"What, if anything, are kids/young adults taught in grade school/high school and/or college re: online profiles and social media such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.? What if you found out that your college-age nephew, who is slated to take over the family business after college, looks like a total idiot online. How do we teach our upcoming "young professionals" that posting pics of themselves in nothing but a diaper at Halloween is just not appropriate? I'd be interested to hear from those in the education profession, too."
I posted this question on LinkedIn and to my peers on Help A Reporter Out, generating some great responses. Here was the winner IMO and excerpts from some of the others:
Michael Merrick Crooks
- The mere fact that you must say something to some people is an indication that your breath will be wasted. At which point you are better off saying nothing.
- Social media = Darwin's Theory of Natural Cyber Selection in which the dregs of the employment pool will drown themselves and float to the top making it easy to spot the one's worth hiring. They'll be the ones with their head above water.
- Basically, Social Media is the new-age gene pool test. But unlike the past where Darwin Awards winners would actually kill themselves ... nowadays they simply shoot themselves in the foot.
- I'm a French teacher in Belgium and I believe that the best way of teaching teenagers about dangers of the web is presenting them with stories about what people did live through after putting such material online. Just stories, not trying to convince them any other way. They have to think about it and you can't make people think.
Pieter Jansegers http://frenchteachers.ning.com - In my college experience, we were constantly taught that future employers, as well as current professors, would be looking at our online profiles. We were often reminded to remove anything we wouldn't want employers to see. This subject was discussed by many professors in class and employers at job fairs/information sessions, and the school sent several emails about it as well.
Christine Stoddard http://momcentral.com - “Don’t Let Facebook Kill Your Career!" “What is viewable to your sorority sisters, drinking buddies and family can often be seen by potential and current employers. This can cost you a dream job or that big promotion. With the job market so tight and information so widely available, more and more employers are either checking up on, or screening applicants using the Internet. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace give employers a snapshot into the kind of person who might be walking into their office. You won’t find this kind of information on a resume. The question becomes, ‘Do you want this person working for you?’ We strongly suggest that our applicants ‘clean’ up their profiles or make their postings private in order to present the best possible face for potential employers.”
Here are 3 sample tips:- The Early Bird. Start the process early. If you are just establishing your online identity use caution. Imagine if your grandmother logged on and viewed your profile. What you feel embarrassed? Ashamed? If so, ask yourself if you are posting the best representation of yourself.
- Management Track. Ok. It's too late to start over - your business is already out there! What can you do? First, clean up everything you can and then make anything personal "private".
- Picture Perfect. A picture paints a thousand words. If you are a party, watch out who is taking pictures and how they might make you look. Remember, you can watch what you post but other people can post too - and you don't get to edit. Keep the lampshade off your head and your clothes on!
- It hasn’t taken long for employers to realize that Facebook and MySpace are a great way to find out more about potential candidates beyond what’s included in the typical resume. Unfortunately for some job seekers, this may mean finding out how many beers they bonged in Acapulco.
That’s what Toni McLawhorn, director of career services at Roanoke College in Virginia, saw when she signed up for Facebook to see what the fuss was about. “Some were not bad at all, but other profiles were bizarre; just things that you would not want an employer to see,” she says. “Even though they might not be illegal, they might not give the best picture of you.”
Students don’t generally think about how their profiles might affect future career choices, say career services directors. The idea of employers and the public using Facebook as a hiring tool has blindsided many students.“Their own sense of their world and who they’re connecting with may not include those entities [employers],” says Dale Austin, director of career services at Michigan’s Hope College. “Then when they find out they had access to it they think, ‘Oh my God what’s happened!’”
“These sites give the illusion of privacy, but that is all that it is – an illusion,” says Gary Wipperman, CIO and director of information technology systems at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. “Information from these sites can be used by potential employers to make hiring decisions, by law enforcement in investigations and by others with less justifiable intentions.”
So, what should students do to make sure their Facebook profile doesn’t ruin their chances of getting hired? For starters, members should clean them up, and to keep private information private. “A good rule of thumb is to not put anything on there that you would not want to show your own grandmother,” says Austin.
Students can change their privacy settings in Facebook so that only their friends – rather than everyone – can see their profile. They should also exclude faculty, grads and alumni from seeing their profile until their job search is over.
Doug Hamilton, director of career counseling at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Ala., suggests using Facebook as a way to network with other students for employment leads and ideas. “One student placed a Career Services link on their profile,” he says. “We are not preaching to not use Facebook but to always put your best face forward.”
Laura Snyder, Dick Jones Communications - They want everything in real time, but what toll will this take? Because information is available immediately, young adults don’t always think ahead- including what they post on their online profiles.
They are used to collaborating online and generating personal information for strangers. The workplace is showing the strains of the tools as well: Can you make a good decision on a Blackberry screen? What are the positives and negatives of keeping an online profile updated with personal info- is there really privacy anymore? For students especially, there’s information overload and they practically have the internet in their pocket! Now, when kids get an assignment to do a paper on the Civil War, they spend hours online doing the research—almost too much information. They need to learn how to narrow things down. Like an uncensored online profile, they also have to learn to step back before they push send. Instead of the “drunken 3 am phone call when you get home”, teens today are sending messages instantly while still at the party!
If we ask a family today what is education? The responses are:- Mom-“What You Know”
- Dad-“Who You Know”
- Kids- “How to know where to go when you need to know” (Relying strongly on the internet)
• 96% of all students who have access to the Internet use social networking: chat, text messaging, blogging, visiting online communities
• 71% use social networking sites at least weekly
• 41% post comments on message boards every week
• 9% upload video of their own creation at least weekly
• 25% update their personal Web site or online profiles at least weekly
• 30% report having their own blogs
Staci Weiner, http://www.schwartz.com/
Liz Hamburg, COO, ApplyWise.com - I’m a 24 year old communications professional – I graduated college less than 2 years ago. Facebook first premiered when I was a junior (I already had a MySpace page at that point). Here are some of the warnings I received while in school: Many of my professors warned that recruiters and HR managers were looking at social networking profiles before bringing in potential interview candidates. We were warned to keep our photos professional and our profiles private (viewable only to our friends, or our networks).
Yet, as my internship coordinator pointed out, even private profiles weren’t 100% safe. As an example, let’s say I’m about to graduate Marist College – I have a Facebook profile, but it’s set to private. I apply for a job at Company X, which happens to have several low-level, recently graduated staffers who also graduated from Marist. Since we are on the same ‘network’ on Facebook (the Marist network), these staffers at Company X would still be able to see my private profile.
Rob Gedarovich, Account Executive, CreativePartners.com - I really appreciated your request today because I spend a large percentage of my FLIPPING BURGERS AND BEYOND blog posts on this subject of being very careful of a young person's image on the internet. Here's one such blog post.
In fact, the "rising sophomore" of the above blog post is someone who cares very much about his image, very much believes in what I've taught him (there's a post about his appreciation of what I taught him), and yet when I told him to take the idiotic picture off his Facebook profile, his response to me was, "But I thought Facebook was only for social networking." I then wrote the above post to make sure he got what I meant.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller, www.flippingburgersandbeyond.blogspot.com - I am a 25 year old marketing professional. I recently graduated from Penn State, with a degree in corporate communication, and many of my professors, as well as the career counselor, emphasized the importance of online profiles. Now that employers can Google an applicant, and see exactly how drunk you were last weekend via your MySpace profile, they wanted to be sure that we understood how important these online profiles have become in the workplace.
I frequently Google myself (even more so when I'm in the midst of a job search), just so I can be sure that I am in control of what comes up. If you Google me now, I believe that only my Jobster profile shows up. It notes my interests, my location, and my previous positions. It's almost like a resume back-up, confimring that I am really what I say I am.
I do have a Facebook profile, as well as a MySpace profile. The Facbook profile is mainly professional, with some "fun" things thrown in: a "flair" application, a garden, some old photos from high school. The MySpace profile is completely private, and is un-searchable. While it is appropriate for employers, some of my friends' profiles may not be, and I don't want that to influence someone's decision about ME.
Megan D. Rothman
Key findings from the Cox Tween Internet Safety Survey are:
• Ninety percent of tweens report having used the Internet by nine years-old.
• Tweens online presence doubles or even triples between the ages of eight to ten and eleven to twelve.
• Thirty-four percent of eleven and twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Tweens with social networking profiles post more personal information online.
• More than one in five tweens post information about themselves online, including pictures, the city they live in and how old they are. Twenty-seven percent of tweens ages eleven to twelve admit to posting a fake age online
• Twenty-eight percent of tweens have been contacted over the Internet by someone they don’t know.
• The percentage of tweens that tell parents “a lot” or “everything” they do online drops rapidly with age. Only sixty-nine percent of eleven to twelve year-olds tell Mom and Dad a lot/everything versus eighty-six percent of eight year-olds to ten year-olds.
• Of tweens who have been contacted online by someone they don't know (twenty-eight percent), eighteen percent keep the messages to themselves, and eleven percent have chatted with the unknown person.
Todd DeFeo, Account Executive, Weber Shandwick Worldwide
http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2008/07/everything-you.html
http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2008/06/can-b2b-marketi.html
Lewis Green, Chief Communications Officer and Founder, L&G Business Solutions
Miles Abernathy, http://399Retouch.com
Louise Maine, http://hurricanemaine.blogspot.com
Wendy Carver-Herbert, President, Carver-Communications, Inc.
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