Character and Reputation in Networking Online

As Internet users we have the ability to weave our own desired reality and portray ourselves as almost any one we want.  You see it in Chat Rooms, in Forums, on Social Networking sites. We meet other Internet users, we build communities, make friends, and sometimes have this whole other life online contrary to our real world existence.

While there is a great ability to ‘hide’ ones true character on the Internet, once we start advertising or promoting any type of Affiliate Program or Home-based business online, sometimes it’s not so easy to maintain the online ‘persona’ we’ve created.

This is especially true when we come out of that "Internet Closet" and start branding our real name in our Marketing efforts.  In the real world we can observe a person’s character. We can see it in their eyes.  We hear it as they speak, in their body language, how they interact with others.  On the Internet, until we build a strong relationship, we can only determine a person’s character and reputation by what is ‘typed’ and what they tell us.

I got to thinking about this early this morning after I read another Food for Thought from the Napoleon Hill Foundation.  I’ll just share a piece of it here with you today and highly recommend your subscribing.

If your reputation is for some reason misaligned with your character, it will soon quickly right itself when others discover for themselves that you are not at all the kind of person they had assumed you were. If your foundation is strong, you never need to be concerned about such misunderstandings. Others will learn soon enough what kind of person you really are. Spend your time and energy in constant self-inspection and self-improvement, building strong character, and you will never have to worry about what others think of you, fear of what others think.

This positive message is brought to you by the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Visit us at http://www.naphill.org. We encourage you to forward this to friends and family. They can sign up for this free service at our web site.

What really brought this to the forefront for me today was a conversation I recently had with someone who was pitching me his ‘deal’ in a chat. He talked about how successful he is; what a great reputation he has in the industry, how much money he is making in his program and how if I aligned myself with him, I too could be making thousands upon thousands of dollars a day.

I won’t go into the unrealities of his statements nor did I feel it important at the time to question his character, but once the chat was over, I was left wondering "WOW! How many people ‘buy into’ the kind of hype I just witnessed?"   While I had never heard of this gentleman before our chat, that did not necessarily mean he was acting out of character. So, I googled him out of curiosity to learn more about him.  He was accurate when he told me "I’m all over the Internet". 

I found older and more recent postings in various forums.  Some of his comments in a few postings (the language used), I would not repeat online or offline. In a recent post on one forum he was complaining about how much his program stunk and how buying leads was costing him a fortune.  In another forum he had no problems in sharing the fact that he wasn’t making a dime (this was the same program he had just told me I could make thousands upon thousands a day if I aligned myself with him).  I found pages upon pages of old and new classified ads advertising at least a dozen different Affiliate Programs or Home Businesses he has been involved with over the last few years.

The point of this is if our character and reputation are out of alignment with each other; it is going to come out.  Granted it is easier in the real world (the Offline world) to determine someone’s character and a person of questionable character or reputation can change as they spend more time in self-development and self-inspection.  In the real world we can watch that transformation taking place.

However, we cannot take back or erase our actions that reveal our character online. What we post somewhere on line today will be there tomorrow, the next day, the day after, and after and after … even long after we have closed that account, stopped marketing that particular program, deleted those pages, that website, or made those statements in a Forum.

With almost every posting, search engines have ‘snipped’ a piece of us that will stand forever. Google and other search engines will preserve our character and will create a reputation for us good or bad whether we like it or not.  

Just food for thought.

~Jennifer Fisher

Related posts:

1. The Price of Honesty