Marketing Career Zone

As a Marketing Professional you often spend time managing the brand and online reputation of your employer - but how much time and effort do you spend on managing your own?

The chances are that like many other professionals, you use online social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and any of the many others out there.  Even if you’re not actively seeking out your next role, you should be aware of the impact of a simple Google search can have on your credibility with clients, colleagues and yes, prospective employers.  If the headhunter called tomorrow, would your online profile stand up to close scrutiny?

So what can you do to minimise your chances of completely ruining your image and take care of your online personal brand?

Not many Marketers reaslise that only approximately 15-20% of job vacancies are ever advertised to the public - did you?

That means that right now over 80% of Marketing professionals are achieving a promotion or being placed in a new position through methods other than responding to adverts in their trade or professional magazines. But how? Well in addition to working with recruitment consultants and headhunters, many people find their new position through networking. Through meeting people online and offline, getting to know them and finding out when they are hiring.

However - and this is a big warning to you! - there are also a number of people who lose out on landing a job BECAUSE of the networking they have done. How?

Because they haven’t taken the necessary steps to protect their personal brand - in particular their online identity. It’s all too easy to ‘Google’ someone these days and if you use the Google Images feature, you can even find pictures of them within a couple of seconds. When you’ve finished reading this, try Googling yourself and see what comes up.

If you think that because you’re not looking for a Marketing job this doesn’t apply to you, consider that when organisations are in negotiations or are making decisions on whether to pitch to companies or indeed are looking for agencies, people Google the individuals at the company - not just the company itself!

Now then, that Google search on your own name: I’m willing to bet that if you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Bebo, your profile came up (it may have been hidden a few pages into the search results). Even if the person viewing your profile isn’t a member or isn’t signed in, they’ll probably have seen your profile picture. Anyone starting to sweat at this point?

Just taking Facebook as an example, your public profile page appears on Google and in many cases displays a selection of your friends. Hmm…even if your profile pic is perfectly presentable, what about the photos of your friends? Would they impress the Marketing Director who could have heard about you through a mutual contact or is reviewing at your CV right now?

Ok, so if you’ve now started to think about what you can do on a practical level to undo any damage to your reputation, here are some things you can do right now. The tips are about profiles on Facebook, but the principles apply to all social networking sites.

• Change your profile name so that it doesn’t include your full name as it appears on CVs - abbreviate your name or use a nickname. Your real friends will know who you are.
• If you do want prospective employers to find you or you’re using the site for professional networking, seriously think about having TWO profiles, one for friends and one for professional contacts.
• Check your privacy settings and put them up to the highest level. If your friends have a habit of tagging photos of you, go onto the page where the photo appears and click ‘Remove Tag’. Then go to your Privacy settings and alter the settings relating to who can view your pictures and videos. I recommend you set them at maximum privacy if you can bear to.
• Look very carefully at what comments and pictures other people have posted on your profile. If they aren’t saying the right things about you, delete them and make sure that you check regularly to see that those amusing but crude pictures and YouTube videos don’t keep coming back to haunt you!
• Now go to your Applications. If you’ve added applications that won’t impress people, remove them straight away. Employers are rarely interested to know which person from Friends you are most like.
• Now to your Groups. Even if you’ve got your privacy settings up to the max, the instant you join a Group, you’re appearing on the online map. The Groups you join say a lot about you and in many cases mean that your full profile is visible to any other members of that Group. If you in a moment of madness joined the ‘Why I hate my boss’ group or ‘interesting places I’ve had sex at work’, it’s probably time to leave that group.
• Now to your Friends list. Do you really have 347 friends who you see on a regular basis? You’re probably giving every one of them full access to your profle. Just because you’ve decided that photos of you will only be visible to your friends, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to show them to anyone else. Especially if you’ve accepted a Friends request from a colleague or ex-colleague. If you really don’t want certain people to see what’s in your profile, you can either adjust your Privacy settings to restrict what people can see or consider removing them from your friends list.
• If you communicate with your friends via the Wall or SuperWall features, remember that you are having a very public conversation. If you post something like “I was so drunk last night I can’t remember what I did” on a friend’s wall, you have absolutely NO control over who is going to see it. Use the private message boards or old-fashioned e-mail for personal communications.
• Finally, if all else fails, close your account and start again.

Now, before you rush off to update your profiles to make them squeaky clean, if employers or colleagues are going to check you out online, you still need to come across as you. If you’re a fun-loving person who only wants to work in companies that have a sense of humour and have some energy about them, that’s what they are going to be looking for on your profile. If you only include air-brushed professional studio photos as profile pics and have no applications at all on your profile, there’s a danger that you’ll come across as a bit dull or not their kind of person. So there’s a balance. Be yourself, but within reason.

© Copyright Hannah McNamara 2008

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Hannah McNamara has published an e-book called ‘10 Ways to Sabotage Your Own Career: Are you making these mistakes‘. You can claim your FREE copy of this e-book on www.hrmcoaching.com