As our PCs and our emails hold more and more of our most intimate musings, and as boomers face mortality, the question of how to treat our online lives in the afterlife is a big one. I hear more and more stories of loved ones who die leaving their memories online and inaccessible to their families and friends.

I first looked into what happens to your online accounts after you die in 2006. Most websites were completely clueless, way too concerned with the here and now to worry about future problems.

Today, Facebook has a very clear policy about death. You can decide to memorialize the deceased profile (certain features, like status updates are shut off), which keeps the site viewable but frozen in time, or you can have the site deactivated (which doesn’t remove the contents). What Facebook doesn’t do (at least not without a big fuss) is release the deceased’s log-on information.

That means, unless they’re willing to fight, your family may be unable to use the site—say for contacting your friends with an update. Or finding out who your friends were or, in some cases, even how you might have died. LinkedIn, MySpace, and others have similar policies. You can have an account memorialized (on MySpace) or removed completely, but don’t count on being able to access the contents.

Planning for the Afterlife

Given these policies, like most death-related issues, the best thing you can do is to start thinking about your digital legacy while you’re still alive. Public radio recently ran a story about the legal wrangling of getting access to a deceased family member’s password. The broadcast identified Legacy Locker, a new website that lets you bequeath your online properties as a solution.

Other alternatives involve simple common sense, low-tech solutions.

1. Give your passwords to a trusted family member—an envelope that gets stored in a desktop drawer until needed is the lowest tech way to protect your legacy.
2. Don’t trust the keepers? Provide a list of passwords and account information to your attorney or executor. Ask that your will be modified to include a statement about what happens to your online persona.
3. Lock up your passwords in a vault to be opened in the event of your death. Leave specific instructions as to how to use these accounts.

If you think I’m just finding things to worry about, then think about this. According to a recent census of social media users, 3.24% of all Facebook users were actually dead. Dead MySpace users trumped Facebook at 7.46%. That’s a lot of souls floating around in social networking purgatory.

Verbally abuse someone on a social network? That gets noted in your score. A good customer who pays on time? That gets noted as well. Does it seem like an Internet version of a shopkeepers’ association or is it more like the scarlet letter? As most things on the web, ReputationShare will probably turn out to be a combination of both.

The good news is that Internet sites and shops need to clean up their establishments and ReputationShare provides some good tools. Web businesses suffer from name callers, kooks, spammers, and scammers as much as any individual storefront in the real world. Real world shops have learned to deal with psychopathic customers; why shouldn’t Internet sites do the same?

Here’s how it works. The website decides to join ReputationShare. Upon registration at the site, users are tracked and their incidents (both good and bad) show up on a report. The scores are algorithmically translated into a single reputation score that the site owners can share collectively and take appropriate action as individual sites.

Of course, the big brother conspirators will have a field day with this. And perhaps they should. While it’s nice to know whether someone is a spammer or abusive online, an unanticipated result may be to inspire some vigilante behaviors. Barring a known thief from a website is one thing; barring the voice of an irate customer who makes disparaging remarks is dangerous. What’s to stop the sites from looking for retaliatory purposes? Lots of questions, but ReputationShare has some pretty good answers. They don’t divulge any personal identities; each person in the database has a “hashed” number attached to them—no names. And the system is transparent, which means you have as much right to view your reputation score as they do.

eBay had one of the earliest reputation systems on the web. Shoppers either praised or panned storekeepers based on their experiences. That information was shared with the entire eBay community. Stores and sites will be able to reward their best customers, maybe through expanded services, or punish their less desirable by making them a persona non grata.

Linda Criddle, the site’s founder, is no stranger to the threats of the Internet. A 13-year Microsoft veteran, she was a pioneer in the company’s Internet safety efforts as well as the author of numerous books on Internet safety. Criddle says her approach keeps privacy intact, but makes actions on the web have consequences.

To read a short white paper http://www.reputationshare.com/ReputationShareWhitePaper.pdf.

Asking Nicely

One of the best ways to manage your reputation is to show up and have your case heard. Asking people to stop saying what they’re saying, apologizing for things you’ve said, clarifying misconstrued statements…these are things we’ve been doing in the real world since the spoken word began.

When people hurl the first things that come out of their mouths into a note, a simple reminder that the recipient is a living, breathing, feeling human being often helps. Giving a body to the disembodied voices of the web brings civility back into the equation. “I’m sorry,” “my mistake,” and “I didn’t mean to cause you grief” are terms that are in short supply on the Internet.

As a blogger (who incidentally finds that being wrong generates the most traffic), I’ve apologized for making mistakes, confronted those who don’t care for my ideas, and tried very hard not to be offensive. Sometimes it’s hopeless. But nine of out 10 times you establish a personal relationship with the enemy and move on.

Reporting a Problem

Your next recourse would be to report a problem to your service provider. Most have a “report problems” button. If it’s easily verified that there’s something wrong going on, the service provider will attempt to suspend, if not cancel, the troublemaker’s account. If complaints from a number of sources trickle in, it’s more likely the complaint will be addressed.

The Legal Route

Of course, there are legal options to seek compensation when someone says something you feel is untrue and harmful. Hard enough to prove in the real world, these libel cases are almost impossible to win in cyberspace. In part that’s because you can quickly defend yourself and correct the record on the Internet, and in part because the courts are likely to play ostrich when it comes to libel rulings on the web. A simple explanation of libel, easy enough for non-lawyers to digest, comes from Larry Lessig’s blog. (He’s a professor and Internet law specialist at Stanford.)

The Reputation Scrubbers

Now to the juiciest part of reputation management. A cross between a personal private eye and a personal vigilante, these are new services that combine the good old craft of PR and spin with search and linking technologies.

Reputation Hawk, ReputationDefender, and International Reputation Management are three of the leading sites that attempt to fix their clients’ sullied profiles. How do they do that? They flood the web with good content, drowning the bad. And they cross-link favorable content in order to get the good stuff to appear higher in a web search.

Just like in the real world, where reputations can be fixed for a price using a PR firm, there’s bound to be a skewing of reality. Case in point: I spoke with Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, after he helped spin Sue Scheff’s web situation into gold. Scheff, who runs an educational consulting firm that places troubled teens in residential programs, recently won $11.3 million from the Florida courts. Scheff sued a woman named Carey Brock, a disgruntled customer who expressed her displeasure by posting complaints about Scheff’s services. The posts called Scheff a crook and fraud.

If you aren’t following this case you should be. It’s a clear example of how those with the money can manipulate their reputations. Some commentators believe Scheff is a heroine who stood up against Internet falsehoods to emerge victorious. A few voices rally behind Brock as a consumer without the media savvy to sway the court, but as a woman who simply wanted to warn others about what she considered terrible business practices.

The only certainty is that Scheff is litigious. She recently took action against another website whose owner took the name Sueschefftruth.com as a way of criticism. You can follow along at Topix with its recap, or straight from the horse’s mouth at Sue Scheff’s site.

The Scheff story is troubling. I wrote a note to ReputationDefender’s Michael Fertik a few months back:

“It’s one thing to write a nice ‘cease and desist’ letter to the person or site that’s giving you agita; it’s another thing to populate the web with verbiage and links in an attempt to tip the search scales. You are not alone in providing these services and, in fact, you may be the most honest of them, but you are still using the Internet to manipulate the truth.”

I’ve lived it. A few years back I made a dumb business decision and it’s still there, haunting me each time I Google my name. Most of what was written was not true, but that hardly matters. It hurt me personally and professionally and still does to this day.

As we put more of ourselves out there on the Internet, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the growing science (or is it art?) of reputation management. Reputation management consists of two parts. First, you’ll want to track what people are saying about you (your company, your employees, your product, your children). Next, you’ll want to take the appropriate action if your online reputation is being sullied. That’s the tougher part.

Tracking Your Reputation

The first steps are the easiest. There are a number of programs that let you see what’s being said on the Internet by tracking a specific word—like your own name. A Google search will bring up your name, but to automate the process you can use Google News Alerts. Just enter your name, company name, or any other term you want to track in the news and if it comes up on the web you’ll receive an email. Lots of false positives and misses, but it’s really easy.

From there, tracking tools get more granular. If you blog you’ll want to monitor where your work or words show up on blogs. It’s advisable to register at a site like Technorati. They keep a sort of uber-list of blogs and can search for mentions of whatever it is that you’re tracking across thousands of blogs. If you want to track comments about your blogs you’ll use a different tool.

For the top 10 free tools to track stuff on the web, read this Mashable post.

If less choice is more, then stick to the five free tools discussed on the Personal Branding Blog.

And, if you want too much information about how you should be thinking about your reputation in cyberspace, you can read 100 tips from criminal justice.

Next, we’ll look at the hairier, thornier issue of what to do when bad things are said about good people (like you).