Notes on the December 9th STl Mgmt Networking group presentation on Managing Internet Presence:
earches are quickly coming to be as common as e-mail.
Employee blogs - they are out there - your employees writing about their daily lives - and sometimes letting their guard down and talking about you, or your projects, or your vendors.
From identity theft, to corporate transparency, to your career and reputation - the Branding of You as it is called - you need to manage your online presence.
What you are looking for:
Google searches - softball rosters, church programs, dating services -
all online. Now you have to think about interviews, layoffs,
promotions, lawsuits, court records - I can even look up your mortgage
information online - at least in St Louis. It's here - whether you
like it or not, whethery you want to be seen or not - so the question
is how to manage it.
Sourcers- Google and Microsoft - the next wave of recruiting in pipline sourcing. Sourcers are paid $10-$100 or more for your names with updated contact information. It's an old industry - and most of you wuld be surprised to find you are on ABI leads as managers with the approximate revenue of your departments - all for $.07 a lead.
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Blogs as resumes - this is a new category = primarily by developers. Candidates look for ways to increase their online presence - tehmost famous so far is a German computer science student who bought hiremegoogle.com as a domain name. The purpose is the same - to get in front of you and provide
Online Presence:
Conferences - you would be shocked to find out how many times your contact info is listed online for conferences, papers, even power point presentations. It's a key tool that recruiters use - from online papers you wrote in college to yahoo chat rooms to sometimes, even company award presentations.
Ways to get cited - write for blogs for search rankings. Look for people who update regularly, have blogged for at least a year, and who get lots of links to their site (50+). Pick one site and write for them occasionally - Mike on my site for example. Look for industry sites like Fastcompany, blogspotting, edelman's PR, Recruiting.com, and leave comments with your -email (not your work address). Be a part of the community where your expertise matters, and you will be called on. Also try being a big fish in a small pond.
Self-googling - start with your name. first name last name. use quotation marks. Then spread out, take off the quotes. Add titles you've had. Try name and your company. name and your actual city address, name and your zip code, name and your phone number
Blogging Yourself:
Corporate responsibility and pseudonymity - it is possible to write anonymously, but it takes a lot of effort, and you have to constantly watch what you say and do. It's hard to generate trust this way - but if you're using your company's brand, you're opening yourself up to their rules. pseudononymous is good - because it takes someone looking for you - it is cyberspace -and anyone who ever played on Usenet should know the danger of a flame war. Everyone knows what a flame war is, right? Having political views is also a problem - find someone with the polar opposite views, and they may call your boss, your ceo, or your home with their complaints.
The dangers of writing online - the problem is the use of computers for surfing is not the same as for business. Writing personal opinions online takes discipline - as many people have found accidentally. The word for getting fired - is called "dooced" from dooce.com.
Employers are nervous - letting you say anything is giving you freedom - so anything can be taken wrong. Take e-mail for example - hit the caps lock wrong and someone thinks you are shouting. Blogs, even comments - can last for your lifetime with the Internet Archive program.
People can lie - fake your name - pretend they are you - or sound vaguely like you. In fact, if you choose to write, as I do, you have to be careful not only to avoid putting up any information that deals with sensitive client information - you have to avoid speaking in hypotheticals that may resemble something you may one day hear. Trying to say that you are talking about something that happened in the past may be seen as you trying to covertly write about a client. So if i mention something about Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles, it might be mistaken as coded reference to Anheuser-Busch.
Self-Googling.
1. Start with your name in quotes: "Jim Durbin" James Durbin" James M Durbin"
2. Take the quotes out and repeat. James Durbin, Jim Durbin, James M Durbin jdurbin
3. Search all of your e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
4. Search you name and company names. (past and present) use slang and jargon. (Anheuser-Busch becomes both AB and MSG)
5. Type your name and your zip code. Your name and your home phone. Your name and your city (both St. Louis and your actual town)
Blogs.
www.recruiting.com Jim Durbin
www.stlrecruiting.com Jim Durbin
www.fastcompany.com
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
www.corante.com
www.instapundit.com
