Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg–Will We Forgive Him?

Along with every other digital marketer on the planet I have a Facebook Account, and I have positive and negative opinions about Facebook. Unlike thousands over the past few weeks, I’m not about to attack Mark Zuckerberg for his indiscretions! I’m not as naive as to expect any human being to be fault-free. But I imagine that the latest revelations to do with the surfacing of Zuckerberg’s disparaging posts expressing his disdain for the very people he owes his success to, will provide his critics with a lot of ammo.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

However, we’ve all made mistakes. Fortunately for most of us, the general public couldn’t care less what we think do or say, but anyone in the public eye had better get used to the fact that anything, absolutely anything that they’ve done or said that can be traced anywhere, may eventually resurface to cause them embarrassment–or worse–just when they least expect it.

No doubt though, that the accounts of Zuckerberg’s faux pas will pretty soon ‘disappear’ from the engines since he has friends, and is in a position to trade favors to make his bad publicity fade into oblivion.

The rest of us, if we’re unlucky enough to get caught out saying/doing something that reflects badly on us, either personally or in our capacity as a business, need to get really busy online to try and repair the damage.

Take steps to manage your online reputation!

The best way to do this is to flood the Internet (or your little patch of it) with as much positive material as possible. How you saved someone’s life, how you gave away half your worldly belongings in a good cause, how you are putting x-number of orphans through college…the list goes on and you are the best person to come up with ideas on what’s positive and good, that people would be interested to read about.

You can do this through your normal social media channels, and if you have friends who blog they can do a lot to push down those unwanted search results by blogging about you in a positive way, and linking to other positive articles/comments about you on other sites. Facebook itself can be a great help here, as can Twitter and all your Twitter friends.

Being nice to all you meet online and helping others out whenever you can will create good will that will help enormously if you are ever in need of some help with your reputation.