Google AdWords
Seth Godin recently wrote a timely reminder about online responsibility.
He describes how a friend advertising for a housekeeper Googled three of the applicants, only to discover that one was a binge drinker, one was a bitter failed artist, and the third a convicted shoplifter.
He makes the point that anything and everything you do ends up on your permanent record. And he’s unnervingly right.
Many of us have separate online personalities. The business personality, and the private one.
I know that we live in an age of personalisation, but for the most part, I like to keep my work friends and private friends separate.
Am I afraid that the two worlds will collide with an almighty bang? Do I have something to hide?
Not at all. I’m not pretending to be someone else when I work, nor am I acting when I’m with family and friends. But I have different roles in different situations.
My friends aren’t interested in my blog, because it’s all about my work.
And the people I work with aren’t interested in my fetish for wearing women’s shoes. I don’t actually have a fetish for wearing women’s shoes, but if I did, you probably wouldn’t want to know. It wouldn’t be relevant to our working relationship.
Don’t get me wrong though. I’m fortunate to have met some incredibly nice and interesting people through work, and with time, some of them have become friends. In that scenario, there’s an obvious overlap.
Many people, however, fail to take precautions to keep their work and personal lives separate, and so end up in the position where their potential employee finds out everything about them. For better or for worse.
The nutshell rule is a simple one. If what you share is open to the public, it’s also open to the people you work with. Keep it clean.
If your tastes are unusual, your political beliefs extreme, your forum personality aggressive, then this is public information, available to all.
I choose to keep my tastes and politics to myself, as I don’t believe that they are relevant to my business. You may choose to do otherwise. But like a tattoo, what you share with the online world will never go away.
Seth makes a good point in his closing comments:
“The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.”
Personal branding in the age of Google
So you’re supposed to hide your private stuff?
Well the concepts of “private” and “public” are not exactly synonymous
I’m not saying you have to hide anything. But separation is easy, and if you choose not to do so, the private and public are mixed together.
Seth’s post reminded me that part of educating my kids on how to be safe on the Internet should involve not just who they interact with and what sites they visit and so on, but also how they conduct themselves on-line. My son is only two and a half but he already knows how to switch on the PC, log in and visit CBeebies and Nick JR etc. In a few years he could be posting stuff on social networking sites, in forums, responding in blog comments, and maybe even creating web sites. We’ve installed software to filter out harmful content but no software can control how someone behaves. Most parents worry about how their kids act and present themselves in public and we all want to teach them how to behave amongst others. Lets not forget that while they are on-line they are in public too. I wonder how many less web savvy parents consider this. What a school child says and how he presents himself on-line could affect how he is perceived by an employer in 20 years time. This is probably a bit of an extreme example, but let’s not leave it too late to teach our kids that what they share on-line is both public and permanent.