My Branding Journey and How To Keep a Low Profile Online

Today’s blogging adventure will concern itself with the act of keeping a low profile online — otherwise known as maintaining a Minimal Digital Footprint, or an MDF. (And no, that’s not actually a real acronym).

In one of my recently begun podcasting initiatives, the Build Your Writing Brand Podcast, I plan on going into my rather unusual branding journey — and, in audio journal format, setting out what’s working (and what’s not) to get me back on the map.


My Online Journey

I started out life not as the ‘Daniel Rosehill’ that households and adoring fans around the world know me as, but rather as ‘Daniel O’Carroll’.

Then I got mixed up with some arms traffickers, spent some time in Siberia, and was ultimately forced out of the as a result of an “altercation”.

Except that’s not what actually happened.

Already planning my move to Israel, I was convinced (possibly accurately) that people would doubt that ‘Daniel O’Carroll’ was an Irish Jew.

Jews are commanded by the Bible to love converts (note: I am not a convert, my mother is halachically Jewish).

However, like so many facets of life in a Jewish community, practical reality and what the Torah ordains people to do are often too very different things.

Envisioning a lifetime of awkward Shabbat dinner conversations in Israel culminating in a hushed “but you are Jewish, right?” I decided to take the plunge, give people no grounds for suspicion, and plan a day trip to the Irish High Court.

(I have mixed feelings about this motivation to change my second name in retrospect. I have exaggerated how judgmental people are and most Jewish communities welcome converts just as they do people that were born into the faith — although the awkward line of questioning I have described is something I often received prior to the name change. Additionally, second names are a rather new invention in the world and many Jews who hail from Arabic countries proudly sport surnames such as ‘Mansour and ‘Jamal’ that do not necessarily mark themselves out as Jewish — nor separate them from the majority religious populations).

Using the finest legal up-to-regulation stationary that Eason’s could provide and utilizing the services of a walk-in solicitors, I lodged, on that day, a Deed Poll and Affidavit with the Irish High Court, thereby officializing my name change in advance of aliyah — such that I would only start time in Israel with my new identity.

The Bureaucratic Journey Post Deed Poll

Changing second name is a lot more work than it might sound.

Although the process of lodging the Deed Poll can be comfortably completed in a morning, at least in Ireland, there are countless follow-up actions that need to be completed:

  • A new passport needs to be issued
  • Ditto for a new driving license
  • You need to change all the name on all bank accounts, utility bills, etc. — which can only happen when the passport and driving license have been updated

If you plan on moving to Israel (making ‘aliyah’), you’ll also need to add your Deed Poll and Affidavit to the surprisingly long (and expensive) list of documents that you will need to have officially apostilled.

Taking The Deal Seriously

Some old “coverage” on IC

As the cold legal language in the Deed Poll makes clear, you essentially agree to a bargain whereby you commit to:

“Wholly renounce, relinquish, and abandon use of your former name.”

Perhaps because I was in studying law and had visions of the Name Change Police coming after me if I didn’t do as agreed, as soon as the above paperwork had been finalized, I set about this process in great earnest and also began dismantling:

  • Social media profiles bearing my old name (this may have been in the days before that was possible simply by changing an account setting)
  • Asking that any mentions of my old name in websites be removed.

To be clear: I did this not because I am in any way ashamed of my old name — although it always felt somewhat ill-fitting considering my strong Jewish identity.

But rather — always having an eye for PR and branding — I realized that it would make my sense for my story to be told — whether professionally or personally — all using the one description.

Planning my aliyah I realized that my future personal brand would likely be connected to Israel and the Jewish people — and less so to Ireland and the woes of economic emigration.

And as The Story Brand podcast tagline goes: “to confuse is to loose.”

Out With The Old But Not Quite In With The New

Some media coverage about Cork Student News’ opposition to an incoming student fee, the student news site that I founded and edited.

As I outlined in the about page of this blog, I was at an interesting professional crossroads in life at the time.

I was studying Law at University College Cork, my undergraduate degree, but was mentally leaning more towards a career in journalism or some other writing discipline.

I also had put down the typical basic digital breadcrumbs that an aspiring journalist typically wants to create for themselves.

I had been contributing a column to IrishCentral / The Irish Voice called ‘Danny Boy’; I had been managing a student news website that I founded; and I had amassed a small selection of mentions for both.

I rush to point out: none of this was quite the stuff of international renown. But having seen how grueling the process of beginning to construct a personal brand is — and then how much work it is to dismantle — I decided to plan my next branding “push” with a little more calculation in mind.


The Era of Hiding Online

The period between when I moved to Israel, five years ago, and the present, has been a kind of strange limbo land for me.

In fact, this week’s frenzied blogging activity (which I am engaging in because I felt a strange need to suddenly emerge from this shell), represents the most prolific period of writing under my own name that I have engaged in for about seven years.

The personal branding journey I described above gave me a lot of pause for thought about the power of what we put online and the repercussions that it can have for our reputation and career.

What we write online, post on Facebook, and tweet on Twitter is a lot stickier than we tend to think and a mess to untangle if we, years later, we decide to repudiate our views on an issue — or need a certain photo deleted.

What if I wrote a piece criticizing a politician only to, years later, want a job at his party?

(Note: my initial career ambition, post-law, was actually to become a speechwriter or communications assistant to a politician. This is largely what motivated to study for a Master’s in Political Journalism at City University, London).

I decided that while my views about Israel and the world were still very much in the formative stages the safest thing to do would be to not be online at all and thus began a period of online anonymity. (Note again: my decision to do this had zero to do with online surveillance or an obsession with privacy. That’s an entirely separate motivation with a wholly different group of adherents!).

Here are some tactics that I used:


1: Do Not Write Bylined Content (Of Any Nature!)

As a ghostwriter, I am professionally involved in anonymously writing for other people.

In fact, discovering this field was partially a result of refusing to have work attributed to me for the past five years.

If you’re also a writer, there is an obvious downside to this — it’s naturally a lot harder to convince random prospects on the internet that you know your stuff.

But on the plus side:

  • What you do write can remain relatively unknown, which can be advantageous while you are just gathering experience and not penning Shakespeare-worthy prose (yes, I realize that I am still very much there!)
  • You can, often unknowingly, write for competitors or rivals that might not want to work with you if they knew you had worked for somebody else. Of course, contracts must always be inspected.
  • Ghostwriting typically commands a higher fee because the author forsakes a byline.
  • You can write some pretty crummy content mill work and have nobody know it was you!
I’m proud to say that one of my first writing clients was a content mill and that I wrote this!

2: Set All Your Online Profiles To Private

Even while trying to keep an MDF, you probably still don’t want to miss out on parties that friends are planning over Facebook.

The key to keeping profiles but not having Google find them is to look for the “let search engines index this” setting.

One exists on most major social networks with halfway decent privacy settings. If a profile-based website does not have this, I will not use it.

Facebook:

Turning off profile indexing on Facebook

Speaking of weird online experiments, I once created a series of four exact replicate Facebook profiles so that people would have no idea which one was me and hopefully give up in futility because I have no desire to have friends.

I then realized that looked really, really weird and aborted the plan.

Facebook has also gotten a lot harder to game and set up fake profiles on recently.

Although I’m slowly becoming less shady, my privacy settings in general do still tend to reflect a good degree of paranoia.

Some settings I actually still use on Facebook:

Some pretty rigorous Facebook privacy controls

On LinkedIn:

Keeping a LinkedIn profile off the internet

3: Do All Your Online Snooping From Fake Accounts

Yes, these are people that have been snooping on your Facebook

You know that “People You May Know” dialog box that pops up on Facebook.

Yep, that’s totally people that are stalking you.

When you are doing the stalking yourself, you don’t want to leave such crude digital breadcrumbs.

The key to avoiding detection, I submit, is to always have a network of reliable fake accounts on hand.

I hereby confess to the world that for years I have operated a small network of strategic online fake accounts.

Virtually everybody that has worked with me or knows me already knows this.

I’m so damn organized at it that I have a folder in my LastPass set up just for “fakies” and even have a few decoy resumes and bios just ready to roll out the door.

One must always have a religious guy Facebook on hand
Some decoy resumes are great for anonymous job hunting. If employers can do it, why can’t candidates too?

Some Worthwhile ‘Fakie’ Uses

Over the years, fake accounts have helped me to:

  • Obtain competitor pricing by posing as a fictitious consultant backed by a credible online presence. (To pull off this scam, set up a virtual number and route calls to your cellphone. Just to remember to put on a fake accent and answer as Moshe when the callback comes through!)
  • Scope out potential employers’ salary budgets by applying for the position using an impressive fake candidate
  • Make sure that my job wasn’t being recruited for by writing to my boss asking if they needed a replacement (just kidding, but, you know).
  • Drive up demand on friends’ second hand good sales on Facebook — all you need is two fake accounts to hold a public bidding war!

As time has gone by, I am sadly becoming less sketchy and focusing instead on more transparent means of operating.

As a result, instead of cultivating a network of fake accounts I am placing my focus on quality over quantity.

Instead, I have put a little bit of effort into developing one high-quality online alias and am exploring how blatantly this character can promote his or her self without raising suspicion.

I will buy you dinner if you write to me and blow this character’s cover.

A burner phone and a Bitcoin wallet are also good things to have on hand for this stuff.

And you’ll also want to have a well-stocked “send mail as” section in your Gmail, at least a couple tied up to aliases

Get some alternative emails ready to go out the (digital) door

Even if you don’t want to take this down the same industrial route, at the very least, a fake Facebook profile — while explicitly convening Facebook’s terms of service — can allow you check out potential employers without leaving a trail.

Make sure to keep close tabs on your legitimate Facebook activity too. I’m not shy about participating in Facebook groups, but occasionally post something that I later regret — or which reveals something like where I live (I always advise against this and it’s crazy how careless people post their email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses in publicly accessible open groups).

I highly, highly recommend setting a Todoist or Google Calendar task reminder to run through your Facebook Activity Log at least once a quarter (I check mine monthly)

It will take fifteen to thirty minutes but you can be sure that you have not posted anything you may regret:

Not the kind of stuff I’m worried about

Knowing a bit about how easy it is to spread disinformation on the internet (e.g. fake profiles) has made me a lot more suspicious and guarded about what I post there.

Funnily, former co-workers who spent time in the Israeli signals intelligence corps are the only people who truly ‘get’ why I take online privacy so seriously.

My top advice: proceed, but proceed with caution!


4: Monitor Your Name Searches Meticulously

Needless to say, you’ll also want to keep a very close watch over what’s going up on the internet about you.

As I’m mostly concerned with building back up a credible presence on Google, that’s where I’m checking.

But if you’ve got more extensive concerns, by all means consider engaging in monitoring the dark web, credit agencies, and just about anywhere else you might be worried unsavory information could show up about you.

For Google, I recommend both creating simple Google alerts with your name (mine is, as an exact search match, “daniel rosehill) and also running a manual search a few times a year to see how your personal SEO is doing and catching any inadvertent “mentions”.

I evidently haven’t made much of a splash in the last month!

Reviewing this month’s activity

If I do this and find my name listed on one of those websites that lists people addresses, for instance, I request that the profile or listing be removed by the webmaster:


5: Robots.txt is your friend

Finally, if you have online infrastructure, make liberal use of Robots.txt — a simple text file which tells (friendly) bots not to index your site.

You can choose to hide entire directories (and allow others) or simply hide the entire website from search engines.

At its most simplest, simply create a text file in your site’s root directory with:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Keeping a Minimum Digital Footprint (MDF)

I’ve discussed how I got here and what I used to keep a relatively low online profile (and went on an expected tangent about fake profiles).

I’m currently actively engaging in the much more interesting (and traditional) process of building personal branding back up.

Details on how that’s proceeding to be documented here shortly.


Some Old Links

For some of my old Irish Central articles, click here.

I also have these, and some old student journalism, on this bylined writing archive.


Some Great Old Irish Central Headlines From The Archives