Online identity management is also called as online personal branding or online image management or personal reputation management (PRM) is a set of methods to create a distinguished Web presence of a person on the Internet world. And that presence could be reflected in any type of content which refers to the person like in news, personal web sites, participation in blogs and forums, social media presence, video, pictures etc.
Online identity management also refers to identity disclosure and identity exposure and it has developed in the management on online identity in online dating services or social network services.
The process of OIM has to do with improving the quality and quantity of traffic to websites that have content related to a person, which is the one aspect. In that aspect, Online identity management is a part of another discipline known as search engine optimization with the difference that the name of the person is the only keyword and the optimization object is not necessary one web site; it can consider a bundle of different web sites which contain positive online references. In this case, the aim is to get high rankings for as maximum number of websites as possible when someone searches for a name of person. If ‘Google’ the search engine is used then this action is called “to google someone”.
Another aspect has to do with impression management means the process through which people control the impressions other people form of them. One of the aim is to increase the online reputation of the person.
Online identity management includes participation in social media sites such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitxr,Twitter, Orkut, Last.fm, Myspace and other online communities and community websites and it is related to blogging, blog search engines such as Technorati and blog social networks such as MyBlogLog.
The motive of online identity management is:
1. To create an online identity in case the person’s web presence is nonexistent or minimal.
2. To maximize the appearances of positive online references about a person and targeting users that search for that person using any Search Engine and also to those that can reach a person’s reference while browsing the web.
3. To solve online reputation problems. The process, in this case, can also be named online reputation management
I hope now you understand all the objectives of OIM.