Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch wrote an article today, saying that Reputation is Dead and that to try to defend your reputation is pointless. I politely, but firmly disagree, reputation does matter and should be defended. Will that defense always be successful, no but that doesn't mean its not worth the effort. A person's reputation is the most important thing he or she has. If someone says something that isn't true about you or someone you know, then you should defend yourself. State the facts and be done with it. Don't get into a pissing war with the person, its not worth it and you will both end up dirty.

Granted a lot of times, especially with teenagers damage to a person's reputation is self inflicted. Teenagers do stupid things, they always have and they probably always will. The difference is today the whole world may know about it instead of just the neighbors. Kids need to be taught this from the time they go on line, that their reputation is important and should be guarded. That being said, in my opinion no one should be held responsible for things they did when they were teenagers, short of capital crimes. After all part of being a teenager is trying new things and making mistakes. Making mistakes is a part of growing up. I think in the near future your reputation will not be not be based on a single indiscreet picture or event, but on your whole social graph. It will be the total picture that is important, not the pieces. It is important though that the pieces are correct and are not being created by someone else who has an ax to grind. If the pieces have become muddy then it is your responsibility to try to correct the misconception, the best you can. A good reputation is kept not only by what you do, but who you surround yourself with and how you treat others. if you surround yourself with people who have a bad reputation, or treat others badly then don't be surprise if you get a bad reputation. At that point you have no one to blame but yourself and the choices you made.   

The difference of course is what these two groups are looking for in social media. The first group is looking for conversation, and community. They tend to post what they are doing, interesting links they found, pictures of their lives. They reply to their friends tweets and buzzes, trying to engage in a conversation. If the number of followers they have gets too high, they tend to disengage from the conversation, often complaining that a conversation is no longer possible. This is what I call the social group. The second group is the media group. This group sees platforms like Twitter, Buzz and Facebook as a way to announce something whether its their latest blog post or product. Followers equal potential costumers, the more followers they have the better. There is of course a thin line between using Twitter to promote a product or post and spam. A line which those with a lot of followers have to tread carefully. The second group has little interest in conversation for the most part, they follow people because they know there is a good chance you will follow them back. Again, they are looking for potential customers.   

Are there exceptions to these groups, well of course there are. Robert Scoble for an example. He has over a hundred thousand followers, but is great at carrying on conversations with people who follow him. There are others like him, but they tend to be unique, most people with that many followers find it nearly impossible to carry on meaningful conversations. Celebrities often have hundreds of thousands of followers, but usually are only following a few hundred at the most. They carry on their conversations with those few hundreds, the rest of us are simply listening in the background.   Neither of these groups are wrong on how they use these sites, they just have different goals. With different goals, what they want from these sites also varies and conflict often occurs, how these sites handle these conflicts is the key to their survival.