Posts Tagged ‘Social Networking’

I respect privacy and I don’t blast my name all over the internet. In fact, I have a number of writing aliases that I use to help protect my privacy.

My name is Michael and I’ll almost always use my real first name, but I never use my whole name. Painful as it is, I use different passwords for different website accounts too.

I love the internet… I just don’t trust it.

When I first got on Facebook, I did so because my family was there and wanted to include me. So, I created an account and within a week I had 30 friends. The social circle is wide open with the friends of friends concept.

The thing is, I don’t want people from my elementary years contacting me. That’s just not my style. So, I deactivated my account and created and alias account, applied all the privacy settings and informed my family.

If you are using your real name in the social networks, then your current employer and peers can find you. When you are searching for work and start sending out your resume, just remember the recipients might be able to easily find you. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr… whatever. Are you 100% sure of your privacy?

While on Facebook, I had old high school buddies sending me shots of whiskey, rolled up joints, and a number of useless stupid crap. I also had old high school girlfriends sending me retarded sex quizzes and other items that I wanted nothing to do with.

As entertaining as these things are, I can’t help but wonder why a professional accountant would be using Facebook to write a paragraph on their wall about how hammered they was last night. He was kind enough to inform everybody he wasn’t able to go to work that day, because of the party last night.

Now seriously? How smart is this?

If you ship out your resume to a company and the interested/resourceful hiring manager finds your MySpace page and discovers racial jokes, religious opinions, party pictures, or crazy comments from friends… what do you suppose their first impression will be?

Social Networking is a growing trend and you cannot assume potential or existing employers won’t search on your name. It’s happening everyday and the more savvy they are the more they will use it to find information about you. You should count on it.

Considering this, you might want to protect your image and build beneficial content by:

• Being Careful: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your employer to see. Avoid foul language, poor attitudes, and negativity.
• Being Discreet: Take advantage of privacy settings as much as possible. You might want to turn off comments if you have wild friends you can’t control.
• Being Prepared: Monitor your social accounts regularly to ensure nothing appears you don’t want. Even comments from friends and other people can be viewed in negative light. Be prepared to have unwanted content removed.