Developing Your Online Reputation (Indentity Strategies)

When developing your online reputation you need to know what message you want to send about yourself. If you want to have a professional image then start by keeping it clean and help it stay that way. It's hard to get respect back once you have lost it so why not work hard to keep the respect you have. Information that other people post on the internet can damage your squeaky clean profile and keep employers from hiring you. Managing your online reputation is just like managing your reputation out in the world. It can be tarnished by the people you associate yourself with also, because information or picture that they post of you as well could be seen by others. Be cautious of the information that you put on the web, because someone could take it and use it against you.

If there is some damaging information or some information that you are not proud of delete it as soon as possible. There are ways that you can disassociate yourself from people on these personal peer sites so if need be do so. I also read that there are ways to contact the website owners to have information removed, you could report abusive information and people. The best thing to do when on these peer sharing sites is to keep it clean do post anything that you don't want everyone to know about. Never bad mouth previous employers or coworkers because it does not say much about the type of person you are. Your image is everything it is what gets you in the door for that interview.

I do have personal sites like Myspace, and Facebook that I use to communicate with family and friends often. I was surprised by some of the things we actually put on the websites after knowing that perspective employers look on these sites. Now I am more careful and I have a lot of pictures I need to remove, I have even made my profiles private, and I set privacy settings to my pictures. It is hard work branding yourself and setting a professional image but it is all worth it in the end.