Covering your tracks

Lately I've been receiving a lot of invitations to join social networking sites such as MySpace.com. This is not particularly exciting; it only takes an e-mail address and a couple of distant acquaintances with an internet connection. Online social networking, it appears, has definitely reached the masses.

Every now and then I click on one of these links, out of curiosity, and browse a bit across the site where it came from. And every time I'm surprised by the stuff that people tell about themselves and about other people on their personal pages. After all, once you've put something on internet, there's a good chance you won't be able to remove it anymore. Ever.

While I'm not normally someone to make a fuss about privacy issues, this is one of the aspects of internet that I find slightly disturbing. By now, it's already standard practice for many recruiters to look up an applicant's name on the internet prior to a job interview. The same phenomenon is making inroads in business and personal relationships: 'Is this vendor or potential boyfriend reliable? Let's check Google. Oh, it says here he used to collect stamps in his youth. He must be boring. I'll go with somebody else'.

Jesting aside, it remains a fact that you must be very careful with anything that you do on internet. No matter which site you're visiting, you should always ask yourself: 'Is this something I want to be confronted with for the rest of my life?' before you hit the 'Post' or 'Upload' button.

This is a particularly big challenge for kids and teens, who generally don't pay much attention to the consequences of their actions. Most people of my generation and older have the advantage that internet wasn't really mainstream when we were young, so the follies of our youth are still blessedly hidden in paper school diaries on dusty attics.

The current generation, however, will have to deal with the fact that anyone with a bit of Google skills can dig up all kinds of embarrassing facts and pictures about their lives - especially when they're cool (or stupid) enough to become popular on a site like YouTube.

At some point, this might become a PR challenge as well. In ten to twenty years, we could find ourselves doing PR for a corporate manager or politician who used to be known as D0p4d00d from That Video With The Toilet Brush. How are we going to handle that?

I must admit I don't know the answer to that yet, but in order to make our lives easier when that time comes, here are some tips for the current and future internet generations:

1. It starts with the parents. If you want your child to have a chance of becoming a successful businessperson or politician, don't give it a very rare or unique name. This makes it very easy to find everything about him/her, whereas a fairly common name almost guarantees anonymity when desired.

2. If you're not sure if you're involvement with a particular site will be appreciated by e.g. a future employer, use a nickname - preferably one that will not be easily remembered. Make sure you never mention your real name and your nickname, or different nicknames on the same site.

3. Like I said before, think before you post. Do not post anything on internet when you're angry, drunk or otherwise unable to think clearly. You will regret this sooner or later.

4. Even when you're using a nickname, mind your language. A nickname doesn't make you anonymous, only harder to track down. If you piss off the wrong people, they will find you. Besides, flaming make you look stupid, and it can even draw the attention of the authorities when you cross the line or use the wrong words.

5. If all this fails and something embarrassing leaks out to the net, there's only one thing you can do: swamp the internet with other stuff about yourself. For instance, build an interesting (but harmless) website and allow people to copy the content as long as it contains your name. If you do this right, there will be so many references to you that the nasty stuff will be difficult to discover.

Comments

[Phil]

Good point, particularly about younger web users, who may end up regretting posts made years earlier. Although I must admit, most of the web-savvy people I know already use pseudonyms on sites like Myspace and YouTube. It amazes me more when people adopt the same carefree approach to profile building on more work oriented networking sites like ecademy and Linked-in. Bearing in mind this is a shop window for people's careers, dodgy spelling, stupid remarks and pics of them in the bath as a five year old, don't really paint the right picture.

[Mark van der Wolf]

True enough, Phil. Although, maybe we're just being old-fashioned and will recruiting in the future actually like seeing pictures and stuff like that - as it's proof of web-savviness at an early age and creativity.

But I wholly agree on the dodgy spelling part.

[David Phillips]

I remember rehersing these arguments to PR practitioners in 1999.

Are they still asleep?

Do they yet know ..... and if that was not enought, Internet Agency will warp your online presence as well.

Future PR is such fun.