Raising and managing your online profiles

We have all heard about individuals being given the sack for things they have said on social networking sites and employers checking peoples public profiles before offering them jobs.  Suffice it to say, that chartering is similar.  You have to expect that organisations that you approach will want to check your credentials and the quickest way of doing this are your online profiles.  This way organisations can see the real you and not the CV.  With this in mind, if you are going to charter either independently or not, you are going to need to control your public profile. Here are some suggetions from my experience.

The first thing you can do of course is to ensure there are no inappropriate pictures or comments anywhere and I am sure you can ask friends and family not to tag you in things that are inappropriate.  The next thing would be to raise your public profile.

Raising your profile is the key to your image.  If you can be seen in the right places this will help develop the image of you that you want organisations to see.  For example, do you have a Twitter account?  Use this to your advantage.  Follow people and organisations relevant to the area that you are interested in and re tweet items from there that are of particular interest to you. This way, if anyone opens your profile and looks through your tweets they can see that you are passionate about certain subject areas.  This is the same for Facebook.  Like and follow pages that are relevant to your interests.  If you attend a workshop or seminar for your continued professional development then when you purchase a ticket or receive confirmation click the option (there usually is one) to post to Facebook or Twitter.  Let people know that you are active with your continued professional development and your chosen field.

Sites  such as Linkedin and Crimspace are also really good sources of PR.  Here you can join interest groups and get involved with discussions about topics which will highlight you in the site and in search engines.  I have found that particularly with Linkedin, people I have approached have often checked my profile to see what I am about. 

Of course there are other ways to raise your profile such as writing a blog on something that interests you (no comment) or good old fashioned networking at all those continued professional development events that you go to.

Now, this shouldn't sound like it takes the fun out of social networking.  Personally I feel that it is acceptable to be seen as human and not a one track minded chartering machine so I follow my personal interests as well.  If these are positive activities then why not show them.  Things like sport and music are great pastimes 'why hide them' is my philosophy.  It will be up to you to manage how you use them publicly so insulting an opposition player on Twitter or slating a musical act you don't like may not be the way forward necessarily but engaging with your pastimes in creative and positive ways allows you to enjoy social networking and show potential organisations the person behind the CV.

If you have any further suggestions please feel free to comment below

Until next time........