Your Online Identity

Posted on March 7, 2007 3 Comments

Social Networking Sites: Enter At Your Own Risk by Amina Sonnie, IEE-USA Today’s Engineer:

Your Career Builders profile may be the professional face you wear online, but sites like MySpace or Facebook may be perceived as the “real” you. Many college students and entry-level employees may think that these social networking sites are not part of the adult world and forget that they are being viewed as an adult by their employer. To put a different face on the “real,” the first thing you may want to do is Google yourself. What comes up first?

Try me: John Hunter – usually my homepage or something about the another, John Hunter, the “father of modern surgery”, no relation. I found the above via: Facebook is public not private where John Dupuis added:

As an aside, when I’m on a search committee I always Google at least the short listed candidates and often many of the other applicants as well. I’ve never found anything shocking. On the other hand, I’m always surprised when I can’t find anything about a candidate. How can you be an active professional (or even an aspiring one) in this day and age and leave no impression on the web?

I agree.

As a society, we have a large bias toward punishing acts of commission – versus acts of omission. So the failure to have established a credible online presence is not normally as big a problem as creating one people object to. However, people should not become so fearful of doing something wrong that they fail to take advantage of the opportunity to enhance their career with a positive online presence: Ackoff on errors of omission.

Related: Electrical Engineering Student – Blogging is Good for You –