A friend of mine made a mistake a few years back. Not a criminal mistake but a mistake that makes it hard for him to get hired by any Fortune 500 company. Google his name and that mistake shows up in 6 out of the first 10 results. He tried everything: Create a blog, developed a very sophisticated online presence, paid SEO companies to improve his reputation.
Still: 6 negative out of 10 results.
That’s a common problem.
Just ask James Andrews, tweeting under @keyinfluencer. He tweeted negative comments about the city where one of his clients his headquartered. And Google remembers.
Ask restaurants on Yelp with a few negative reviews. One of my former clients almost had to close down one restaurant because a few people spread the message that the restaurant was closed due to health hazards.
Algorithms are determining our fate and our future.
We have given up control of our reputation, our future and our history. We already have dozens of companies creating garbage content to feed the algorithm monster. We created a new discipline to help us with reputation management. And now we’re starting to hand over our lives to the algorithms.
I love algorithms. They are very helpful, they make my life easier, they help me find things quickly. But algorithms shouldn’t replace human decision and decency. We need to find better ways to humanize the web, make it more adaptable to the human experience.
We start to understand that the “All the base belong to us” phase might not be a solution.
The day the Internet learns to forget is the day a humanized Internet is born.
uwehook 
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