Sitting down at my desk for a quick lunch today, I clicked over to the sports section and saw the headline, "Jags RB Jones-Drew gets 5 years, $31M."

My initial thought was, "what in the world did HE do?  I thought he was one of the good guys!"  Until I took another look at the headline, I didn't pay any attention to the "$31M" at the end, my attention was immediately riveted on the "gets 5 years" part.  It seems sometimes that every other day we hear about the illegal or questionable exploits of yet another professional athlete, and my initial reaction was to assume something negative.  Instead of a headline celebrating a hard-working, community-involved athlete's good fortune, my mind wondered what he did that he was going to jail for.  The relentless repetition of bad stories conditioned me to think that way.

Maurice Jones-Drew is known for his work in the community and as a general all-around Good Guy.  He hasn't done anything to warrant my initial reaction.  Was it the way the headline was written, or the general perception of what is going on in professional sports?

Why don't we hear more about the good things athletes do?  Simple - Good News Doesn't Sell Soap

Professional sports has an image problem.

Had I not taken a 2nd look at the headline, that thought would have sat in the back of my mind to fester all afternoon.

My point is this:  In this day & age, where social networking, blogging, tweeting, site-building, online reporting, etcetera, etcetera, we have to be much more careful how we protect our professional image on the internet.  A lesson I learned in another industry is that negativity carries a lot more weight than positive messages - the deck is stacked: 

A person who has a negative experience will usually tell no less than 20 people about their side of the story.  Another person who has a positive experience may tell 2 or 3 people, but not with nearly as much conviction as the reverse.  When we relate a personal experience that is not good, we are subconsciously looking for sympathy - a powerful drug.

The real estate industry has been the subject of a lot of negativity in the past year, moreso this winter.  What do you think enters John Q. Public's mind when he first reads a headline with the words, "real estate," "housing" or "mortgage" right now?

Real Estate has an image problem.

I get emails from friends and acquaintances that have been passed around the internet all over the world - jokes, funny videos, photos, "Gee, Can You Believe This???" articles and the like.  All it takes is one person to latch onto a phrase or thought, forwarding it to their friends - who forward it to their friends - who forward it to their friends before that perception becomes the reality, no matter if taken out of context. 

We've all played the game as kids, where a sentence is whispered into one ear, and in turn, by the time it reaches the other side of the room, there is very little that resembles the original...yet each person will swear that they accurately repeated only what was told them.

With such a major part of our practices taking place in the internet world, the same thing can happen, but on a much wider scale.

So, as you blog, as you tweet and create your online presence, take care with the image you project:  after all, it is more powerful than you are!