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The sacking this week of comedian Catherine Deveny following a public outcry over her tasteless tweets during Australian television’s Logies award night has again highlighted the connection between our work life and our personal online life.

Deveny used to write a column for The Age newspaper but editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge was quoted as saying, “the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age.”

Passing Notes

Whether someone who was employed to be controversial should have been sacked or not while being controversial remains up for debate but her defence that Twitter is like passing notes in class seemed a little odd to me. It’s been a long time since I went to school but I seem to remember that the idea of passing notes was that you wanted information to reach a specific and very narrow audience. If you wanted to share something with the whole class there was ‘news time’. When you wanted to communicate privately you resorted to small, scribbled notes.

Twitter is not like passing notes in class, or even telling news in class. It’s broadcasting your thoughts to the entire world in 140 characters or less.

What does your online presence reveal about you?

Are you guarded about what you put online? Do you play close attention to what others are posting about you?

Your next job or your chances of promotion may be hanging on how much of yourself you’ve exposed online. 70 percent of United States hiring managers in a recent study say they have rejected prospective employees based on what they found. That means that what you consider to be a private matter between you and your Facebook friends could end your hopes of furthering your career.

We could argue all day over whether it’s fair or not but the reality is your online reputation can have a dramatic effect on your real life future. You may have been very careful with what you’ve put online via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, your blog or whatever else you use online, but have your friends tagged you in their photo of that crazy night on the town? That image of you drunk and half dressed will be hard for a recruiter to ignore when they’re deciding if you’re a good fit for the job you want.

What’s put online, stays online.

A lot of people are of the misguided opinion that they can delete online material that casts them in a bad light. The sad fact is that there’s no delete button online. You can remove material but it’s sure to be cached and available somewhere. Removing it is still a good idea because it will make it harder for a prospective employer to find but a determined recruiter will know where to go snooping.

Research commissioned by Microsoft in December last year found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters they surveyed checked online information about job applicants. The interesting thing is just how deep their research goes. Check out the table below for a better understanding of what your potential boss is looking for online.

Who else is finding out about you?

While the Microsoft survey deals specifically with employers and recruiters, they’re certainly not the only people who can Google your online reputation.

You might think that your parents would never check up on what you’re doing online, and that may or may not be true, but your parents have friends who might.

A potential boyfriend, girlfriend or even a future spouse may take a dim view of you proudly describing your past ‘conquests’ online.

There are plenty of other people who may be seeking information about you. Don’t just assume it won’t happen to you. Nothing online is private. Don’t publish, or allow to be published, anything about you that you wouldn’t want splashed across the front page of the newspaper.

The other thing to consider is that identity theft is an ever increasing crime. Many identity thieves use material gained online to steal thousands of dollars from unsuspecting social networkers. I may say more on that at some time but for now a reminder that you should never accept a friend request from someone you don’t know, no matter how cute their profile photo looks.

What would I find out about you if I searched? Would there be cause for embarrassment? Do you need to spend a few hours undertaking some searching and editing?