Ain't this scary? Well, not so much the fact that most anything you post in the 'net becomes your online legacy for others to find, but that there are a lot of folks out there who still don't get it. Try this: google your name in quotes. See what comes up.
Orange County Register: Need for privacy going public
- More online users are realizing how accessible their social sites are.
- Hearing more stories like those (in the article) prompted career counselors at the University of Dayton to survey employers in their database about their use of Facebook. They found that 42 percent of the 326 who responded said they would consider factoring a Facebook profile into their hiring decisions. Some of those employers also said they’d already rescinded offers because of things they’d discovered online.
- “If you don’t want people to read it, don’t post it,” Bush says. “If you don’t want people to see a video, don’t post it.”
- Today, the rule of thumb is: If it’s in the public domain, it’s fair game.
Those interviewed for the article above have it right, ya gotta be really conscious of what you put out there. It's the kind of stuff potential business partners, customers and employers can find. Which, I'd argue, is the kind of visibility we shouldn't necessarily shy away from. (?!)
Despite the cautionary tone of the article above, I think there's a missed opportunity by removing your public profiles and minimizing -- or even eliminating -- your participation in online social networks.
I'm a member of several online social forums including: ecademy, LinkedIn and Xing (formerly OpenBC). I'm also a member of various professional associations. Many of these networks have a professional profile page. You fill it out for other members in your professional association or online networking group to read in case they're interested in knowing more about you. And as it turns out, they're not the only ones. Many of these are also captured by search engines. And how you start your profile can affect your internet presence.
The first few lines you place in your profile page is something of an opportunity that many folks miss. When search engines like Google compile results of their nightly internet crawl, they pull the first few lines of your profile page and present those as a descriptive abstract immediately below the search results line. I didn't used to pay attention to this until someone forwarded me an article Ron Bates wrote at ecademy. (Internet Presence...)
It used to be, I'd write something up without paying attention to the opening lines. I used to get search "hit lines" like this:
Blah, blah, blah... that was the result when I opened with a bullet summary of personal interests. That's still there, by the way. It'll eventually move further down the search results page as enough time passes. But, since having changed my opening lines, I now get results like the ones below which now show as the first three hits on my search results page at Google.
Even if it's not entirely compelling, it at least creates a better internet presence than a bunch of bullets merged together.
As Ron points out, by simply making a small adjustment to your networking profile content on your profile sites, you create a useful hit in Googe that actually has a chance of adding to your internet presence in a way that's supportive of your online legacy. And how cool is that?
