Understanding Personal Online Reputation Management: A Grounded Theory Study

In our digital and hyperconnected society, social networking sites such as Facebook or Instagram facilitated information sharing in the Web and it becomes an integral part of many people’s daily life. Consequently, the amount of personal data available online is significantly increasing and concurrently, it is easy to find personal data in the Web. As a result of availability and uncomplicated retrieval of published personal data, creating comprehensive online profiles becomes effortless and also eases the derivation of implicit information for various purposes. Such information forms an online reputation and is used to make a judgment about a person (Farmer & Glass 2010). Although first studies show that individuals perceive their online reputation as important (Komisarjevsky 2012), their endeavor to manage their online reputation is on a low level (Brackenbury & Wong 2012; Madden & Smith 2010). In order to understand why individuals consider their online reputation as important but do not take action to manage it we conducted a grounded theory based on 22 qualitative interviews with digital natives to reveal the underlying motivation. Thereby, we contribute a new facet to the general understanding of online reputation management, its obstacles, and explanations for the lack of motivation.