Optimize Yourself

By Dave Tan, VP, Content Solutions

This blog posting probably comes from the fact that I am currently working through updating my online profiles across a bevy of networks and alumni sites about my latest career change. Through the process, it got me thinking about how friends, acquaintances and long lost friends stay in touch, or at least try to find people in this virtual world.

I am certainly guilty just as many of you are, on keeping up with our favorite social/professional network sites to see the everyday status changes of the friends and former co-workers we are “following”, but I am sure that there are many of you who still hit the good ol’ search engines to find friends. I did that a while back when I was trying to reconnect with a long-lost friend, and the specialized social networks weren’t helping me.

That got me to thinking – what if someone was looking for me? We all have googled/yahooed ourselves in the past, but I had not done it recently. Much like a previous posting from Dave McAnally regarding online reputation management for companies, we all should be monitoring our own online reputations.

Lo and behold, simple name searches can bring up a lot of people (there sure are a lot of Dave Tan’s in the world, especially in Southeast Asia.). Much like an intrepid wsj.com reporter detailed out last week, it can be very hard work to get your approved online persona ranking in the web, and you may never truly be successful and crack the first page.

However, in this especially crucial time of career promotions, layoffs, job searches, and job changes, I am sure there are many of you who have not taken the initiative to look at your online profiles, and or online personas. Ultimately this is all about making sure that you are doing everything you can to present the correct online persona so that friends, companies, headhunters, and other enquiring citizens have the ability to find the right you.

For those a little behind, start small, and make sure you publicize your public linkedin.com URL. As well, seeing that most of you on are facebook, make sure your public search listing is turned on. On your alumni networking sites, add your linkedin.com URL to further promote your online persona. You can certainly go on from there and start projecting the right you to the world. So get going and search for yourself. See what comes up and start optimizing.