Other than making sure you know what your online identity says about you, and dealing with anything negative that you might find, what else can you do to help give the right impression? You can start by building yourself an online identity. This can be as simple or as complex as you chose to make it. You can start with simple things like creating an account with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a play on social media sites that is geared towards business professionals and making business contacts. Creating an account and keeping it updated there helps you to establish a professional identity and can link you with other professionals in your field. This is equally valuable whether you’re a lawyer, a tax attorney, or a retail associate.
While Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, it is easy to suffer from guilt by association. Check out Facebook’s privacy settings (which have come a long way after recent privacy woes) and lock your account down. Don’t let people who aren’t your friends have access to any information about you. It’s also a good idea to make sure that you don’t allow non-friends to see who you are friends with. While these things can make it more difficult for legitimate people to find you to add as a friend, it will help more discrete material from ending up where you’d rather that it didn’t. It’s as much about keeping your private and public lives separate as anything else.
A really great way to help put forth a solid online identity is to create a website whose sole purpose is to sell yourself. It can simply have links to things like your LinkedIn profile or other online accounts that don’t open up a window in to the aspects of your private life you’re not comfortable with strangers seeing. This site can also serve as your online resume, letting perspective employers get the glimpse of you that you want them to see. You can also use it to link to organizations or good causes that you’re involved with to help illustrate what kind of person you are. There are many free webhosts out there where you can keep a simple site up to date. If you really want to help promote yourself and show that you’re willing to go that extra mile to create a professional identity, think about purchasing your own domain name. Avoid extremely silly names, or ones that have obscure personal meanings. Your name or some variation on it can serve as a great launch pad for your online identity. While this route isn’t free, and does require slightly more than just rudimentary online skills, it isn’t terribly expensive and there are many great tools to aid your with your site creation. Many places offer templates you can use to create a polished looking site that can help you get noticed. In fact I recently looked to acquire alexschwartz.com or alexanderschartz.com but at the moment both are owned, though unused. Having your own domain also means you can create an e-mail account that you use solely for business purposes. Having your own account means you get to pick anything you’d like, and it will end with the @the-domain-you-registered. This is a great method to help you stand out when you’re acquiring about potential business opportunities. While have a gmail or hotmail account (with an appropriate name) can have a sense of professionalism, nothing says you are willing to work hard like creating your own identity through your own domain. Sometimes it’s the extra edge you need to stand out a bit from the rest of the crowd.
Just a Man with a Mash Paddle 