Getting Naked to Get Ahead?
CNET’s Caroline McCarthy welcomes the naked generation:
It’s no longer noteworthy to point out that there are hordes of Web users who are putting their lives online, from revealing “personality surveys” posted in pink Comic Sans MS on glittery MySpace profiles, to Flickr play-by-plays of the wildest Pi Beta Phi rush week since the invention of the digital camera. I’m not talking about them. The Naked Generation is something different: its figureheads are smart, business-savvy young adults, typically in emerging creative fields, who see the embarrassing antics of “MySpace kids” and their emotional outpourings, and see a window of opportunity. They’re smart, and they know it, so they think they can use online exhibition as an advantage rather than an embarrassment.
Maybe you could get ahead in your career by opening up your life online… or maybe one day you’ll regret blogging and videocasting and sharing every little burp, especially if it compromises your ability to win a job or a client.
Where do you draw the line in deciding how naked to get online? What advice would you give to those wondering how to balance privacy and transparency, especially in looking for career success?
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This is an interesting topic. I recently had to go on an online mission, deleting all the old social network accounts, forum posts and anything else that popped up on Google that could potentially harm my business. The problem lies in the fact that the general public is now becoming web savvy at a young age, so those messages you left on a forum or that blog you posted about your crap day at school when you were 12 might come and bite you on the ass now you’re older.
Unfortunately with caching and web page archiving, hiding your past is becoming a lot harder. My advice is to think about what you’re posting, could it bite you if a client found it? If you’re joining a forum which is unrelated to your profession, then make sure your alias can’t be traced back to your full name or your business name through Google. Also I would recommend to keep your personal email address well away from anything business related to keep the chance of Google or other search engines linking the two.
I’m interested to read other stories and tips from everyone else.
This one is pretty straight forward in my book: Don’t write it unless you would say it in front of 100 strangers, your mom, your best friend and your spouse/partner.
Too many people believe that clever user names (like mine!) can hide their identities. All it takes is one person to crack your name and you have a whole history of comments and other goodies that will paint an interesting tale of your life.
Having worked in the PR game for more than 20 years, I’ve seen too many instances where a comment was taken out of context and has haunted it’s author for years.
I don’t post a complete play-by-play of everything, but in general I think having parts of my personal life online alongside my professional work has helped me be more recognizable and approachable. Molly Holzschlag just had a fascinating essay about this topic in O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/18/from-princess-to-goddess-female-success-in-it.html
It’s a hard problem, isn’t it? I generally agree with Molly’s suggestion to be authentic and be yourself online (thanks for the link, Audrey), but sometimes I’ve done that and later wished I didn’t make myself so vulnerable. For me, it’s not an issue of career possibilities as much as wanting to protect myself from criticism that can hurt.
As for the issue of compromising your career options, at this point I’m wondering if it’s worse to not have an online presence than to have one that shows you as a real person, flaws and all. I really liked danah boyd’s recent suggestion that the way to control your image online is to take regular action online so you can be the one who decides what shows up in the first page or two of Google results for your name.
Anyway, I’m also interested in hearing more from people… I don’t see any easy answers for what’s a pretty important question.
I am fairly open about who I am online. My customers see the same things my friends and family see, more or less. There are a few things I “hide” behind friends-only filters here and there (my ranting about Battlestar Galactica in one of my blogs or more colourful tales about my children or my experiences breastfeeding, for example) but even these are things that I am not really afraid to make public so much as don’t want to bombard the public with what a geek I am. But yeah, I think it’s important to be open and out there. And like Anne, I totally agree with danah’s philosophy on personal profile management.
Now I don’t go as far as some folks who publish their cell phone numbers alongside their blog. And I’ve had a few instances on Flickr where it seems some serial pedophiles were collecting pictures of my daughter where her underwear (or diaper at one point) was showing, and I’ve made those pictures friends-only. No more nekkid baby pics online as endearing as they might be. But I think delving into famly privacy/security is a whole other issue. Maybe.
You know, we always approach this from the point of view of the writer, the publisher, the person putting the information out there. We talk about what is appropriate to share, whether it can hurt you or help you, how you can manage your online persona.
But where is the discussion of the responsibility of the people reading things? I see HR people quoted as saying that party photos and Myspace entries lowered their opinion of candidates – but didn’t those same HR people ever do silly things at parties in their 20s? Didn’t their current employees, even their executives? Do these people really think that those of us in our 30s, 40s and older are that different? Of course we did silly things, drank too much etc., etc. The difference is that we didn’t leave evidence behind, but let’s not be hypocrites and act like what most of the younger generation is doing is so heinous. Let’s realize that people aren’t this perfect, slick, always professional face that we like to present to the world.
And, please, let’s not talk about being authentic and then penalize people who are precisely that.
I realized way back in 1996 that trying to maintain anonymity on the Web was going to be next to impossible, so I never tried. I’ve been online as me since day 1. Blogging out in the open is a very good natural filter on what does and doesn’t get posted. My current job can be traced back to a friendship that developed online in 2002 from a blog post about a baseball game. 5 years later, the only person that commented on that blog post called me to discuss coming to work for his company. Never would have happened without an overly geeky post about baseball text simulation games.
Take control of your web presence.
As part of my “Getting to One” exercise I am reducing all my cyberclutter. The first thing to do is make sure that a google search has your official webpresence at the top. Sidestep all the social networks and create your own profile on your own website.
Feel free to look at mikefitzgerald.me.uk. for an example
Don’t be too controlling about this – you need to show that you are human.Think strategically – your interests and career aspirations will change significantly through time!
Whilst a good rule is to not say anything you wouldn’t want everyone you know to know about you, someone should probably tell this to the current generation of angst-ridden teenagers posting things on myspace, facebook etc that could be embarrassing/incriminating to them later on in life when they’re grown-up and successful!
I’ve found several people via the internet, some in business, who don’t seem to realise what trails they leave and how easy they are to pick up.
Some of them had used their full name or personal phone numbers in forums and in their email addresses commenting on sites etc. that definitely wouldn’t help their work profile.
I’ve used my real (and full) name online for almost as long as I’ve been online (except for in the early AOL days where clever handles were cool). With a name spelled like mine, using handles would be a thin veil and I’d still be laughably easy to find, so I saw it sort of as a personal branding opportunity. Today I have four sites that explore four different aspects of my life – one for general, long range personal updates and general “about me stuff” (y’know, for Grandma), a wiki for recording tidbits of research, a professional site for my portfolio and all things related to work, and my blog – the content feeds of which actually power parts of my other sites as well.
I tend to be pretty vociferous online, free with my opinion and standing by it even when I’m wrong – and around the Internet is a pretty solid trace of some of my more soapboxy moments, but I’ve figured as long as I’m authentic and (mostly) civil then I won’t be ashamed of what I’ve written. I just stick to some simple rules — I don’t blog negatively about anyone I actually know, I almost never blog anything about my day job or my clients, and if I’m write about something related to my work – I use general terms and never directly describe an actual project’s specification.
Rick, you made an excellent point there. The reader also has the responsibility of applying a context to what they are reading/looking at.
A friend of mine has recently started University and on the first day was warned about broadcasting their behavior online as this could affect future jobs. This kind of phishing for personal information is becoming standard HR practice.
While people’s attitudes to privacy change, so should the context that HR departments and managers view the employees (or potential employees) they’re keeping tabs on.
It’s great to read the discussions about nakedness. Our company is called Naked for that very reason. I personally believe it’s a great thing to open up. But as Hak says, if you wouldn’t say it in front of an audience, you should consider who you want to say it to. Maybe this consideration is something that becomes more natural in maturity.
I’d be very interested to hear your views on our Open Messaging concept, designed to deal with the problem of being intimate and open online without the fear of reproach. There’s a PDF about it at http://www.nakedyak.com/getnaked/open-messaging.pdf
Openness, as well as carrying on our personal relationships offline, is something that is growing. The tools will grow as we do. It’s a shame that some people are losing out because they opened their doors. It really is. Hopefully it won’t carry on for much longer.
~biff~
I can understand getting naked to get ahead in the movies, but i think we’re talking about apples and oranges here. One is about full disclosure on the net and the other is well about getting naked. I would reckon that most people fall into the camp, of “who could possibly see me that I might know”?.
Guess what. It’s why second life has taken off. people go online to be something other than who they are, and that could extend to, getting naked to get ahead…
It is interesting watching all the things that my generation and others did in private be splashed across the media. While it’s true that ‘bad’ behavior can cause problems in the future, when that future is made up of the Naked Generation, will it even matter?
There is a shortage of qualified workers in many fields already and the population is headed for a slowdown as the boomers retire. Money will ultimately trump a video of college drinking.
I blog about my life and now that my first novel is being published next month, everyone will know my real name. Doesn’t bother me. I need to be visible in order to sell my book so that I can retire and write more. :)
I’ve always been pretty open online (like the previous commenters, I feel that it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible to be anonymous on the internet anyways) and have relied on the “would I say this in front of my mother/grandmother” rule when it comes to deciding what I’ll put online.
Posting in Blogs other relevant forums such as LinkedIn forums, etc. would help to spruce up a professional profile, and be seen in the right places. However, with Facebook opening up to Google, and People search engines coming into the picture (http://www.wildblueskies.com/2007/08/26/no-more-deperately-seeking-susan-people-search-made-easy/), its is debatable how much of control we ourselves have over the parts of our lives that we put online.
From a career standpoint, I would like to limit it to say, pertinent forums on specific social networking websites, my own blog, etc., but are we in control over all parts of our lives that go online?
I would prefer posting things which are knowledge oriented in forums and blogs,posting personal data is not secure based on my experience as a software engineer.. since cracking any content is really easy since human beings are prone to mistakes while posting they may fail to secure things with the eager to post.