By Meghan M. Biro, Contributor Hold on —I’m just checking my account . . . No, I’m not looking to see if I’ve got the funds in my bank account for my car payment.  Instead I mean and so do you or will soon enough how many people have recommended me on LinkedIn, the number of “likes” I’ve posted on Facebook, the comments I’ve gotten on Airbnb — and whether I vote regularly. Like it or not (and do we?), the world of work is recalibrating your future career currency as you read this. Very soon, your online reputation will be far more significant than your traditional credit rating or FICO score has been for getting jobs, apartments, the best interest rate on mortgages, or even a run-down couch off of Freecycle. Start-ups are focused on figuring out the best ways to gather our social media data and convert it into reputation currency.  Some of their approaches suck up data on trustworthiness, others, on social influence. Our social culture is accelerating in the drive toward the online reputation where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history. Or as the global founding team of start-up Movenbank note, “it’s no longer about credit and a specific number”. It’s about credibility. It’s about authentic self branding. It’s about leadership. It’s about trust.  You apply for a job where you’re going to have face-to-face contact with the public. Your employer checks out, say, Kred or Klout, to see how many friends you have on FB, whether you have a dialog going with them, if your comments “liked” on different sites, and so on.  That data provide insight about your social reach and intelligence. You want to sell something on eBay. The buyer looks at your general rep for all transactions you’ve made across the web — Amazon, esty, airbnb.  In short, you become a composite of all your purchases and sales on the web. You need a bank loan. Yes, Movenbank examines your credit rating, which is based on your past transactions, plus, on average, 8,000 other bits of social data about you to find out your likely future trustworthiness.  The past is no longer prologue, at least that’s no longer the whole story How should we think about all this? Does it even matter what we think? Yes, of course it matters. We may not be able to stop this sea change (and do we even want to?), but, hey, we are the “social” in “social media” — our online life and preferences shape its direction. In trying to get my mind around all this, I offer 4 questions:
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest