5 Things You Can Do to Avoid Mugshot Fame

Humor writers deserve our pity. Each day, they have to come up with some new hook that can make people laugh, or else they'll be out on the street with no job at all. Mugshot websites make the life of a writer a little easier, as these sites allow computer users to copy photographs for personal use. With just a few clicks of the mouse, a writer's work for the day is done. Showing up on a site like this could mean disaster, however, as the sites often publish the names of people who are arrested, and it's easy enough for other writers to steal photos from these humor sites and meet their own deadlines with the same photo. In time, your photo could spread all across the Internet, just because a few writers want to make people laugh.

Avoiding an arrest is the best way to ensure that you're not the brunt of these kinds of jokes, but if you are arrested, there are a few things you can do to make sure your photo just isn't funny enough to share.

1. Don't Smile. 

People who are arrested often have very little to smile about, and according to an article produced by NPR, some sheriffs actually don't allow people to smile in their mugshots. Those who do could face additional time in jail, or they could be fined. However, some people feel that smiling is an excellent way to protest their arrest, and they show off their pearly whites as the camera flashes. Unfortunately, smiling like this in a mugshot is just inappropriate, and some people find these photos just hilarious. As a result, websites have pulled together a variety of catalogs of people grinning. (One choice example comes from the Orlando Sentinel, which also published the names of people photographed, along with the crimes they were accused of.)

2. Keep Your Emotions in Check.

Getting arrested is an emotional experience, and it's not unusual for people to wear their emotions all over their faces during their mugshots. People may cry, rage at the camera or otherwise misbehave while they're photographed. This might allow people to blow off a little steam during a stressful situation, but again, it's just not a good idea. People who are emotional in their photographs are often targets of humor sites, and the writers of these sites love to publish collections of people looking distressed. For example, SlightlyWarped.com has published a collection of crying-people mugshots, under the heading, "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime 'ya [sic] crybabies!" It's worth mentioning that mugshots are records of arrests, not convictions, so it's possible that the people shown here aren't guilty. But the site chooses to overlook that fact in order to poke reputation-wrecking fun.

3. Face Forward. 

In order to use a mugshot in a facial-recognition software program, photographers need an image that shows all of a person's facial features in clear focus. This means that people must face forward and look at the camera. Everybody knows this on some level, but even so, there are some people who choose to rebel by refusing to look up or hold their heads up. Police officers will go to great lengths to get the photos they need, and this means they'll hold people upright in order to snap the shot. Photos like this are, again, inadvertently funny and they show up on blogs over and over again. It's best to pull yourself together and cooperate, so you won't be in one of these photos.

4. Dress Appropriately. 

When you're heading out for a night on the town and you have even the slightest suspicion that you might get arrested, it's important to dress for the occasion. Loud, lewd or just strange clothing could get you placed in blogs like this one from Oddee.com, which compiles a list of mugshots with people in strangely inappropriate tee shirts.

5. Hire an Expert. 

If you are arrested and you know that your photo isn't as professional as it could be, it's best to hire an expert as quickly as possible. We can help you to delete photos as soon as they appear, so they won't be pulled off mugshot sites and onto humor sites. In some cases, we can pull down photos instantly. Visit www.internetreputation.comto find out more.

Could Revenge Porn Ruin Your Online Reputation?

In an intimate relationship, couples share all kinds of information that they may not feel comfortable revealing to the wider world. If the relationship goes south, good manners dictate that both partners develop a form of amnesia, forgetting everything that the two once shared, or at the very least, refusing to share all of the smarmy details with outsiders. Unfortunately, many people have really bad manners.

Revenge porn sites like the now-defunct IsAnybodyUp.com and Texxxan.com allow the single and brokenhearted to share intimate photographs without asking permission of the people who appear in those photographs. The images, according to some bloggers, are designed to humiliate and punish the people who appear in these images. After all, many (or all) of the people shown in the photos are women, and there are hundreds of naked-women photos available online. The images here aren't lovelier or more interesting than those a porn site might have. There's no reason at all for them to exist, unless they're just there in order to shame and punish.

The sites could lead some women to lose their jobs, or fail to find jobs in the first place. One woman who was a target of a revenge porn attack found this out the hard way, and in the end, she was forced to change her legal name in order to keep the images from appearing when people looked for her name via Google. Some women are forced to take action in order to protect their personal safety. According to an article in Salon.com, one revenge porn site publishes links to social media profiles of the women shown in the images, along with mapping information that can allow people to visit the women they see in the photographs. This kind of information could lead to cyber stalking, or stalking in real time.

The sites are also intensely profitable for the people who create them. For example, the New York Daily News reports that the developer of the revenge-porn site IsAnybodyDown.com makes about $3,000 each and every month by people who want to run advertisements alongside the photographs he publishes. Since the developers make money on these sites, it's unlikely that they'll take the sites down anytime soon.

Some people who appear in revenge porn visit lawyers in the hopes of removing their images. Unfortunately, according to an article in Slate, women who go this route are destined to fail, due to the influence of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In essence, this law suggests that people who run these sites can't be legally responsible for the information their users might post. Since these sites rely on users to post photographs and data, the sites might not be legally required to take the photos down. They are working a little like a bulletin board here, and just as a person can't sue a bulletin board and win, users who hope to sue a revenge porn site administrator might also not be expected to win.

If you've been a target of a revenge porn attack, we'd like to help. We can develop customized solutions just for you that can help you to remove photographs from sites like this and replace them with information that isn't so personal and isn't so damaging. Please visit www.internetreputation.com to find out more.

Zuckerberg's Law, and What it Means for Your Reputation

According to Social Bakers, Facebook is the most popular website in the United States, with 158,855,340 users. That's a whole lot of friends, likes and chatter, and if the founder of Facebook has anything to say about it, these people will share even more in the coming year than they did in the year prior.

In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg gave a famous speech in which he suggested that people share twice as much in the following year, compared to their sharing levels in the current year. Writers quickly dubbed this "Zuckerberg's Law," and while it hasn't been tested in any kind of scientific study that this writer can find, it does seem to have some merit.

Where people once shared information sparingly, some people are becoming comfortable enough with the medium that they're posting all kinds of information, and getting in all kinds of trouble as a result. For example, Business Insider compiled a list of 17 separate people who were fired for sharing information on Facebook, including:

• A waitress who complained about her tips
• Hospital employees who posted a series of "lying down on the job" photographs
• Flight attendants who discussed the number of times airplane engines had been replaced
• A royal guard who complained about a wave he received from the princess

Similarly, in 2013, a physical therapy employee lost her job for calling her coworkers names and claiming that the place she worked wasn't quite worthy of the fees clients paid. This employee sued for wrongful termination, claiming that her words did no harm because no individuals were named, but it's unclear if this lawsuit will fly in court. She might just need to find a new job, and now that her name is all over the Internet due to this lawsuit, a new job might be hard to come by.

One poor radio host was even fired via Facebook, proving just how ubiquitous this form of sharing has become. If employers feel as though they can transmit sensitive information via social media, one might reasonably ask what might come next. Marriage proposals? Warrants for arrest? Eviction notices?

As reputation management professionals, we find the ubiquitous use of social media a little troubling. We know that something that seems amusing when shared between a pair of close friends can be incredibly terrifying when shared openly with strangers. We also know that some people throw very sensitive information to the public when they're not thinking quite clearly, and once the information is out there, it's hard to take back.

However, we don't agree with people who encourage computer users to, in the words of one writer, "commit Internet suicide and disappear from the Web forever." We think that having an online presence can help people to highlight their good traits and positive attributes, and in this day and age, having no social media presence at all is just a little suspicious. The key is to be smart: sharing only the good and leaving the bad behind.

If you'd like to know more about how this works, visit www.internetreputation.com and read some of our case studies. You'll see how some of our clients have made terrible mistakes, and you'll see how we helped them to bounce back. You might even be inspired to hire us, and let us help you to recover. Come see!

Responding to Online Reviews: Bad, Better and Best Approaches

Online review sites like Yelp, Angie's List and TripAdvisor allow people with computer connections to share their thoughts with the world at large. Once the purview of techies who were a little too cheap to try out new experiences without a seal of approval of an expert, almost all modern consumers consult these sites at least once during their lifetime, and some bloggers are even claiming that the sites are improving the quality of the products and services customers receive. A business blogger, for example, suggests that reviews of hotels might be, "driving a resurgence of great service," as employees fall over themselves to please their clients and ensure that they get mentioned, by name, in reviews these travelers might write.

Responding to positive reviews like this might be remarkably easy: A little dance of joy should do the trick. But when the reviews get nasty, and they often do, there are several approaches business owners can take in order to get back on track. All of them might seem reasonable, but unfortunately, many of them aren't likely to result in success.

Some people attacked on review sites fight back by spewing their own venom in return. That's one husband of an author did, according to one blogger, as he took to Amazon.com to write a response to a negative review of his wife's book by using the phrase "Psycho alert." Things went downhill from there, as future reviewers chose to respond to the husband's review, and then friends and assistants of the writer jumped into the fray. One little poor review can become a firestorm of hatred and anger when businesses, individuals or their hacked-off friends respond to poor reviews with poor language of their own. This is the worst way to deal with a review problem, by far.

A better approach involves lawyers, but this isn't always successful. Suing the site that hosts the reviews won't work well, because the sites are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In essence, this law suggests that websites work a bit like public bulletin boards, hosing information without taking any responsibility for what they might contain. As a result, people who want to use the law to get relief from a poor review need to sue the reviewers themselves, and sometimes, this works. For example, iHealthBeat reports that at least one doctor sued a patient for poor reviews, and that blogger took the reviews down as a result. Unfortunately, this same site reports that some lawsuits have failed, as the reviewers are protected by free speech laws. If the comments are unflattering but true, or unflattering but not really malicious, there's no real basis for a lawsuit. Unlucky people who hire lawyers might just be in the hole for thousands, making this a better option, but not the best.

Some business owners are able to handle poor reviews with absolute calm and grace. The owner of the Cupcrazed Cakery in South Carolina, for example, takes time to respond to almost every negative review in detail, and often her comments contain so much detail that the original reviewer is persuaded to come back again. For example, when a reviewer complained about dry-erase marker tags that described cupcake selections, the owner responded with these words: "I write the name of the cupcakes on the windows for 2 reasons: one we just don't have time to make signs everyday, and two I hate to waste paper. Honestly, half of the time my printer is broken with paper jams. We try to be as eco-friendly as we can. We use recycled boxes, dishes, even the furniture so writing on the glass seemed to be a good solution for us." It addresses the issue, and it's gracious. In general, this is the best way to handle a review.

Unfortunately, not all of us can be the picture of grace under fire, and a business owner under attack might reasonably make rash decisions and see a small problem blow up into a huge mess. If that's happened to you, it's time to get help. A professional reputation management company can help you remove damning information and repair your reputation lickety-split. Just contact us to get started.

Changing Online Privacy Laws: Will They Help to Protect Your Reputation?

In the early months of 2013, it was hard to get away from stories about online privacy. The Hill published an interview with the new head of the FTC, claiming that this organization would push hard to protect the rights of private citizens. CNN Tech covered the RSA security conference in San Francisco, claiming that industry giants were wrestling with issues of privacy and commerce. And the letters page of The New York Times was full of steamy responses from industry executives about the privacy policies that were already in place and were even now protecting private information about web users.

A busy Internet skimmer with just a few moments to spare could scan these headlines and believe that a secure future was just around the corner, and no action would be necessary on the part of the average consumer. Unfortunately, that skimmer would be 100 percent wrong.

In each and every one of these articles, the talking heads were discussing cookies and commerce. In essence, "privacy" to these business executives relates to browsers and a history of the pages a consumer visits. Cookies allow advertisers and retailers to follow behind a web user, building a sophisticated profile of the sites that person visits and the things that user wants to see. With that information handy, retailers could target people who are likely to buy their products. It's a problem, for sure, but it's not the kind of problem most people think of when they're working to maintain their online reputations.

An online reputation attack tends to come from a much more visible source. Blog entries, press releases, poor reviews, news articles and ill-advised Facebook postings tend to cost people jobs, prestige and peace of mind. These aren't the kinds of issues on the table for privacy experts. They are the kinds of issues that drive the work of reputation management companies like ours, however, and we work hard to keep our clients informed and engaged, so they can spot and stop an attack as soon as it begins to unfold.

There are some things consumers can do in order to maintain their privacy and give malcontents a bit less data to work with. Unfortunately, according to a study conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, only 4 in 10 people know how to protect their online privacy. While it might sound tedious, the best way to begin is to open up each and every social media site you participate in and read the fine print contained in the terms of use. You'll know just how the sites you use will use you, and you may find that you're overexposed and need to back away a bit. Next, look through the privacy settings of each site you use and lock down as far as you can. These two steps can help you ensure that you're not sharing with your enemies. Waiting for lawmakers to take action isn't nearly as helpful as taking action on your own, and it's something we all should do right now.