When the spotlight hits you, how will you look?

It’s not easy to find out about most investigators via Google search, and I’m sure they like it that way. The less information “out there” about them, the better; criminals won’t be able to find them (or their families) as easily, and defense attorneys won’t be able to damage their credibility in court. If they keep their heads down, their work will speak for itself among the people who matter most.

Well… maybe. But online reputations are beginning to be made without a person’s involvement or even knowledge. People increasingly go to sites like Twitter, their own blogs, or newspaper sites’ comment sections to share and, yes, vent their experiences with businesses and people and government agencies.

Consider this blog entry about Toronto Police Services Constable Scott Mills. It’s overwhelmingly positive; no surprise. I haven’t followed Scott for long, but his passion for his work is plain. He’s a Crime Stoppers youth coordinator, active in supporting graffiti art, and regularly seeks assistance from the public in solving crimes.

Even if he did not choose to be online, the Cop Gossip blog likely would’ve covered him anyway, as would Toronto news media. In other words, his reputation would be established for him. But if his influence was not so positive?

Then you’d have what happened to a friend of a friend.

Who’s in control of your reputation?

Researching a story, I was referred to a potential source by a friend. I wanted to find out whether this detective had written or spoken about the topic I was working on; my friend wasn’t sure, so to Google I turned.

What I found frankly shocked me. I trust my friend, and I knew he wouldn’t send me to someone I couldn’t likewise trust. But here was a detective who’d been brought up on an infraction: supplying alcohol to a minor. He’d pleaded no contest, paid a fine, and resigned from his position at the police department he worked for.

Google turned up another search result: a defense attorney who was using the media reports against the detective, insinuating during a separate trial that an inappropriate relationship existed between the detective and the minor, a police Explorer in the same department.

According to my friend, the detective and the Explorer had participated in a sting which resulted in the arrest of a liquor store proprietor. When it was over, the detective bought her something to drink. She picked an energy drink—one that contained alcohol.

This was before the demand to repackage alcoholic energy drinks, so neither of them noticed the problem. In the ensuing investigation, however, “energy drink” became “beer,” and the detective’s union rep gave him what my friend called bad advice: to resign before he was fired (given his record, probably unlikely).

The detective went to another agency, had no problem getting hired. Offline, his reputation had preceded him, and he apparently felt no need to try and improve his Google standing. “Why bother?” he may have thought, yet attention spans nowadays are not as long as they were when he started in law enforcement and traditional media made or broke a reputation.

In other words, had he started a blog or had articles published or worked to get positive press of the same kind that our mutual friend has, Google and other search engines would pay more attention to optimized, more recent mentions of his name. The other stuff wouldn’t disappear, but it would be harder for defense attorneys to cast reasonable doubt.

The new resume

Public relations/social media consultant Brian Solis quoted journalist Kevin Donline as saying:

It’s been said that Google is the new resume. Truth be told, any search engine, whether social or traditional, is the resume – it’s the Wikipedia entry for the rest of us. It’s no longer what we decide to curate onto a piece of paper or onto one traditional one-page digital resume. It really is moot in a world when anyone can practically piece together your story without the help of a document designed to shape and steer our perception.

Solis then went on to say: “Indeed, there are many stories that fuel the urgency for everyone to take control of their online persona.”

Back to Scott Mills. He doesn’t have to be online (though I’m sure he’d disagree), and any attention he were to get solely from Toronto media would be positive in itself.

But by having his Facebook and Twitter and other profiles, Scott has done what a lot of law enforcement professionals are not comfortable or used to doing: rather than react to something, he’s proactively “branded” both his work and his agency. And that’s something more public safety professionals need to strive for.

How can you be proactive about the way your work is reflected online?

Image: sashafatcat via Flickr