There has been a lot of discussion recently about the proposed changes to the Facebook terms and conditions in so far as ownership of the data is concerned. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg writes in his blog;
When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.
This raises the very important question of whether or not it should be possible to withdraw comments when posted, and whether or not comments left on a site such as Facebook should have any bearing on your employment prospects. In many respects there is a suspension of disbelief – people post assuming that there is some form of quasi private conversion taking place but in reality the words that were considered throw away remain in near perpetuity.
Numerous examples litter the last decade where the authors doubtless wish that they could put the genie back in the bottle. Whether it be an email that should not have been sent, a sick note gone bad, talking about your employer online or badmouthing the home city of a major client, the message seems to be think before you post. The current Twitter phenomenon will presumably serve to exacerbate the problem, with drunken SMS messages entering the system before being catalogued for posterity by a Google robot. From a non-salacious perspective, I have a personal example of this very thing in the form of my own 1994 post to bit.listserv.i-amiga. Amazing what you can find eh?
The Daily Mail ran a piece reporting on the concerns of leading charities that employers should be banned from researching potential employees online. John Carr, secretary of the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety said that
It's a bit like looking at someone's diary. A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms.
I agree that a distinction needs to be drawn between teenagers growing up, and adults reporting in lured detail about a night out, but I am not convinced in any way that legislation is needed to do this. As educators we need to provide young people with a way to be themselves but at the same time isolate them from future repercussions. More on this subject in a future post.
Control your identity
A good reason for being concerned about employers looking at ‘your’ online presence is identity verification. I suspect that many people have gone to sign up for a new online service, only to be presented with the message that their choice of username is already taken. Two John Smiths living in your town, one doing rather more ‘living’ than you. How does an employer differentiate?
This is where active brand management comes into the equation.
A couple of years ago I came across an article by Tom Peters entitled The Brand Called You. Peters asserts that we are all CEOs of our own individual corporations and as such need to control the brand. The article was written in 1997, before the dot.com boom and way before the web2.0 technologies that have created a breeding ground for the issues I have already discussed, but nevertheless still holds relevance today. So I read it, took on board some of the issues and put it to one side.
Eileen’s recent post got me thinking about this again. It contains a link to Personal Branding 101: How to Discover and Create Your Brand, an article that brings Peters work into the social networking era. I agree with most of what Schawbel writes, with one possible exception being the view on email addresses. If you have registered yourname.com, why then use a gmail address. Doesn’t seem to add up.
I am a big LinkedIn fan, and my LinkedIn profile allows me to control exactly what information is served up to the public, along with the information posted on my personal site.
The distribution of information, and the ability to do so en masse, is a very powerful business tool in the present economic climate but is not without problems. Google yourself, check what is out there, and try and head off any potential problems.
