Just an idea

[mangosteen]

I have a business idea. I currently lack the resources to execute on it, but I want it to exist in the world, and I'm confident I'll come up with more ideas. So, have at it.

Business Idea: Internet Image Consultancy. There are tons of college juniors and seniors that launch themselves at the job/internship market every year. Over the past few years, three things have happened:

1) They all have accounts on LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook.
2) They publically post the somewhat questionable things that college students tend to put up on those websites.
3) Employers know how to type a name into a search engine to find this stuff.

Here's the pitch. 30 seconds. Start the clock.

In the work world of today, your interview starts long before the phone screen. You give us three months lead time, and we will tidy up the trail you've left on the net. We'll do the same searches employers would do. We'll talk with entities about removing things you've put up on the Internet. We'll help you clean up your MySpace pages, along with all the other places you've left information about yourself, and make them look like you're a multitalented young adult ready to enter the work world. In short, we will use our resources to make your Internet presence look to be the very picture of employability. What do you think?

Have fun.

Comments

[lizzielizzie.livejournal.com]

....dude. I think it's a fabulous idea.

At the same time I'm so very very disappointed that it has to exist at all. The whole "forever archived" aspect of the Internet bugs me for this very reason (among others).

[infinitehotel.livejournal.com]

The first interesting question is how many people actually have (or perceive they might have) this problem and whether what they can afford to pay is worth your time. It might be one of those places where if they can afford you, they probably don't need you.

Second, aside from google, how are you going to guarantee you're going to catch and eradicate every last embarrassing bit? The big sites might be willing to deal, but convincing Joe Bob to take down his lovingly compiled collection of alt.sex.erotica.teensex.stories which features your client's 23 chapter epic might not be easy. Or cheap.

Third, the main problem with the idea of your "Internet-persona" is you never actually know that's what lost you the job. You can scour the net clean of all their adolescent mistakes, but in the end, you're going to have a lot of clients (I'm guessing perhaps even most) who won't get the job they want, after which they may well turn on you.

In short, it sorta sounds like a particularly bad private investigation job, dealing with the unpleasant mistakes of not particularly pleasant people. There might be money in it, but I wouldn't expect it to be a lot of fun.

[radioactiverich.livejournal.com]

Whether they get the job or not is not the business of the business; this service exists merely to scrub the 'net clean to the client's satisfaction, documented by some contract or somesuch. The catch here is that the contract has to be quite specific about what will be (or can be) scrubbed, and even then the risk of missing something is large, and with it so is the risk of a lawsuit (or at least a bad reputation.)

[concrete.livejournal.com]

it does have a good chance to work for the next 5-8 years. If you could automate it instead of doing it manually, it could be cheaper and more widespread.

now you only need the copious amounts of free time...

[mangosteen]

What do you expect to happen in the next 5-8 years that would obviate this?

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Smarter teens? Or at least teens who've been told often enough that they need to not use a personally identifying online persona that they actually (for the most part) keep the personally identifying information out of their online activities...

[noire.livejournal.com]

I think it's a *great* idea. Go for it...

[siderea]

I think you'll have an interesting problem pricing that service, because it will be labor intensive ($$$) but your target market is not wealthy executives (yet).

Now, if you were to do this for candidates for office....

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Actually, marketing to college students can be surprisingly lucrative if you're willing to overlook the fact that they're driving themselves deeper into debt with each image cleanup, resume consult and ghostwritten essay.

[sethg]

One could market it to the parents of college juniors and seniors.

[mangosteen]

Exactly. For the parents who have made sure that their kid got into the right nursery, pre-school, elementary school, middle school, high school, school activities, after-school programs, test prep programs, etc., helping their kid have the right Internet presence is hardly a big leap.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

It's a fine plan, and a fine pitch, but I think you should respin it with some thought of diseases of the rich: Your target market are not kids just entering the work world, your target market are established executives & c. who could stand to not to have left some of the trail that they have.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

... Meanwhile, when you are hiring, our affiliate company will search out all published information about and by the person you are intending to interview. We will dig out all their old MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal, and web forum postings to discover what sort of person they are outside the interview room. You should have all the information you can get about the person you're hiring. What do you think?

With great power, comes great profitability...

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

And here's me, being glad that all the posts to alt.sex.stories I made as a teenager were under a nick and email that's no longer associated with me at all!

[mangosteen]

And here's me, being glad I lost interest in Usenet somewhere around 1992.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm old enough that it was right around 1992...

[minkrose]

I think the snag is in the "tidy up for you" section. I'm imagining this as a list of Suggested Things To Change and then the recipiant of said list can either change them or not change them. Thus, it's not your fault if they don't listen to you, and they can't accuse you of not doing enough to clean up (unless there was a problem with something not on your list).

Possibly also a Suggested Things to Add & Improve list? Either way, I think feedback is good but doing it for them gets tricky.

by the way, this is exactly why I'm Mink to my friends but not to my co-workers.

[mangosteen]

You have a very good point. It's better to do a "footprint scan" of the person in question, pinpointing what are good, middling, and bad things to have on the net, and then show what the business can and can not do for them.

[http://users.livejournal.com/urban_faerie_/]

If you could find a way to clean up my internet image while allowing me to continue to keep the personal or raunchy stuff but keep it private from employers, I'd pay for that. Otherwise, I might as well just edit my MySpazz profile myself. Which I have. ALL the kids at the middle schools have them now. There is no way I want them seeing pics of their teacher in fishnets. And I never, ever give my real name or my email or AIM or links to my other blogs. If somebody is going to find me on the wb they damn well better work hard.

[gingicat]

It's a great idea. Can I be one of your consultants? ;)

[drwex]

Some summary thoughts:
- good plan, but one that mssly only works in hindsight. What newly minted college grad thinks he has this problem until he's found some doors closed in his face?
- do undergrads have the money for this?
- it's potentially very labor-intensive (and therefore expensive). A good set of automated tools can help.
- liability could be tricky. Probably want to talk to a lawyer about that.

Now the big question: why are you the right person do to this?

[mangosteen]

- good plan, but one that mssly only works in hindsight. What newly minted college grad thinks he has this problem until he's found some doors closed in his face?

Define 'hindsight'. It's not like they wouldn't have use for the Consultancy after they got a few doors slammed in their face.

Undergrads might not have the money for this, but their parents do.

Automated tools would likely be a very big part of it, and at that point, you're into a completely different realm, that being "The Network Credit Check and Repair" business.

Also, it is true, any entity like this gets a lawyer involved at some point.

Whether or not I'm the right person to do this, I thought of it. :)

[minkrose]

disagree on hindsight - I have at least one friend who is 3rd year undergrad who didn't create a facebook profile until this month because he's wary of the potential consequences. Furthermore, he's still being extremely cautious about identifying marks in his profile and friendslist, doing as much as he can to leave open the possibility that it's just another person with the same name.

I have many other friends who've gotten especially paranoid about their facebook profiles (I dont know many people on MySpace but I'm sure there are people worried about that too). I've also known people to ask "Will this part of my internet presence hinder me?" in LJ posts to get specific feedback about the results that show up when their nickname is googled. In the case I'm thinking of, it was still a potential problem.
So, I do think that college-aged students are becoming much more aware that their internet persona can affect them in real life.

[minkrose]

oh, and for what it's worth, I think my facebook-paranoid friend is somewhat bonkers. If he's going to shut up his profile, why not do it when he's ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR A JOB and just let it become whatever it wants now? He's not applying for anything; there are no potential employers looking for him on the 'net. But he likes having obsessive control over all information about himself.

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

A very good idea.

I read an article in the Boston Globe a couple of months ago that things College Grads had written in blogs like MySpace were coming back to bite them. It is a very real problem for a lot of people. And more often than not they never know that the blog was the reason they didn't get the interview or the job.

[skreeky]

I will add that college undergrads going into the job market are not your only target audience...

When you're contemplating a first date, whether it's online matchmaking, FOF, or the cute guy you met at the pub, what's one of the first things you do?

"Gosh, I wonder why no one's responding to my J-Date profile?"

People who are in their twenties/thirties and trying to find a new job also have issues. Few places google on their current employees, but if you're trying to change jobs, that scathing posting about your client may turn up.

And for undergrads... yes, the parents will pay.

Yes, the service is needed. Yes, it is wanted. I question whether it is possible to actually scrub out content that you find.

Brilliant

[taylor-stone200.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I'm willing to go along with this plan, being a computer geek with WAY too much time on my hands. I'd like to see if its pocssible, and in the end, if it can actually be beneficial to one's career. As a techy, I'll handle computer stuff. Business deals aren't my savvy, but I can worm my way into that realm as well. What I'm curious of is whether or not these major profile-posting entities would allow for outside augmentation of a person's online profile. If that hurdle can be jumped (BIG hurdle), then the rest is simple editting work.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm surprised that staffing companies don't already do this. Except of course they'd keep a record of everything that they got 'taken down' and then sell that too.

You'd make much more $$ if you "erased" what's out there on the web, kept a copy, and sold it for big bucks to employers as a "lookup" service -- but then you'd be evil.

P:S

[http://users.livejournal.com/urban_faerie_/]

The whole idea that my employer has the right to spy on me and check out my life outside of work, and then use that to judge me, seems like foul play to me. What makes an employer even feel that they have the RIGHT to do that in the first place? My mom used to have a saying, "People who snoop never find out things they like." Lord is it ever true.
My employer did a CORI check on me to make sure I have never molested a child or committed a felony, but besides that they've stayed out of my life. Even when I was talking about professional development with my boss she said, "Let us know what kind of classes you are taking, unless you are taking a pole dancing class, then that's none of our business." That is the way it SHOULD be.
Unless you are a felon or a child molester it is really nobody's effing business what you do outside of work. It is wrong that people expect you to maintain your whitewashed corporate image 24/7. If I have an interest in S&M or feel like cracking an off color joke or expressing an unpopular political view in an online forum that's nobody's business but yours. I cleaned up my MySpace mostly because it would be really awkward to run into one of my students online, and kids are less apt to control themselves with gossip than grownups are (most of the time).
If my boss ever tried to give me a hard time about something she found about me on the web it would be ME asking HER the questions about WHY she felt the need to spy in the first place. Then I'd get a lawyer.
The privacy erosion that has gone on in the last few years is out of control and it has got to stop somewhere!
Really, when our president spies on people ilegally and gets away with it, it is hard not for employers to expect that they should be able to do the same.

P:S...

[http://users.livejournal.com/urban_faerie_/]

When you google me all that comes up are a couple of really silly quotes from my bios from past T@F productions. They are undignified, yes, but probably harmless to my image.