Saturday, August 09, 2008

Your 'e-footprint' and future employers

Most of the time I am more than content to secure my diverse news content here online; from our national and local newspapers through to local rags in distant lands that might feature friends I've made trotting the globe. However, being an newspaperman at heart I like to actually hold some newsprint and The Guardian is the media of choice on a Saturday.

At the forefront of web content I have yet to find something in the paper that is not online, and as you would expect the website offers even more than the printed version. So the second I read the 'Work' section this morning I knew I would be blogging.

Essentially it is a well written assessment of what impact your cyber size nines will have on your future when employers turn to Google before your referees. Now this is last season's headgear, but the article does raise the interesting prospect of no e-footprint as a sign the prospective employee does not contribute. This being the result of privacy settings being employed to save your blushes at interview.

Of course, sometime it is not even your facebook page that lets you down, it can be someone elses, or a news story or some other content that will prove a humiliating search return. We have associates who are adept at combating inappropriate content on Google and other search engines and assuming you cannot get the offending content removed, then get more interesting content about you posted with sufficient SEO to ensure the search engines return this data on page one and your exploits with a donkey in Malaga disappear into the lonely expanse of page two and beyond. Clever eh?

I've saved to last the most exciting part of the article - leading the field of experts commenting on this whole issue was none other than Internet Psychologist and the man who single-handedly inspired us to start blogging - Graham Jones. Incidentally his has been one of only a handful of RSS feeds that I have maintained in Outlook, whereas others come and go.

Read what Graham Jones said in The Guardian or visit the Internet Psychologist's blog.

1 comment:

Graham Jones said...

Thanks for the mention again Nigel. The Guardian article was an interesting experience - I'm finding increasingly that journalists are interviewing me via email. I also have three journalists on nationals (that I know of) who read my blog and have asked permission to quote me from my blog if there's something of value to one of their stories. Sometimes I find myself "quoted" without ever knowing I was involved - another reason for blogging...!