gov 2.0

Cyber Reputation Management and Control From Digijaks

Alan W. Silberberg

Cyber Reputation Management and Control From Digijaks

BAM!

There it is.

Right in your face one morning when you check your social feed as news.

That nasty little something that someone, a bot, or a person, or maybe both left for you overnight. It is a digital take down. A bad blog post. A social media meme that is being unanswered or purposely pumped up to discredit you, your company or organization or your brand. Or maybe it is a false allegation. Or paid fake bad reviews that your competitors put up.

Face it. The Internet is a hostile place for your reputation and your brand, whether that is personal, corporate or government. The control and management of your reputation start and end with you. As we enter 2015, it is worth paying attention to, in fact it is important to take stock of your online reputation, the management of it and the control of it. It is yours. Not anyone else.

The — Internet, social media, the cloud, mobility, bring your own device, artificial intelligence, autonomous computing etc etc — all are really cool buzz words. All come with prices to pay that include the constant need for personal, corporate and government level cyber security, reputation management and reputation control.

Our top 10 List of Ways That Cyber Security, Social Media and Reputation Management and Reputation Control all mesh together.

  1. Social Media — is the entrance point for viruses, malware, malformed links, phishing and learning enough about someone to turn around and destroy their reputation.
  2. Mobility — allows for instant access to social media, email, sms, cloud and phone, and video, as ways to tear down a brand or reputation. It can happen anywhere, at any time, by anyone around you holding a smartphone or smart watch or smart glasses.
  3. Cloud — allows people to store information quickly and easily. This can be for phishing, for cyber crime, for reputation destroying or extortion. Images and videos, poems and documents and your complete online profile can be easily harvested by smart people and or bots and then turned around against you. What information are you allowing out or putting out to make it easier to be attacked? Or easier to have your reputation tarnished or that of your brand?
  4. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) — While fun and easy for users and your employees BYOD brings a whole fruit basket worth of cyber security and reputation management and control issues along with it. BYOD allows users and employees to access the internet and social media channels without approval or notice from the employer. A reputation can be destroyed in an instant with a recorded conversation, a video, an errant email or sms, or worse corporate espionage and cyber crimes can be instituted easily with BYOD.
  5. Artificial Intelligence — The name alone. What does it mean? How can artificial intelligence (AI) bots or autonomous computing affect your cyber security and reputation management and control? In so many ways we are just beginning to understand.
  6. Lazy People — Sorry but many times the malware or the phishing or the destruction of reputation starts with someone simply being lazy, not having security and privacy settings attended to, and or worse letting someone else use their login credentials.
  7. Your Competition — They have access to the same tools you do. They can buy hackers, they can buy reputation destruction; they can attempt to steal your trade secrets; they will try to insert bad people into your organization at every level. (See 8 below.)
  8. Bad People — No good, no ethos or morals. These people do not care if they harm you. They seek to. These come in the form of social media contacts or email phishing all the way through HR, interviewing, shadowy financiers and content theft propagators from online goods. They will use any and every tool out there to disrupt your business, to destroy your reputation.
  9. Posting stupid pictures of yourself — on to any website regardless of how safe you *THINK* it is.
  10. Not checking the health and welfare of your own digital reputation and brand.

Copyright © 2010-2014 Digijaks, LLC

Recap of Gov20LA 2014.

Alan W. Silberberg

By Alan W. Silberberg, Founder of Gov20LA

https://storify.com/ideagov/gov20la-2014-recap-by-founder-alan-w-silberberg
As the founder of Gov20LA —  looking back at the 5th Annual Gov20LA Open Government Conference in 2014; I can’t help but to express humbleness and gratitude to the brilliant people who spoke, and those who interacted with us from around the world on Twitter. For the 5th year in a row, I come away so impressed with the hard working, innovative people who present their knowledge to you.

We heard from such amazing people, and will be releasing videos with their presentations in mid-2014. Topics ranging from Privacy and Internet Security to Mapping, Veracity of Comments and how Social Media is used in Emergencies, to a roadmap for social engagement. Each speaker took us on an exploration of the mind blowing mixture of technology, government, people and ideas. With in-depth deep dives about real world examples, with interactions from Twitter from around the world and questioning from the audience – each speaker opened a whole world of discussions.

Gov20LA had participation in both our live-stream and on twitter from over 10 countries. Thousands of people were engaged with the small conference on the beach. Every year we have participation and engagement from public figures in multiple countries at the Federal, State and Local levels and foreign equivalents. We hear back from many of these agencies later in the year and many of the lessons and technology discussed at each Gov20LA becomes the basis for training materials for other governments as we have kept all our videos of speakers free and easy to access.

U.S. Federal Agencies have been long engaged with Gov20LA, we would like to thank the State Department, NASA, DATA.GOV, The White House, The Defense Department, Small Business Administration, Commerce Department; and others for lending their brilliant people to speak. Foreign Countries like Great Britain, Canada, Israel, and their representatives have been great speakers and guests, we deeply appreciate the interactions and engagements with all the above. It speaks volumes about the success of this event, and the results globally.

When governments can use technology openly to engage their citizens in a transparent dialogue that is genuinely two way, we all see massive changes happen. When budgets and records are open, and easily accessible by the people, suddenly light is cast upon the darkness. What was chaotic and possibly corrupt can now be viewed by all. This makes each one of us powerful. Add that to the phone you carry around in your pocket and how it multiplies and magnifies your messages instantly, globally. As I said in my opening remarks; we all carry around in our pockets the power to create change. The decision is up to us whether we do so, and how we act on that.

This conference has been a project of mine since 2009, when I was running You2Gov. Every year we have had a 50/50 split between men and women speakers. In 2014 we made the speaker ratio over 3:2 in favor of women over men. There are very few other conferences who can state the same or something close. I challenge other tech founders, conferences and the media to start addressing the gap that usually exists at conferences. There are so many brilliant women who are founders, who have created world changing technologies, hold patents on intellectual property or run organizations that are changing how our world works. There is no excuse any more in 2014 or later years not to be making every conference 50/50 at least.

Thank you to everyone who has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make the event a success, year after year. Thank you to everyone around the world for the interaction through various forms on the Internet.