Job opportunities and college admissions are currently plagued by an ever-growing issue: negative social media profiles. There have been many stories of potential bosses and universities looking at applicants’ social media profiles to gauge a person’s personal behavior, even when it has nothing to do with work or academic behavior. Applicants are judged harshly, and many have lost positions due to their negative social media decorum.
This can all change if you are willing to pay for it.
Many businesses are now focused on cleaning up social media accounts – yes, that means Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – to make their clients more appropriate and approachable for jobs and schools.
BrandYourself.com is an online reputation saver that completely revamps businesses’ online presence, focusing on top-notch reviews, referrals, and search results. Their job is to develop content and strategies to get any and all negative information out of the public’s reach*.
Their success has brought them individual clients looking for the same results: all the good up front, all the bad far, far away. BrandYourself has not only received $5 million in venture capital, it has swarms of parents paying upwards of a $100 a year to clean up any search results related to their children’s names.
The website Integrity Defenders goes even further in hiding your social media woes. Their monthly plans range at the bare minimum (turning your Facebook profile into an online resume) to the extravagant (taking anything negative and making it “disappear”). Close to 10 percent of Integrity Defenders’s clientele are students looking to get into good colleges, and many are willing to pay a hefty price tag of $1300 a month to insure their online behavior doesn’t come back to haunt them.
While many refrain from putting risqué photos and comments online, there are many people under 30 who haven’t been doing so, and these companies are helping them hold on to opportunities their social media personas could cause them to lose otherwise. For these folks, the monetary cost is negligible.
*While there is no way of deleting bad press or images, they can certainly push all of that onto page three of an Internet search, which gets almost no traction.
