, of course, the mid-90s was 96, 98. There was no Twitter, there was no Facebook, there was no Google. There was none of that. And yet the core documents that govern the entire body of law were created then and have really not been supplemented or amended since then. So there's a very narrow body of law, which means that it's the wild, wild west out there. And when you walk into that type of environment, I think the biggest surprise to people is they don't realize how exposed they are until something happens. And I guess that's true of many aspects of life. Right. You never think you're going to have a car accident, so you don't put the seat belt on and then you have the car accident. Well, our business deals with all those people that didn't put a seatbelt on and they've had an accident. And those accidents look, they can look like all kinds of things. They can look like, if you're a retail business, bad reviews, most negative reviews, we track down and find they either come from former employees or competitors, and it materially damages their business. There's a form of attack, a form of slander. City, county, state and federal courthouses are now scanning historical documents to empty out their file rooms. Those documents are now being placed online for easy access. And so things that even five years ago, in order to find out the information about me that you may want to know, you'd have to hire a firm that would do some research. Somebody would have to go to a courthouse and pull a file. Now, with a few keystrokes and $19.95, you've got every piece of information out there.

Who's the 19, what's the 1995 reference item under one of those site?

Most these. Yeah, most of these sites will charge you some fee. It might be 495 or 595 for printing rights, because you want to print them out. Well, yeah, the information is virtually there. And you don't have to go to Idaho, where I used to live, to go to a courthouse. All you got to do is take a minute and a half and you have all that information. Well, there's all kinds of information coming out of the courthouses. Allegations, initial lawsuits that were resolved, divorce, adoption, bankruptcy. There's one website alone that has over 4 million mug shots on it. And criminal mug shots, you mean mug shots. But lots of them are dui, petty theft, and they were, they were disposed of first time offenders and the records were expunged. But the photographs that were taken at the time of booking have made their way onto the Internet. So you've got a guy that 10 years ago had a petty theft, had his record of sponge, paid a fine, did some public service a decade ago, and he wakes up tomorrow morning and his friend calls and says, hey, you know when I searched your name just now, right in the number one position on page one is mugshots.com and it says you're a criminal.

Yeah, and that's especially bad for a young person. I mean, I guess it's not going to apply to a juvenile, I hope. But if they're 18 years old and then they're 28, 10 years later and they're living a good life and being a good citizen, you know, I mean it's common for kids to get in trouble here and there.

And it's not even, it's not even just kids. I come from a perspective that says everybody makes mistakes, nobody should have to pay for them forever if they're petty. And the Internet is forever.

Well, that's the thing, you know, that's what I want. Yeah, right. And that's the thing I wanted to ask you about. I think there is a law that I heard about like in France. I think the French have a different view of this. And of course that doesn't really matter because the web is glued global. But I think in France things have to come down after a couple of years. Like it doesn't last forever on the French Internet. But of course any French citizen could be on the rest of the Internet. So. But if it's a French website, I think there is some sort of rule that they have to take things down.

Well, you know, in Europe in general, in some ways they're much more progressive than we are as it relates to the Internet. And there are changes going on in the law in Europe in general. State by or, excuse me, country by country. And I can't speak to those because I haven't studied them enough other than to tell you that. The one thing I can tell you factually is that seven countries in Europe are in the midst of criminal proceedings against Google for violation of privacy acts. And here in the United States, Google walks around with impunity.

Well, because Google is in bed with the government, so is Facebook. Everybody thinks that.

Yeah, there's a bit of speculation.

So anyhow, Europe views a lot of this stuff differently than we do. But we live here and we deal with this reality. And actually, you know, Google, Europe, Google Asia, those platforms are totally independent platforms. They're connected together. But your search results, if I searched your name and I was in London, I would not see anything near what the same search results that I would see here in the U.S. right.

Talk to us a little bit, if you would, about what people do. I mean, are they just knocking down search results by posting other content and getting those results to drop in the line, or what is the solution for this? And then I want to circle back and talk a little bit more about the problem too.

Sure, sure. Well, it's like anything else. The solution is defined by what the problem is to begin with. And so you really have to begin to look and see. Okay, where is your issue coming from? Every website, if you go to the bottom of their landing page, has terms and conditions of operation. And so if there's slander there, if you've been slandered, if there's information out there, the first thing your listeners want to do is they want to go to the terms and conditions and read those because they may find that the content posted about them is actually a violation of the website's own terms and conditions, and they just haven't monitored, haven't found it. And in those cases, if there's a violation of the site's own terms and conditions, you can contact the site and they'll delete the information. Problem solved. That'll work. Good. If there are issues like nudity, full social securities or bank numbers or Fein tax numbers for corporations that have made their way into postings and you contact Google, Google will delete them. Clear violation of terms and conditions that Google operate under.

How do you contact Google, though?

Like people listening to this must be thinking, how do you do that?

Yeah, you can't call them. There's a link, and there's a link and you file a report and you send it and they respond. So.

It is a big black box in one way, but at least for our firm, we have been very successful helping clients do that.

And you see those situations in an ugly divorce where one spouse will have nude pictures of the other and decide as part of vindication to post them up and I'll show him or her. And of course, Google will knock those down. So we have clients like that. So terms and conditions, that's a place to begin. Things that are very challenging to deal with that are legitimate are court documents and press documents. And by press, I'm talking traditional press in the form of either print or video links. So you've got newspaper reports or you've.

Got television reports and government, I assume, government type stuff. Like you said, court documents. So how do you deal with those?

Well, it depends on what it is. The problem with all of the sources I just mentioned is they're all matters of public record. That's the way they're managed. And, you know, in terms of people being damaged by it, I always tell the story. It's in the front of the book. Violated online. I had a medical professional contact me and 30 year history, senior partner in a large practice at a hospital, had a nurse allege sexual impropriety, criminal charges, cuffed him. He did the purple walk out the front of the hospital. The news cameras were there. The subsequent hearing, jury trial, he was totally, completely exonerated. And the record was a sponge because it was determined that this woman had made the same type of allegation seven years previously, different state, different hospital. So the guy's record was completely a sponge. His first page and second page search results were all the media feeds that were there. So all of the newspapers, all of the television reports, that's what you found for the guy. So there's no police record, and yet his search results totally destroyed him to the point that he left his vocation and went in a different direction for a career. Put him, put him out of medical practice. Wow, now. And I hear those stories every day. You can't make this stuff up. I sit down with my wife at night and so you're not gonna believe what I heard today.

That's one of the interesting parts of my business.

So what do you do about that? The answer is that there are technical, mechanical, disciplined ways of influencing page results. If you start with the question, when you search a term, why, when you get 10 results, why is the first result in position one? Why is it there? So let's say I live in Nashville and I search the term Nashville Pizza and your search results, There are always 10 results on a page. And the question is, why is Joey's Pizza in position one? And Tommy's pizza in position ten. Well, it's all counterintuitive because it has nothing to do with the length of time they're in business, the quality of their product, the price of their product. It doesn't have anything to do with the pretty pictures, the nice colors, doesn't have anything to do with any of that. It has to do with very technical structures in the way websites are built and the way they are connected and interface and interact with search engines. So if you understand that and then you can develop ways so that positive content interacts with those search engines in a positive way and the derogatory negative content is diminished in value from a search perspective, you can elevate positive content and you can suppress negative content. And over some period of time, you can actually influence what people see and how they, how they perceive you.

Right, right. And that's of course on the broader Internet. But what do you do about social media sites? See, nowadays with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, I guess too, things really, really in this one way, of course, they changed in a lot of ways. But in this particular way, when it comes to reputation management is that it's like we have, instead of the big broad Internet now we have a bunch of walls with moats and those are basically controlled by the list of who are your friends. So on Facebook you can have up to 5,000 friends, for example. On LinkedIn, I don't know how many connections you can have, but those are walled networks, so you don't even see them on a search. But there may be a lot of reputation damage being committed within those walls and you may not even know about it.

Right, well, but the thing I'm going to say right off the bat is most of that is self inflicted. And by that I mean that if you handle those social sites on a casual basis and are not methodical and thoughtful about your settings and about checking your settings and about rechecking your settings on an ongoing basis, you are the one that exposes yourself. So unlike the Internet, unlike the Internet as a whole.

No, no, no, I got you there. That's not what I was getting at. I was getting at if you are a business person and someone else is doing it to you within their walled network. So, you know, yes, we may control our settings. And one of the things you said was very, very good advice because what you said is if you're not rechecking those settings, because you know how Facebook is, they love to just change things on us without telling us. And suddenly you can go there and your Settings will be just completely different than you thought they were originally.

But.

And so that's great advice, of course, but what do you do when someone else is committing that damage inside of their walled network? Because unless somebody tells you it wouldn't even show up in search results, maybe there's nothing you can do.

You know what we're struggling with again? We've gone full circle now. And what we're struggling with again is the First Amendment. And the first amendment says that I'm entitled to my opinion. Now, when I express my opinion in public, and we would think of public as television, radio, newspaper, print, there is a nice broad body of law of what is slander, what is libel, and you're called into accountability. If I say something about you and it's on the radio and it's not true, you have recourse against me on the Internet. It changes in two ways. First of all, in the big Internet, as you refer to it, the global Internet, I have the ability to go on blogs, forums, and slander sites. And there are hundreds of them. I can say anything I want about you. I can sign it Mickey Mouse, and that content will be there for 20 years. The site stands on the First Amendment. The site discloses in its terms and conditions that it doesn't try to validate any claim or statement made. And very, very seldom will that content ever be taken down. So you've got. Anonymity is one issue on the Internet that you haven't had to deal with in the history of our country. Anonymity is a big deal. Second piece is those sites. And so now we'll talk about closed networks. So it's not the Internet now, but it's a closed vertical market. It's the same thing as if you came in and looked at my desk and I had written down that Tom is a bad guy and Bob is a criminal. And I've got notes all over my desk. That's my private stuff. And basically my Facebook is my private stuff. And I have the right in my private space to opine in any way I want. Now, the way you deal with that, and most people don't think about it when they're accepting friends, but the way you deal with that in the beginning is who you let into your network to begin with. I use the boyfriend, girlfriend example all the time. Your boyfriend and girlfriend and your Facebook friends. And so your friends see her friends and her friends see your friends, and then you break up. Well, everybody's been connected, and at that point, the only option you got is to disconnect yourself from the dialogue. But if Tom and Tanya are now friends on Facebook, and Tom's your friend and Tanya is my friend, they're connected. You can't break them apart. They've got their own relationship now. And the most graphic example I can give you again is in the book Violated Online. And it's a call that I got from a couple that had gone through divorce. They'd gotten married, loved their families, and decided to get on Family tree dot com. You've probably heard that site. It's an ancestry site where you build your family tree and it's so much fun, and you build. You know, and they built their family trees at Christmas, and there was infidelity in the relationship, subsequent divorce, and that happens all the time. But what they didn't count on was all the connectivity between the two expanded families, the in laws and outlaws, the cousins and nephews, and everybody that had connected through the digital medium that existed. And so long after the marriage was dissolved and the couple had gone their separate ways, there was this festering feud of content going back and forth between families that was the equivalent of a Digital Hatfields or McCoys. You can't do anything about that. And if you think about those things, when you begin that process of the family tree, when you take out your Facebook account, when you sign up for Twitter, you'll approach it more cautiously. But most people are in a hurry to get through. They check that terms and conditions box. They give their information, they have a wonderful user experience, and they never think about the exposure on the backside.

Yeah, these things are great tools, but they do carry real consequences with them. Well, give us an example, even a famous one, if you like, or especially a famous one of a reputation management problem. I mean, Herman Cain's been in the news, Governor Brownback's been in the news. Any of these that you want to bring up?

Well, you know, there are, depending on whether you're talking about social media, regular media, you're talking about tweets. I mean, when Mubarak stepped down, half an hour before Mubarak stepped down, Katie Couric tweeted that he'd stepped down, went out to 128,000 of her closest friends that all happened to be in the media. She jumped the gun on it, and it created a major media storm for her. And it was because of a simple tweet. And of course, we know about sports figures and politicians that have had inappropriate tweets and had it come back to hurt them. The most recent one is the Governor of Kansas, which is Governor Brownback. And the end of the month, the end of November and if your listeners will go out and simply put his name in, you'll see what's happened. His name is simply Sam Brown. Brownback. Sam had visitors from the high school there at the governor's office and met a nice girl named Emma Sullivan. Emma was an 18 year old student and as she left the governor's office, having met him along with her class, she decided to grab her cell phone and tweet. And she tweeted a message that was something like just made comments to Governor Brownback and told him he sucked in person. And it went out to her 60 followers, her friends. Well, every politician has a communications director. And the governor's communications director was monitoring social media. All public figures monitor social media now. And saw that tweet come across, felt compelled to call the president of the principal of that school. The principal called the student in and the principal demanded that the student write a letter of apology. And right then and there we stepped into the world of free speech. Where's the line? Does an 18 year old girl have the right to express her opinion to her 60 friends on Twitter? She refused to write an apology letter. It went from 60 friends to 8,000 followers within 24 hours. It was one of the lead stories on CNN Online. That story on CNN online had over 7,800 comments within the first 24 hours. And subsequently what happened? The Los Angeles Times carried it as their lead story. It had 825 additional articles tied to it with real nice headings like Cute girl says Brown Beck sucks. Brownback fixed the Kansas state government on her demanding an apology. Brown Beck eats crow and admits he was out of line. This is a governor.

And she now has thousands and thousands of new followers.

Thousands, thousands of new followers. And so you've taken a non event, turned it into a major media circus. And now when you look at the governor's search results and you want to find out, okay, I'm thinking about Governor Brownback, what's he done for my state? When you search his name now, what you'll find is that his search results are inundated with all of the media feeds from this Twitter incident. So it's discredited his office and it was a non event. And that media director, which I feel very bad for her because the first two pages of her search results, there's 10 results on a page. So the first 20 postings for her search results, 17 of them have to do with the faux pas she Made on this Twitter incident. She'll never work again. That old saying, you'll never work in this town again. Well, the Internet amplifies that.

It sure does. The Internet amplifies everything for good and bad. Well, any final tips that you want to share with people and give out your website as well, please.

Yeah, I can give you three or four. The first is you've got to acknowledge what's online about you. People tell me all the time I don't do the Internet. And my response is you may not do the Internet, but the Internet does you because you're already online. Public information is already out there and there are dozens of data aggregation sites. I always tell people if they want to be surprised, there's a site called spokeo.com. go to spokeo.com it's aggregating public records information and you will be astounded at what the world can find out about you. So you're already online. First of all, get educated, figure out what's out there about you.

Say that website again.

Pokio Spokeo. Sam. Oh, I've heard Sam, Paul, Oscar, Kangaroo, Ida, Oscar. It's either Ida Oscar or elephant Oscar. E O or IO and you'll just be very surprised what's there. So you've got to know what's there. The when you're looking for what's there, do yourself a favor. Look up your first name and your last name. Look up your first name, middle name, last name. Because legal documents have your legal name on them. Look up your first name, middle initial, last name so that you're getting a comprehensive perspective about what's out there. Because the search results for those three searches will in all probability be different. So find out what's out there about you. Second piece of advice and you'll smile at this because of your successes, own your own real estate. And by that I mean you must own your name online, your own domain name.

Yeah, right.

You go to godaddy and you buy your name. You don't buy just con. You buy.net, org, com biz. You buy them, it's going to cost you $50 a year. It's the cheapest insurance in the world. The example I give folks all the time is I have two daughters and when they were little girls I bought their names.

My one daughter is 16 years old and all we need is a bad dating relationship with a 17 year old fella and he can go out and ruin and destroy her reputation. We've gone so far that we even give URL's we give website addresses as baby gifts. When a baby is born.

That'S a great idea. You know, by the baby's Name is a.com and that's their gift because you know what it's like. And again, you'll see this information in the book. But the analogy is I'm old enough to remember when 800 numbers started and you know, the 800 numbers work with the gold standard. Well, now in our generation here, the gold standard is the dot com, right? You can have dot net, but you'd much rather have dot com. Once somebody buys your name, you'll never get it back. So you've got to buy your URLs. You need to go out to those social sites we mentioned social sites like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. And you need to secure your name, open up an account. You don't have to be active in it, but secure your name. You need to go to WordPress, you need to go to Blogger, and you need to secure your name. That's a good place to start.

Those are great.

The final thing is get involved in the dialogue. If you're going to represent yourself, represent yourself well. LinkedIn is a fine social site. It's a great professional business site. You can set up an account, put up a resume, and make sure that it's accurate, technically correct. In retail business, businesses are continually surprised by the inaccuracy of the information that's out there, because the initial information pulled for small business is being pulled from public records. And so it makes its way to the Internet. And Google will have wrong addresses, wrong phone numbers, wrong zip codes. So validate the information if you're a small business and make sure that what you put out there is accurate. And the final thing I'll say is, and I always recommend this, have multiple email accounts. And when you sign up for these social sites, put an email account on there that is perhaps not your main email account so that you build a firewall around yourself. Think of having a public Persona and a private Persona, and the Internet should always be your public Persona because if you're not careful, you can absolutely be slandered. I lived it firsthand. I experienced it. It's how I got into this business. And if it can happen to me, it can happen to you.

Very good advice. This is a whole other area of protection that people need to pay attention to. Steven, Wire, one of your websites. ReputationAdvocate.com violatedonline.com as well. Thank you for joining us today, and it's good to hear about this. It's a little scary. I hope the listeners don't become totally paranoid that they're searching their name all the time. But certainly something people need to be aware of. And you know, maybe I just add one more piece of advice. Be especially careful nowadays to just be a good person. This is not, this is not a sure way. You know, everybody's bound to face a competitor, a jealous person, or someone that they just don't get along with or someone they have a disagreement or dispute with. But as much as possible, just try to do the right thing, take the high road and hopefully, hopefully, and it's only a hope you'll lessen the likelihood of running into problems like this. So I think maybe that's another part of it that's outside of the technical that you so much discussed and the online and the specific, but just kind of a general living thought too. Steven, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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