Originally published in Forbes
“I date younger men... Predominantly men in their twenties... And when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men,” Cindy Gallop shared matter-of-factly.
Except this wasn’t a private conversation with a close friend. It was on the stage of TED’s main conference talking to hundreds of the smartest people in the world and the 800,000+ people that would go on to watch her video. It certainly wasn’t what you’d expect from a former senior advertising executive (49 at the time) and the former chair of the board at international advertising agency, BBH.
Cindy Gallop wasn’t being spontaneous. She was making one of the most calculated decisions of her career as a way to launch her new company, MakeLoveNotPorn.
Many of today’s top entrepreneurial leaders are making similar decisions to Cindy’s. They are deeply sharing who they are and what they believe with the world while building their companies. Everyone from Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos), Gary Vaynerchuk (co-founder of Vayner Media), Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Elon Musk, Jacqueline Novogratz (founder of Acumen Fund), Richard Branson, Jason Fried (co-founder of 37 signals), to Arianna Huffington (co-founder of the Huffington Post) are using books, blogs, social media, and speaking engagements to speak their truth.
To understand why this increasingly makes sense in the digital age, we need to understand the explosion of online reputation platforms.
The Explosion Of Online Reputation Platforms
Online reputation platforms help others understand who we are, what we do, and what we own by:
- Aggregating reviews,
- Displaying content we create, or
- Organizing data collected from various sources.
They help individuals make better decisions and facilitate exchanges that would never happen otherwise. How crazy was renting our most sacred space, our home, to a complete stranger before Airbnb!
The platforms that exist now are just the beginning. Every year, we’re collectively doubling what we proactively share about ourselves on social media and what we allow our devices to share about us.
We as as a society have not fully grasped the significance of this explosion...yet.
What It All Means
On the popular review website, Yelp, a Harvard study showed that a one-star difference in a restaurant rating impacts revenue between 5% and 9%. If you use Yelp, when was the last time you selected a restaurant with a bad reputation or no reputation? The Yelp for your industry is coming if it hasn’t already. It is impacting what jobs you get, the contracts you’re offered, your admission into schools and programs, and even what friends, significant other and romances you attract into your life.
Every reputation platform seems irrelevant at first. Then, it becomes a nice, useful tool. Finally, it becomes the price to play in the field. When this happens, having no reputation is as much of a red flag as a bad reputation.
Joe Fernandez, the founder of the largest reputation platform measuring influence, Klout, learned this firsthand in October 2011. Klout changed its algorithm in order to improve the quality of the overall score. As a result, some people’s scores changed significantly. He expected some backlash, but he was in no way prepared for what actually occurred.
First, an #OccupyKlout hashtag was created.
We can't stand idly by while #Klout downgrades AMERICA #OccupyKlout — Occupy Klout (@OccupyKlout) October 26, 2011
Next, his cell phone was leaked and he received hundreds of death threats.
That’s when Joe realized the importance of reputation platforms. People were literally threatening to kill him because they were so attached to their Klout score.
Here’s what you need to understand about what all of this means:
- Your online reputation is your reputation. People are using the first impression they have of you from the Internet to decide whether they connect with you and how they act toward you when they do.
- In short, your online reputation will precede you. Ben Huh, the founder of CHEEZburger, put it like this, “I’d like to think that we’re getting into a world where we’re understanding more about the substance of a person rather than just their biology. While we’re no longer in the wild, biology still drives a lot of decision making. For example, you still hear things like, ‘men who are taller tend to rise more quickly in their career’. At its face value, that’s ridiculous, but it also turns out that it’s true. We’re moving away from biology as our first impression. This is actually a good thing.”
- Who you are in one area will be how you’re perceived in all areas. Reputation platforms scale the power of your reputation. In the past, reputation was solely determined by word-of-mouth in a small community or by our one-on-one interactions. In this context, word-of-mouth diminishes quickly over time and distance. Now, our reputations can be seen by everyone everywhere. It is always a Google search away.
- Reputation is often more important than money. Josh Klein, author of Reputation Economics, makes the case, "The really far-reaching implications of reputation economics comes from the fact that, as a means of exchange, reputation exceeds financial methods in terms of potential return. Let’s say that again - reputation economics can give you more value in an exchange than a purely financial transaction." In other words, the value of really high rating or the cost of a really bad one can be worth more than the profit that comes from the product or service being sold.
- Other people can more easily make their opinions of you go viral. Whether online or offline, we ultimately can’t control what other people say about us or the context in which they say it. However, what’s unique in the online world is that it is easier than ever for others to make those opinions widely known. This can be a very good thing or a very bad thing.
The implications of the future of online reputation aren’t innately good or bad. What matters is how you handle the shift.
To Play It Safe Or To Play It Real?
In writing this article, I had the opportunity to interview several people who’ve seen the shift coming for years and have found ways to prosper in it. Over the past year, I’ve explored this for myself as I’ve opened up about my life and lessons learned online.
If I had to boil everything down into one idea, it comes down to the following words that Cindy shared with me:
If you identify exactly who you are and what you stand for, what you believe in, what you value, and if you then only ever behave, act and communicate in a way that is true to you, then you never have to worry about when anybody comes across you or what you're found doing, because by definition you are never caught doing anything to be ashamed of.
By publicly sharing her sexuality with the world along with her thoughts on how the porn industry should change, Cindy is putting a beacon out in the world. That beacon attracts people who ‘get’ her, and it distances or has no impact on people who don’t. In so doing, Cindy is building an authentic network; a network of kindred spirits around her who deeply value her for for who she is. As entrepreneurs, this means vendors, partners, employees, investors, mentors, and customers with shared values. She doesn’t have to worry about other people discovering who she really is. She has already ‘outed’ herself.
Don’t Aim To Be Perfect! Aim To Be Antifragile
Nassim Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is not afraid to share what he really thinks and put his reputation on the line. Like Cindy, he has built an antifragile reputation.
As he explains in the book, things that are fragile break when they’re exposed to stressors. A glass vase is the perfect example. If you drop it, it breaks. With fragile objects, you want to keep them as safe as possible.
Things that are robust do not change when exposed to stressors.
Nassim’s contribution is the introduction of a third category; antifragile. Antifragile things actually want stress up to a point, because they become stronger with it. Our bodies are a perfect example. We grow muscle by exposing it to lots of resistance.
As we enter this new reputation economy, 'outing' who we are and what our best insights are may be the best approach to building our antifragile reputation. In his book, Nassim gives advice:
Some jobs and professions are fragile to reputational harm, something that in the age of the Internet cannot possibly be controlled - these jobs aren’t worth having. You do not want to “control” your reputation; you won’t be able to do it by controlling information flow. Instead focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage. Or even put yourself in a situation to benefit from the antifragility of information. In that sense, a writer is antifragile [benefitted by a stressor]... [...] Now let’s say I were a midlevel executive employee of some corporation listed on the London Stock Exchange, the sort who never take chances by dressing down, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach). What would happen to me if I attack the fragilista? My firing and arrest record would plague me forever. I would be a total victim of informational antifragility. But someone earning close to minimum wage, say, a construction worker or a taxi driver, does not overly depend on his reputation and is free to have his own opinions. He would be merely robust [not hurt or helped] compared to the artist, who is antifragile. A midlevel bank employee with mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact, he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core -- because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados.
The Perils And Rewards Of Personal Transparency
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ― Brene Brown
Choosing to start MakeLoveNotPorn has not come without costs though. The risk anyone faces of being more visible and unique in the online environment is trolls, people who use snark to put others down and hide behind the veil of anonymity. After Cindy spoke at TED, TED did not post Cindy’s talk because of the content. Eventually, they posted it on Youtube, but disabled the comment stream. After she asked for the comments to be enabled, over 3,000 positive comments streamed in. Cindy took the time to respond personally to 90% of those comments. A small minority of those comments were negative; mostly from young men. When she engaged them, they either apologized publicly or through a private message, although some kept on going no matter what she did.
Entrepreneurs who have the courage to authentically share their unique story and the generosity to share their best insights have an amazing opportunity to quickly build a world-class, antifragile reputation. In so doing, they have an opportunity to build an authentic network of kindred spirits and stakeholders.
Even more so, learning from difficult situations or memories often only happens when we own our full story.