Are you exposing yourself online?

KeyboardThe 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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Giving it all away

aussie_money.jpgIt’s fairly widely known that Bill Gates has given away a large part of his $US40 billion ($AU48.7 billion) fortune in the fight against poverty and disease. Not content to miss the opportunity to do even more to make a difference, he’s once again encouraging other billionaires to follow his example and give away most of their money.

At a public debate in Oslo, the Microsoft founder has told the world’s richest people that they will find that they enjoy giving their wealth away.

I think all billionaires should give away the vast majority of their fortune.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t leave anything for their kids or to have a little bit for themselves but yes, I think they would enjoy it, I think their kids would be better off, and I think the world would be better off.

I’m a great believer that great wealth should go from the richest to the poorest. – Bill Gates

It’s easy for those of us without great wealth to look at Bill’s example and admire him for what he’s doing while at the same time thinking that the call to support worthwhile causes is only for those who can afford it.

I think the attitude is the same whether we have great wealth or not. We can have an attitude that says we’ve got to hang on to every cent we make or a generous attitude that looks for ways to help others with whatever we have. If we don’t develop a generous attitude when we have little we’re not likely to be generous if we ever find ourselves with wealth.

In the post Thinking about compromise by Seth Godin, he points out the fact that a lot of people who have more than enough are still trying to scrape together every dollar they can.

I know people with $50,000,000 in the bank who still don’t believe that they have enough, who still grind away at a job they don’t like trying to earn another penny.

Seth’s post is talking about attitudes to life and the way that rich and poor alike have to set their own values.

Are you waiting until you can afford it before you develop a generous attitude or are you already being generous in whatever ways you can already?

You and I may never be able to give away billions of dollars like Bill Gates has but we can still give away our time, our experience and our money to help those we can. I believe that we’ll find, just as Bill has found, that a generous attitude is far more fulfiling than the kind of attitude that only seeks to build our own empire.



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