Is Someone Watching You?

We con­nect with our friends through social net­work and it can never be that easy with these online social net­work sites now!  Social net­works like Face­book, Friend­ster, LinkedIn and Plaxo just to name a few, are some of the sites that you have accounts in.  Def­i­nitely, you must have AT LEAST one account in the men­tioned site.  Fur­ther­more, you have your per­sonal blogs that you can write about your thoughts, your day, the new cute col­league that you spoke to at the pantry.   All these social net­works and blogs allows you to write what­ever you like, post what­ever com­ments, pic­tures and videos you want.  They allow you to check out what your friends and col­leagues (that includes your bosses) are doing too.

Sure, you can share the fun and stu­pid­ity that you have com­mit­ted at last Sat­ur­day night’s party.  Sure you can talk about how insen­si­tive the human-resource depart­ment and your employer when it comes to employee wel­fare.  How­ever, all these can be read by some­one on the inter­net.  This some­one can be your employer or your human resource depart­ment.  All these infor­ma­tion is pub­lished online (unless you make them per­sonal).  You never now who is going to read these pro­files you have online.  You do not want your boss to find out that you are bitch­ing behind him, right?

That is for your cur­rent employer.  Your prospec­tive employ­ers and the recruit­ment agen­cies will also check on you with these pro­files.  They will make assess­ment of who you are based on your pro­file.  They want to find out the “other side” of you.  They want to know, are you what you say you are in your resume and interview.

These pro­files with the social net­work sites and blogs can be used as a double-edged sword.  On one hand, if you put great cre­den­tials about your­self such as your pro­fes­sional cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, work expe­ri­ences and achieve­ments, your prospec­tive employer will be more con­fi­dent of you.  All these give the employer a pos­i­tive impres­sion of you.  On the other hand, if you focus on the neg­a­tive aspects of work (talk­ing about dumb bosses, bore­dom, bitch­ing about col­leagues, etc.), you likely risk get­ting a neg­a­tive impres­sion of you.  This goes for pro­files that empha­sizes on too much par­ty­ing too!

Fur­ther­more, these pro­files are stored on the social net­work sites and blogs, which mean they may not belong to you even though they say your infor­ma­tion belongs to you.  They can “delete” your record by mark­ing it unread­able by the pub­lic.  They can make copies of record in some other data stor­age.  What does it all means?  Your infor­ma­tion is still avail­able online some­where and it is dif­fi­cult to remove them totally from the inter­net.

To sum up, your infor­ma­tion in social net­works and blogs is pub­lic and can be viewed by the whole wide world (WWW).  That means, your cur­rent employer, and future employer.  You will also have prob­lem remov­ing all these infor­ma­tion in future.  So before you write any­thing funny, make a dumb com­ment or post a not-so-intelligent par­ty­ing video, do think twice.  You do not want those things you wrote in becom­ing some­thing that is used against your career progression!

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