January 28 was Data Privacy Day and I bet you didn't even know. I didn't know and I'm not sure it would have bothered me much if I had known but since the release of Google Buzz I've become a whole lot more interested in online privacy and so should you.

Here in adult online marketing many of us protect ourselves by using nicknames that we think are untraceable but I do see a few people beginning to appear on adult webmaster boards and identifying themselves with what could be their real name. Unfortunately that may not be quite as good an idea as it may seem at first.

When I began working in the adult industry offline there were ... and still are ... some very valid reasons for not using my real name even though I certainly wasn't ashamed of what I was doing In fact I probably would have used my own name if more people had a more mature view of the adult industry.

Sadly those people didn't have a mature view of the adult industry then and they certainly don't now and whether you're working in adult in the real world or adult online there's a certain stigma about what you're doing that can affect the rest of your life. So using a nickname to identify yourself online is a good thing because one day your past might come back and bite you in the ass.

Keeping a clear separation between that nickname and your real name is important too because it is so easy these days for people to connect the dots and Google is all for helping people connect plenty of dots. Just try doing a search for your real name and your nickname and you may be very surprised at how much information shows up.

These days Google can pull information from a huge variety of sources ... including message boards, Twitter, Facebook and more ... and drop them all onto a results page and direct searchers to things that you would rather they didn't know about you.

Of course, while it's easy to find information about your nickname and information about your real name, connecting the dots may not be all that easy to do for the average person but it's not impossible.

Even if you don't care that people might discover that you're involved in the adult online industry you may be concerned about what people may learn about the real you so you really do have to be careful about what you say online these days.

Just last night a fairly bright guy who has been trying to make his name in the search engine optimization business managed to shoot both feet clean off when he went berserk on Twitter. He had written a very critical piece about Google on a blog and had gone along to Sphinn to get some kudos from his SEO peers and some further votes for his ability as an SEO.

Unfortunately someone had beaten him to it and had already posted his article. When he tried to put a link to his piece on Sphinn it was ultimately rejected. That really set him off because, without checking, he presumed that the owners of Sphinn didn't like him so he attacked them on Twitter. He called them a variety of unpleasant names and generally ranted and raved like an idiot.

He even tried to defend his actions on his own blog and only managed to attract a lot of comments from people who told him the truth ... that he was being a complete idiot.

Now those Tweets are currently showing up for anyone who does a search for his name and by the time tonight rolls around there'll be plenty more blog posts mentioning his meltdown and the fact that it was totally unwarranted ... and people will see those when they do a search for his name.

Just how badly that will affect his reputation in the future is anyone's guess but the chances are that he could lose some important search engine optimization jobs because of that meltdown and because of what people are now saying about him.

In fact it's almost certain that what has just happened will have an adverse effect on him because people do use Google to run checks on those that they're thinking of employing.

To commemorate Data Privacy Day Microsoft released a study of 2,500 consumers, human resource managers and recruitment professions in the United States and Europe in an attempt to discover what the prevailing attitudes were towards online reputation and how this impacted on real life. Only 63 per cent of consumers were concerned about their online reputation and even less thought about it when they posted anything to a message board or social networking site.

70 per cent of human resource professionals in the United States and 41 per cent in the United Kingdom have actually rejected candidates based on what they had discovered or seen about the candidate online.

Perhaps you don't think that what you say or do online will ever have much of an impact on you because you're only ever going to work here in adult and no one cares about the sort of person you are just so long as you can make money for them. If that's the case maybe you should think again because, if it's happening in mainstream, then you can bet that it's happening here in adult too.

So whether you're working in mainstream or in adult or even in both it pays to remember that what you say never goes away.

07/30/2010 - Unique Selling Points and Other Things

07/28/2010 - Go Hard or Go Home

07/26/2010 - Keeping it Simple

07/21/2010 - Are You Stuck in the Past?

07/16/2010 - This and That on a Friday

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