Be Careful Little Fingers What You Post
As you can see from a previous post, I’m a big fan of Facebook. However, there are some cautions which folks really need to think about when posting anything on the internet. Here are a few with which I have had first hand encounters:
1. Social Networking is no longer just for my generation. My mom is on Facebook and MySpace. So are a large number of my co-workers. As a result, things that might be acceptable in my social spheres are no longer acceptable on Facebook. For example, for awhile I had listed that I was married to my college roommate. She and I were attached at the hip at school and it was a running joke among our friends that we were an old married couple. This was fine until I started being friends with individuals who are not members of my generation. For them, they did not understand the joke and began to make assumptions about me. That is the last assumption I want people to make
2. Prospective employers are on Facebook, too. There have been several times that I have been the point person for hiring a new employee for my company. For every person whose resume makes it to my potential interview category, I always do two things – I google them and I look them up on Facebook. I can’t even count the number of people who have been eliminated from my pool of candidates because of something I found from one of those two sources. They think they are only sharing the information with their friends, but they also shared the information with me, and, as a result, lost the opportunity to interview for the job.
When you post something on the internet, be very careful about it. It doesn’t just go away when you remove it. It is saved on a server somewhere waiting to come back and haunt you someday – so just do yourself a favor. If you wouldn’t want your mother or pastor or kindergarten teacher to see something, don’t post it online.
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