Balancing your Online Persona and your Professional Career

January 12th, 2009

Last week, I was reading a post by Jason Crouch: Are YOU the Eddie Haskell of Real Estate? I am old enough to remember reruns of “Leave it to Beaver”, so I knew all about the suck-up insincere character from the show. Jason makes a good point about being yourself in this blog.

Then on Sunday, there was an article in the Austin American Statesman, Business section, Job Hunting? Beware of what recruiters see online” by Candice Choi of A.P. I was quite floored in regards to the statistics thay were provided:

One survey reported that 34% of the time, Social Networking sites are checked as part of the employment process.
And 19% said they plan to begin checking these same sites in the future.
Of those who check the Social Networking sites, 47% said they did so before contacting the applicant.

So, here we have a blog saying, “Be yourself”, followed by a newspaper article saying, “Becareful being yourself.” Hmmm. Interesting. Both make good points. So what do you do?

Personally, I signed up for Facebook for professional networking for The Stage Coach. I plan to figure out my account security on the site, to keep too many people from seeing too much about me, but will try to balance that with accessibility. And I fully intend to ask old friends to refrain from digging up pictures and posting them online – when they do, I will just ask them to remove the tag pointing to me.

Mainly, I plan to be myself. I will continue to jabber back and forth with friends from Chicago about the political craziness emanating from that town at this time. I will continue to keep up with my sister and her family, and keep her in the loop with ours. If some one feels that my book choices are offensive, or I crossed a line with my latest status update, it is probably in my best interests not to work with them. And I am OK with that, because that is who I am.

And I think that is the bottom line for these Social Networking sites: you have to accept responsibility for the choices you’ve made along with the consequences.