An Interview with Gist's Greg Meyer - Part 3: Reputation Management and Social CRM

Author: Sean Cook
Published: June 17, 2011 at 5:12 am
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Greg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 3 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talks about managing your reputation using Social CRM tools.

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I give career advice to college students, both in my private practice and with a small school here in Georgia, Wesleyan College, and talk to them about what they put out on social media, especially on Facebook. You know, college students think they are tricky. They'll set up one for their mom and dad and for employers to look at, and then they'll set up a second one, where they post their party photos and talk to their friends about drinking and whatever else.

What I think is interesting is that tools like Gist can confound that, because all of the relational data allows it to see the related e-mail addresses under which they registered and to kind of “mine” that data in some ways. And so I've shown job seekers kind of how to do a “social media audit” using Gist, where they can kind of see that what they think they aren't putting out there, they still are. So I talk to people about using privacy filters wisely. The other thing is “Don't think you can really get away with anything these days, because the network is almost becoming self-aware, because of tools like this.”

I would say in response to that is that we honor the privacy controls set by the browser. So if you have locked things down on Facebook or other web service, we wouldn't see that. And we're not mining private data. We're only mining public data. So your advice about having them understand that anything they put online could be seen by someone else is good.What I usually tell people who read newspapers is that if you don't want to show up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, then don't post it. If they don't read newspapers, and don't want to read it on TechCrunch, then don't post it. If you are owning your own brand and understanding that when people do a search on Google, or do a search on these other services, that they are going to find you, then that gives you additional power, because you can say, “this is what I want to present.” And if all my social media waypoints are saying the same thing, then it's going to ring true, and people are going to have a consistent view of me. That's probably the best defense you have against being seen in the wrong way.

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Article Author: Sean Cook

Sean Cook is a Life Purpose and Career Coach based in Athens, Georgia, who helps higher education professionals create intelligent strategies and move forward in their careers. Before earning his coaching certification from the Life Purpose Institute, he earned his M.Ed. …

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