Twitter

Send Me A Birthday Smile

I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that while you may be kind enough to wish me a happy 48th birthday today, you’re unlikely to rush off to my Amazon Wish List to buy me everything my heart desires.

That’s why I’m going to make it easy on you and ask you to do a few things that will make my one day a year very special, while costing you ….. nothing. Well, maybe a little time but these ideas won’t put a dent in your wallet.

Like Me On Facebook

First of all, I’d love to connect with a lot more people on Facebook. I have a public Facebook page that makes that really easy. It’s what Facebook calls a ‘fan page’ but I’m not that much of an egotist that I want you to declare yourself as my ‘fan’. It’s simply just an easy way to share stuff on Facebook. Just head to my Facebook page and click ‘like’.

Share My Posts

Whenever you drop in to my blog, please, please, please feel free to use the little buttons at the bottom of each post to share my posts via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg or Reddit. Hey, you can even click the email button to send a copy to your friends. When you share my posts in any, or all, of these wats, more people visit my blog and I smile a lot. Really I do. If you use StumbleUpon I would especially love you to Stumble my posts. You’re more than welcome to spend a few minutes going back over my recent posts and sharing a few.

Comment On My Posts

Don’t just think it …. say it. I love it when people leave comments on my posts. Your comments make me smile big time.

Thank You

So there you are. If you’d like to, and only if you’d like to, you can make me extra happy by folowing a few of the ideas above. Of course I won’t complain if you’d simply prefer to buy me everything on my Amazon Wish List but we both know that’s never going to happen.

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Are you exposing yourself online?

May 7th, 2010

by Rodney Olsen.

3 comments

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?

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Too Much Information?

Jan 8th, 2010

by Rodney Olsen.

6 comments

Social networking has helped us to instantly connect to people around the world. We can share all kinds of things about our lives and update people on the other side of the planet with what we’re doing every second of the day. But how much information is too much information?

I blog, I use Facebook, Twitter and various other online applications but I still manage to keep huge amounts of information about my life private. I’m not trying to be secretive or to hide anything, it’s simply that I choose to choose what I reveal about myself and those close to me.

I don’t mind telling you that I’m trying to lose weight. I did pretty well last year, slipped up a little over the festive season, and am now back on track to start reducing the numbers on the scales again. What are those numbers? Sorry, that’s my business.

Of course if you want the world to know your exact weight every time you step on the scales you could always get a set of Withings Wifi Body Scales. I love many of the features of these scales. Just step on and they automatically record your weight, fat mass and BMI, then transmit the information to your chosen weight management application online. Brilliant. As someone who records their weight alonng with cycling statistics every day, this could be a huge boost, but I certainly wouldn’t be using the new Twitter feature.

You can select to tweet your weight every time you step on the scales or once a week, once a month or whatever you prefer. I’d prefer not to let everyone on Twitter know my weight at all but I can see that it’d be a useful feature for those seeking some external accountability.

So how much is too much? How do you draw the line on what you put online? Experts say that you shouldn’t put anything in an email or online that you wouldn’t be prepared to have splashed across the front page of newspapers around the world. Are people sharing too much? Have you ever wished that someone close to you had held back a little more? I’d be very interested in your response. Please leave me a comment or two.

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Being Downright Unfriendly

Nov 18th, 2009

by Rodney Olsen.

2 comments

Did you see that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named “unfriend” as its word of the year? Reuters is reporting that it was chosen from a list of finalists with a technical flavour.

Unfriend the term used when you delete someone as a friend on a social network like Facebook or Twitter.

I must admit to unfriending people from time to time. When you get started on something like Facebook or Twitter it’s easy to say yes to every friend request but after a while you realise that as in real life, you should choose your friends more carefully.

While I know that anything published online can end up being read by more people than you intend, I still choose to limit those who I invite into my world. I guess that this blog and my Twitter tweets are open to the world while the stuff I put on Facebook is a little more private. I’ve got almost 500 Facebook friends which is still a lot but a while back I did unfriend a bunch of people because I simply didn’t know them in any way.

What’s your “Facebook Policy”? Do you open up your Facebook to the world or are you very selective? have you had to unfriend people? Did they know about it and if so what was their reaction?