Have you ever visited HotOrNot.com?
This website, which has bruised thousands of egos and wasted many thousands of hours, uses social media techniques to show you what people think of you. More specifically, it lets you upload your picture and allows anyone else who sees it to make that critical choice: hot, or not?

The site is juvenile but it highlights an interesting issue. Most of us don’t really know what other people think of us. We can ask our friends and colleagues but rarely will we get an honest answer (“Honey, do you think I’m fat?” comes to mind). Full-circle performance reviews come closer to the truth but only provide a picture of your work performance. There are offerings that promise to help you “manage your reputation” online, but these are really about just visibility, and do nothing to help uncover people’s real perceptions of us. So are these “online reputation” offerings really helping us understand and manage our reputations? The answer depends on what constitutes our reputation. Is it just what other people think of us?

There are other definitions, but that’s exactly what they all boil down to. And that’s what makes reputation such a concern. It has a tremendous impact. Our families, our careers, and our friends all depend to some extent on our personal reputation, and it’s very hard for us to measure our personal reputation.

Even if we could measure it, one measurement wouldn’t be enough. It varies depending on who’s thinking of us. We all hope our spouse thinks of us very differently than a coworker does. People we’ve never met may also have ideas about us based on things they’ve seen or stories they’ve heard.

There are no easy comparisons. A reputation is much harder to quantify than a photo posted on HotOrNot.com. You might live a completely green lifestyle, but your neighbor adopts homeless puppies. Is his reputation better than yours?

Finally, we’re all aware that some people’s opinions matter more than others. Your boss’s opinion of you will always be much more important than that of the guy who sits six cubicles down.

By identifying which aspects of reputation matter the most, understanding that different situations call for different strengths, and prioritizing our interactions, we can change our reputation. Since most of our personal interactions are face to face, though, we may never get a complete measure of where we stand.

Great companies follow the same steps to enhance their corporate reputation, but they have a significant advantage. Corporate reputations can be measured, monitored and tracked. We’ll go into more detail on that next week. Meanwhile, feel free to comment and share your thoughts.