May 28th, 2010 by 
If you have registered to any jobsites over the past 2 years, you have probably been receiving newsletters about how you should take care of your online presence.
Back in 2006, we were already told that 77% of recruiters and employers are “conducting online searches on candidates” (stats: ExecuNet). As if none of us ever Googled ourselves to find our homonyms or stalked our exes on MySpace (that was before God Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook: now, no need to stalk, he’s had already added you as a “friend”)… Tip: If you want to sound less creepy, you can say you’re Cyber-vetting your ex.
Somehow, added to the help from a shrink, a personal stylist, and a life coach, it became “good for you” to seek the help of a Social Media Guru to make sure your little web 2.0 world does not stain your immaculate online reputation.
Are people really unaware of the consequences of their online activity?
I am all for online anonymity: whatever some of my “friends” say, I am very unhappy with Facebook gently forcing me, as a user, to choose my real name as a screename – that’s probably why I decided to test the suicide 2.0 !
For a while, the net has been considered as an outlet, a way of releasing the pressure of real life. That’s probably what made it both threatening and so attractive at the same time. The first internet was, to me, the internet of Second life and other previous metaverse’s where the whole point was to live another life, be somebody else, and have an avatar (way long ago before the blue thing on the wide screens!).
Now, in the Real Time Web, everyone is out there, updating their status and tweeting around. Remember that 73% of Twitter’s users tweeted less than 10 times – It means that the 27% left is fairly noisy! As commented by Nick, my friend working at the music social networking site last.fm:
“Everyone is so desperate to carve out their presence on the internet: they make loads of controversial and ill-thought out remarks that they probably haven’t even thought through just to have an opinion for themselves.”
The web has definitively evolved since my childhood, and, I think, for the better. But it’s still a wide wild space and what alarms me is that I am not sure the youth has adapted to the new danger of the internet. For instance all this media buzz around Facebook rapes proves that 1) young ladies can’t see the devil in a random fellow social user 2) young (or not so young) lads are using the web for a very wrong reason.
That why I would highly recommend Social Media Gurus to think about converting themselves into Social Media Prevention school lecturers & child protection online agents…
If you really insist – Some “useful” Online presence tips there.
