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Tell me, who are you? 'Cause I really wanna know
by Brad Whitworth, ABC
The Who asked that musical identity question on the cover of their 1978 double-platinum album Who Are You? And their tune blares during the opening credits of the American television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which seems to be on every time I switch on cable.
It's also a question that your next boss will be pondering during the interview and selection process. It used to be that you could selectively reveal personal information to a prospective employer through your cover letter, résumé, personal interview and a list of hand-picked references. Today's wired world has changed all that, for better or worse.
We've all heard the horror stories about a hiring manager dismissing an otherwise qualified college graduate during the interview process because of "inappropriate" photos on the candidate's Facebook site. Whether the stories are true or merely urban myth, it's clear that your next boss has a lot more places to check you out today than was ever possible.
You and your network of college friends have created much of that content. As you start your transition from student to working professional, it's incumbent upon you to assess what your online presence says about you. What does your personal brand say about you? Would you hire Brand U? If you like the story you're selling, strengthen it further. If you don't like the picture your online brand paints, change it. But how?
Do an inventory
Before you do anything else, discover what's already out there. The natural place to start is Google to see the top-ranked references with your name on them. Google yourself. It turns out, for example, that I share my name with a minor league baseball player in Connecticut, a golfer in Oregon and a former vice president of the UCLA ice hockey team. I don't know the ball player or the golfer, but the skating Bruin is my son.
There are a lot more links to information about me than to the other three. That's because of my IABC involvement, my speaking engagements and the media relations work I've done.
If you're lucky, you don't share a name with a convicted felon, a drugged-out rapper or a porn star. If you do, it'll be a bit harder, but not impossible, to manage your own online brand identity. After you've seen the good, the bad and the ugly, it's then time to…
Sort things out
Put the online references you’ve found into four buckets:
- good things about you
- bad things about you
- neutral things about you
- things (good, bad and neutral) about others.
Then it's your job to find ways to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." As best you can.
You'll want to drive people (especially recruiters and hiring managers) to the good things about you. You can probably leave the neutral items alone. They're generally harmless. And then you'll want to distance yourself from the items that are about others who share your name. One web site makes it easy to do that: naymz.com is a reputation network that lets you "establish and promote your good name online." In your naymz profile you can identify and list links that aren't about you.
We'll deal with your bad items in a minute.
Broaden your home base
You've probably already got a page on MySpace or Facebook. That's a great beginning because building your online personal and professional network is exactly what you need to do. Think about expanding your base of friends. Does your college adviser have a Facebook page? Your favorite professors? Some co-workers from a summer internship? As you leave college for the working world, can you invite some of your parents' friends to be part of your network? And as awful as it might sound, have you invited your parents to be contacts?
Time to think a bit more expansively. Have you joined LinkedIn (an online network of more than 19 million experienced professionals from 150 industries) or Plaxo’s Pulse ("your address book for life")? What about professional networks that focus specifically on communicators like the IABC eXchange, myRagan or Melcrums Communicators' Network?
The basic services provided by these sites are free and it won't take long to establish a presence. You may find yourself repeating content from one to another—your résumé, for example. Realize that the more sites where you have a presence, the more places you'll need to keep up to date when you change your e-mail or your phone number. You do want recruiters to find you when they call, don't you?
Cross-reference
When you find something out there that's good—maybe a bylined article you wrote for the campus newspaper—make sure you link to it everywhere. Put the link to your LinkedIn profile on your Facebook page. And vice versa.
Start something good
If you haven't found much out there with your name on it, here's your chance to establish a positive presence. You don't have to invest in your own domain through godaddy.com or one of the other domain registries. It's not a bad idea, though, if you've got some birthday money burning a hole in your pocket. Better to grab beckysmith.net or becky_smith.com before someone else does. It doesn't cost more than a large pizza and a pitcher of beer and it might come in handy when you leave your .edu identity behind.
Even if you're lacking the funds, you can build a credible presence using free resources. Here are some things you can do to improve your online reputation:
- Start your own blog on twitter.com.
- Add thoughtful comments to others’ blogs.
- Contribute an article to IABC's Student Connection newsletter.
- Post a project from a video class on YouTube.
- Put some of your best journalistic or artistic photos on Flickr.
- Ask a LinkedIn contact to endorse your work on your profile.
- Add a link to your home page at the bottom of each e-mail you send.
The idea is quite simple: If you post lots of good things in multiple places, Google will find them and put them at the top of a search on your name. Then you've created a positive personal brand identity for recruiters to see. Since recruiters are busy people, they probably won't have time to go beyond the most popular Google links to discover everything about you. That means they may not find anything that might be construed as negative.
Ask politely
What if you've found a less-than-flattering photo of you taken at a kegger during your sophomore year? If it's on your own Facebook page, it's probably time to take it down and put it in storage. If the questionable photo of you is on someone else’s page, you can always send a request asking that it be removed. The worst they can do is say no. In that event, you'll probably want to develop an honest explanation of the situation in case you're asked.
Track it
Now that you've successfully built your online brand identity, managed it and promoted it, you should also check the quantitative results from time to time. See how many people have viewed your profile or added comments to your blog. With some of the premium services available, you can even track who is looking at your posted content.
Have fun, and enjoy your journey as you move from being an IABC student member to working practitioner.
Brad Whitworth, ABC, is an IABC Fellow, a past chairman of IABC and senior communication manager for strategic alliances at Cisco. Brad is responsible for integrated communication for the part of the company that partners with IBM, Microsoft, HP, Nokia, Accenture and about a dozen other multinational companies. Before Cisco, Brad led communication programs at HP, PeopleSoft and AAA. He earned undergraduate degrees in both journalism and speech at the University of Missouri and an MBA at Santa Clara University. A former broadcaster, Brad now speaks regularly to communication groups and university classes around the world.
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