The Importance of Living in the Know

I made a small but embarrassing mistake recently. I wasn’t sure about the correct use of an uncommon pronoun, so I looked it up on a major search engine. The first result was from a reliable website, and it showed a definition that supported my use of the pronoun. It wasn’t until later, when my manager questioned the usage, that I actually went to the website and saw what hadn’t been visible in search results: that pronoun had been obsolete for almost five hundred years.

Oops.

This anecdote illustrates one of the dangers we all face online: as we navigate the Internet superhighway faster and faster, often paying less and less attention to the details of the information we encounter, it is all too easy to miss critical context. 

For me, the cost of doing this was a small error as a communications professional. But what if I’d been searching for a person, glanced at a search result from a credible source, and leapt to a conclusion about that individual? Or what if someone had done that to me? And what if the decision involved had potentially significant consequences—for example, whether or not to connect for professional networking or go out on a date?

You’ve read in recent posts about TrueRep, our new online reputation management service. My pitfall with the pronoun reinforced in my own mind the TrueRep message:

• Know what others can find about you online.
• Know what perception that information is likely to create.
• Know how to manage that information and perception.

With TrueRep, we’ve not only given you unique and powerful tools to achieve these three goals, but we’ve taken it one industry-leading step further, and given VIP subscribers the capability to add remarks to background checks on themselves that others purchase from Intelius. These remarks offer the chance to provide context that can significantly alter how information is perceived—just as finding out that a word is obsolete provides important context.

Our message with TrueRep is really the same one that we’ve chosen for Intelius: Live in the Know. Because you never know when someone may glance at a search result, or a people search or background check report, and leap to an erroneous conclusion. And the consequences of doing so may be far greater than using a Shakespearean pronoun during the Information Age.

Elisabeth DeVos
Marketing Communications Manager