Brandon Coppernoll Web content management, internet marketing and social media in Indiana

Have you Googled yourself? Your employers will

Social media and networking has done wonders for people on a personal level. We are able to connect to friends we haven't seen for years. There are games out that thrive on a social media community such as Facebook. We are able to post videos and photos of ourselves so our long-distance family and friends can keep up with us.

There is a dark side to social networking that people need to take notice. Whatever you do post to these communities will show up in search engines sooner or later unless you take the extra precautions to make yourself private, and if someone wants to dig deep enough to find dirt on you they probably will.

More employers are screening candidates via social networking sites and it's becoming more important to create a positive public online image. A good rule of thumb is would you want your grandmother to see what is online about you? Would you want your children to be able to see what is found online about you?

While you may view this as an invasion of privacy or "none of their business" you are in for a rude awakening. It is their business. Just as they may be doing research about their potential recruits or their current employees their customers are doing the same to them. Consider a scenario where a sales person has up to twenty photos posted to Facebook all showing a night of drinking and scandalous behavior. If a customer meets with this individual, looks them up on one of these social media sites and finds this person to be of questionable character those same thoughts could correlate to the company.

So my  question to you is "have you Googled yourself lately?" I tend to do this about once a month. I want to make sure my online public image is one that I can be proud of, and I want to be sure that my boss knows that I am out there representing the company even when I'm "off the clock" in a positive manner.

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