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

[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.)