MySpace 101
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In a world of constant change, a few things are still certain: death, taxes, and the fact that anything you post on the Internet will stay up there forever.
The permanence of Internet content has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the Web is a fantastic place to beef up your credibility as a professional, writer, designer, volunteer, or whatever other image you’d like to develop. On the downside, anything unsavory can come back to bite you if you’re not careful about what you post and what’s posted about you.
If you’re thinking about posting a profile on a social networking site like MySpace (the most popular, but also the most commercial and spammed), make sure you use the site to your best career advantage. Even if you’re on there just for fun, be aware that potential employers, clients, journalists, event coordinators, and agents are on there too and are probably checking you out. Here, some guidelines to keep in mind before you hit the upload button.
Don’t rely on the private setting. You can set your profile to “private,” meaning that only users you approve can access it, but you never know what friend-of-a-friend might be peeking over the shoulder of someone in your network. Remember, it’s the World Wide Web. Is anything truly private? More and more employers these days are checking you out online—especially if you’re job hunting. According to a recent report by Viadeo, a business social network, one in five employers finds information on the Internet about job candidates, and 59 percent said what they find influences their hiring decisions.
That said, there’s no need to be a monk on your profile; just avoid nudity, profanity, excessive drinking, and illegal drugs in the photos and content you post.
Play up the positives. In the same way that employers can find out negative things about you on MySpace, they can also discover your many talents and accomplishments. The most professional profiles keep the personal info and photos to a minimum and focus on providing good content that’s updated frequently. Career-minded folks generally post a head shot, book cover, company logo, or “business casual” pic. If you’re an aspiring writer, you can create a blog on your profile or link to articles, stories, or reviews you’ve created that are posted elsewhere. (One great place to post articles is Gather.com, an online community where anyone can post content for others to read and review.) A Web service called Pimp-My-Profile.com can also—name notwithstanding—help you create a visually professional profile layout for all of your content and photos.
Promote your profile. What’s the use of having a great profile if no one reads it? To increase traffic, attach a link to your MySpace profile in your e-mail signature line and include it in any articles you write. You should also get in the habit of posting comments on other people’s MySpace pages. You’d be amazed how many well-known people read the comments on their blogs and communicate with frequent posters.
Protect your rep. It’s easy to control what you post about yourself, but it’s harder to keep tabs on what others may be saying about you. Google has an alerts feature (google.com/alerts) that can tell you every time your name appears on the Internet. Friends and casual contacts will usually agree to take down any offending content, but not always. If you’re seriously concerned, check out the fee-based Reputation Defender (reputationdefender.com), a service that will work on your behalf to remove any mistakes or inaccuracies that exist online.