http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28545913/
Like a silent career killer, your social media profile(s) could be snuffing your career prospects.
Hiring managers and recruiters increasingly turn to social media sites to find candidates and more importantly, to research them. It’s very important to think carefully about the material that you post in your profile because regardless of your “privacy” settings, there’s no way to ultimately control who will see it’s posted. Think of it as personal brand management or reputation management.
For example, you might have your profile marked private, but what would stop someone you are connected to from copying the information from your profile and postings, pasting it into an e-mail and mailing to someone (or maybe everyone) else?
Don’t believe me? Try this: open your LinkedIn or Facebook account, hold down the control (CTRL) key and press the “A” key, which will select everything on the page. Then hold down the “CTRL” key and press the “C” key which will copy the contents of the page to the clipboard. NOTE: there may be no visual indication that anything happened when you copy the page contents.
Then open Outlook, Word or some other application that allows complex editing. Position your cursor in the document and then hold down the “CTRL” key and press the “V” key, which will paste the contents into the document. Viola! Your “private” information is now public!
This simple, but well known technique could be used by someone to copy any or all of your “private” information, including photos and mail it anywhere they want, including the media!
Another potential issue is that of indexing by search engines which can lead to postings that can haunt you for years to come if not forever. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not search the web in real time, it would be impossible for a number of reasons. Instead, they copy the content of web pages into their database where it’s indexed by their unique algorithms for searching.
You might have had the experience where you do a search, get a hit, but when you click the link to get the material, the content has changed or been removed from the site. This is because the content was copied into the search engine database. Once it has been indexed, it can be very hard if not impossible to get it removed from their database.
I have had personal experience attempting to get content removed from Google, and it can be quite daunting. I strongly suggest that you work from the assumption that once it’s indexed, it’s there forever. This mindset may make you much more cautious about what you post online, which for your personal brand, is a very good thing!
Generally, I encourage people to work from the assumption you should not post anything that you would not want to show up in the newspaper or on the news, because it certainly could. Based on my own personal experience with e-mail (eons ago when it was new) and a very bad experience with a magazine printing my mail, I can assure you that it’s always best to be judicious and use caution. It’s a very funny story, ask me about it sometime, or maybe I’ll blog it as a word to the wise when time permits.
In the interim, I strongly encourage you to read the article linked above for more information on this topic.
Posted by davehatter 
