Will you be one of the people that has to change your name in the future? Will you have to close your company and relaunch with a whole new persona one day?

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has predicted that people may indeed be given the opportunity to change their names to avoid exposure to their youthful exploits on their friends Social Media sites.

Schmidt’s comments came during an interview with the Wall Street Journal,

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.

It does beg the question, will you have to change your name? How about your company name. The impact that Social Media and the new “user contributed web” is having on society has yet to be truly measured. I believe we are only now starting to see the real damages surface. While social media practitioners tout the virtues of being “social”, and very often with an emphasis on sales, there is far too little conversation around management of reputation.

Hal Varian posted, on Google’s 10th Anniversary,

“Information technology has enabled the “democratization of data:” information that once was available to only a select few is now available to everyone. This is particularly true for small businesses.”

During a recent webinar, I expanded on that thought and stated,

“The democratization of the Internet by way of user contributed communities has changed the way that data is created. Your corporate story will now be written collaboratively by you, your employees, ex-employees and the public.”

The reality is that, on the democratized web, Corporations no longer create all of their data – they participate in it.

I think it is safe to say that business owners are feeling a stressful pressure to participate in the Social Internet to one degree or another.

As the Borg used to state, on Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.”

Cheers – David A. West
Calgary Website Design

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