Dr. Richard Barnes, an admissions tutor at Cambridge University in England has confessed to joining Facebook so he could check out the profiles of students applying to Emmanuel College (part of Cambridge University). How far he took this ‘checking out’ isn’t mentioned in the article, neither is a count of how many applicants were daft enough to ‘friend’ him, so it’s unknown if any / many students were denied entrance to the University based on their wall posts, or TV show dislikes, thus forcing them to go to such lesser schools such as Reading, or Manchester or Hull (NB: the author attended University in Hull). Is this right? Should what you post online be used to judge you?

Yes!

It’s all a matter of personal reputation management. You should always anticipate that anything you put online may be found and used against you at some point. If you really feel the need to let your ‘friends’ know that you constantly drink heavily, and hate your current employer, don’t, especially if the place you’re posting it has your employment record listed! One company that I worked with had the biggest reputation management from its current employees - one ‘gentleman’ was a convicted violent sex offender (and that did rank for their name), and a group of younger employees had MySpace accounts where they talked about their extra-curricular activities, with one of them indicating that their job title was ’slave’, not something that their current employer was pleased with, nor something that would be likely to impress their next one (which was an issue they had fairly shortly after this came to light).

With more and more employers, college admissions tutors, prospective dates, etc. searching on your name, you have no-one to blame but yourself when they find what you’ve written, and placed in the public domain. Sure, Facebook is supposed to have content that’s only visible to your ‘friends’, but if you haven’t set your profile up correctly, there are elements that were recently opened up to the search engines, and who is to say that at some point in the future Facebook won’t open up their kimono a little bit more, and suddenly what you thought was private… isn’t… Then there’s the trust level that you have with your ‘friends’, there’s nothing to stop them from taking a screen shot of your profile and posting the data elsewhere.

So, while the internet is a great communication tool, you have to remember that there is a line about how much you can and should communicate, and who you trust to share that with.

Filed under: Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Monday, January 14th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.