How The Wealthiest People In America Manage Their Digital Presence

Cultivating your personal brand online is something that everyone with a digital presence deals with. However, if you’re among the 1%, maintaining a spotless digital presence is both a challenge and a necessity. Five Blocks analyzed the 200 wealthiest Americans by simply Googling their names and reading through the first-page results; here’s what they found.

In every one of these first-page results, at least one or more results were Wikipedia pages. Like it or not, Wikipedia is the site that appears most frequently in any search result, and the same rule applies for wealthy people. At least 99% of the richest Americans have at least one Wikipedia result about them, their family, or their company that can affect their digital presence deeply. One-fourth of the people surveyed showed results that related to their personal homes and properties. Just 16% of results were owned and influenced by the individual searched, a surprisingly low number considering how well-known many of these people are. For wealthy people, it’s a gamble to not own and influence their search results, making their digital presence an easy target for online attacks.

Articles and pages that associated with philanthropy were very present, giving positive influence on the digital presence to those who are actively involved. Individuals who work in philanthropy had at least two times the amount of influence in their digital presence over those who are not. It has been shown that being engaged in charitable events and organizations make it far easier to maintain a positive digital presence as those stories more likely to be reported on in place of something negative. With an average of 12% of unfavorable results as a whole, those who had been involved in philanthropic activities that had been reported on showed just 8% unfavorable results, while those who had no philanthropic activities reported on showed 13% unfavorable results.

When one is wealthy enough, there is no way around the spotlight. By this point, one becomes their own brand rather than a person on the digital landscape. Managing that digital presence is essential to maintaining a positive reputation, much like managing a business. Take a look at this infographic brought to you by Five Blocks for more on how the world’s wealthiest and most influential people manage their digital presence. Thoughts or comments on this piece? We’d love to hear from you, so let us know what you think.