Personal Web Presence or Brand

Believe it or not you now have your own brand and web presence - if you are on any of the social networking sites or have contributed online. Its a hard concept to wrangle but there are some steps you should take right away.

1. Audit your online presence - what accounts do you actually have and how active are you in them? Are you on Facebook weekly? LinkedIn daily? Twitter? Do you have a blog? any videos on YouTube? any presentations on SlideShare?
2. Think about who is looking at you - if a potential employer "Googled you" what would the results look like? would they be representative of you? of the professional you, that is?

It goes back to - if you don't want everyone to possibly see something, don't share it online.

Employers are now looking at web presence to get a sense of the person - do they have friends? are they well adjusted? mature in their comments? intelligent in their comments? do they have a range of interests? is their overall behaviour acceptable? (e.g. not profanity or malicious comments).

You need to consider what you are really saying about yourself when you participate online. You also need to consider your audiences. Are your friends on Facebook really your friends? or are they colleagues, bosses, and potential bosses? There is an email going around about a young woman who complained about her work and her boss on her Facebook page forgetting that the boss she was complaining about was one of her "friends". OOps - she got fired.

It is always important to have goals, and even more critical to have goals for what your own online brand is. If you want to leverage the Internet for your career then you need to shape your presence to one that is professional. You never know who may read what you've written.