Keeping It Real …an Alternative Viewpoint
A couple of days ago, I posted up about why it is important to take care of your internet persona. The response it turns out was polarized with some people agreeing wholeheartedly but many others giving an alternative viewpoint in both the comments and on other sites. So today I thought I would present the flip side of the coin, or as I like to say in my pseudo-gangster speak … Keepin’ it real!
One of the great things about working for yourself is that you DON’T need to wear a suit/toe the corporate line/blend in and all the other things that made us become freelancers, so why would you want to give that up? Indeed for the most part you may not need to. What might hold you back from getting a job, may not hold you back from getting a freelance client.
A Marketing Question
To add another question in, if it does hold you back from getting a client, is that a client you want to work with? And that is the key question that defines how you go about your business online. You see really this question is a marketing question, how do you present yourself … to potential clients, to your friends, to the world?
In real life you have the choice to compartmentalise the different facets of yourself to suit different day-day interactions – you’ll act one way in front of one person and a different way for a different person. When you go online all of a sudden everyone is potentially part of every conversation and you will consciously or subsconsciously make a choice about how you wish to be perceived. In making this choice it is important to be aware that it may affect the entire range of your life, not just your personal one.
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Taking Care of Your Internet Persona
This post turned out to be quite controversial, so you may like to know that there is in fact a follow-up post to it as well that you can read here…
It’s easy to forget that Google works not just on finding big companies, blogs, shopping sites and all the other myriad search queries we hit daily, but that it can also be used to find all the down’n'dirty on people too – that MySpace page you forgot about, those crazy Flickr party shots or that ranting blog you write everyday. This is particularly true if, like me you spend most of your life online. Now if it’s just your mate looking you up that’s not really a problem, but what if it is one of your clients, your employer or heck your future father-in-law? In that case you had better make sure your internet persona is what it should be…
If you write anything on the net, you must be prepared for a prospective client or employer to read it (and for that matter your friends, partner and mother). Unfortunately, many activities can come off as unprofessional and may lose you work. So the first thing you should do is run what is known as a vanity search, hit Google.com (or whatever search engine you prefer) and type in anything you think people might use to find you. Some names get lost in the masses, but others will stick out like sore thumbs … like my name!
Controlling your Internet Persona
There are some easy ways to avoid making the wrong impression to a prospective client:
- Think before you swear profusely online.
- Consider what you are about to say when discussing politics or religion online.
- Consider how a personal blog might come off if it is written under your trading name or business site
- Think before you post a photo or video of yourself that you wouldn’t want your mother to see (and if you have a really liberal mother then insert the name of someone more conservative into that sentence!).
- Avoid inflammatory comments about sex, race or religion.
- And think before you join a controversial site under your name or your trading name.
Using pseudonyms or handles which you keep completely seperate from your working life can help for all your personal activities. That way you can keep work and life seperate. If your vanity search does yield some incriminating results, take measures to clean up after yourself, take things down, rename sites and contact websites to ask for a take down if you don’t have control yourself.
Remember, the internet is like a dinner party – make sure you think about who you’re speaking to before the words come out of your mouth.
