Social media and you
We’ve been talking a lot this month about social media and associations as organizations. Let’s change the focus a little, and make it all about you.
Harvard Business Review’s June 2007 issue featured a case study about a young executive enthusiastically applying for a new job; her prospects are (possibly—the case study ends without a final decision) torpedoed by an old news article found by a Google search. For a young professional reading the article, it can come across as a cautionary tale—bad things about you could be found online, and they can keep you from getting that dream job.
I’ve actually blogged about the idea of the “permanent resume” subject before, but my thinking has evolved since I originally wrote about it. It’s possible to look at a case study like the one in HBR and think that it’s scary—that old MySpace page (or what have you) coming back to haunt you so easily. But I’ve decided to think of it as empowering, because you can control your online identity in a such a wonderfully direct way.
Sure, you can’t magically delete all potentially negative mentions of you that appear online. But you can launch a blog. You can participate in a wiki. You can join Facebook or LinkedIn or what have you, answer questions and ask them, and get your voice out there. The more actively you participate, the more you can craft your personal brand to be what you want it to be.
I think Tom Peters was right, back in the early 1990s, when he wrote about the power of “Brand You.” And now, social media creates exponentially more opportunities to show others who we really are.
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Comments
Great post, Lisa. You actually do have a lot of control with your online identity. Working hard to get your message on relevant, highly-ranked sites and blogs will ensure that your personal brand is clearly communicated - reducing the impact of other items that may be posted about you (and often pushing them to page 37 of your Google results!).
Those with the strongest online brands work at communicating their message on the web as a matter of course. We developed the Career Distinction Online ID Calculator (www.careerdistinction.com/onlineid - it's a free tool)) to evaluate online personal brands and we learned that people in the media have the highest scores - probably because they are in the habit of communicating consistently and constantly.
Best.
William Arruda
www.reachcc.com
Posted by: William Arruda | November 18, 2007 2:02 PM
Lisa--Michele Martin has had some good posts on online identity recently over on the Bamboo Project and also experiments with an online resume. Check out http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/10/is-an-online-id.html
as one example. Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Cobb | November 19, 2007 7:11 AM
What happens in five to 10 years when this becomes ubiquitous? When all college graduates have a digital past, many of them less-than-flattering to a potential employer? Will employers just not hire anybody? Or will they be forced to take these digital histories into consideration but discount any youthful indiscretions for being... youthful indiscretions?
In other words, will it be like pot and presidential candidates? We've reached a point where just about every candidate's tried drugs (even if some did not inhale), largely making past drug experimentation a non-issue. When everyone has an incriminating online identity, will those old photos of yourself getting stoned and doing tequila shots in college during the 00's even matter? I have to wonder.
Posted by: Mark Forstneger | November 19, 2007 3:38 PM
Jeff: Thanks for the link to Michele's work on this topic. She always has interesting things to say.
Mark: You bring up a good point, and it's definitely something I've wondered about. And I think your prediction may be right on the money. If a hiring manager is forced to choose between someone with a few minor youthful indiscretions documented on an old MySpace page, and someone with no evidence of online engagement at all ... well, I would take the former. (Although I might give him or her some advice on updating or closing down old MySpace pages!)
I also wonder if technology will make it increasingly easy to present "professional" and "personal" profiles online, and control who has access to which profiles. As online identity becomes more important, there will certainly be increasing demand for that kind of control.
Posted by: Lisa Junker | November 19, 2007 9:27 PM