Networking the West with Liz Ryan

What’s in Your Networking Wake?

By Liz Ryan, 5-19-06

I was talking with my friend Derek the other day - that's Derek Scruggs, who told me about New West in the first place and who was one of the first people to welcome me to Boulder when I arrived here in the summer of '01. Derek said, "Someone will soon start a business drowning out all the stuff that's searchable about people, online - whatever they want to hide. Someone will invent a way to blast extraneous info all over the web to neutralize whatever old list-serv posts and off-the-wall blog comments a person might have made in an unguarded moment, but doesn't necessarily want dogging him for the rest of his life." I thought that was a brilliant observation! We figured you could call the drown-out-the-bad-stuff company White Noise. Go ahead, you can steal the idea.

The longer you've been around on the networking scene, and the longer you've been online, and the more prolific a writer you've been or the more things that have been written about you, the more dirt a researcher can find on you without even hardly tryin.' My daughter in seventh grade has published articles on EzineArticles.com, and that's really all it takes.

As for me, I've got posts on Google Groups (the old Usenet groups) that go back to the mid-90s. I sometimes get Google News alerts on my name that include old posts where I listed phone numbers I don't even remember ever having - that's how old those suckers are. The web has a long memory. And it's not easily erasable.

Add to that the more recent boom in social networking sites like Facebook, Ryze, Friendster and MySpace. Now, Linkedin is a different animal - you can't really embarrass yourself on LinkedIn, too easily. But MySpace? Are you kidding me?

And there are absolutely sincere HR people who say (on HR list-servs) that they don't believe HR people and hiring managers should look at MySpace as they make hiring decisions, or even Google a candidate's name. It's unethical, they say. That information is private.

Yo, I am all about employee advocacy (I even got the boot from a newspaper workplace columnist gig one time because the editor said I had 'pro-employee bent'!) but I draw the line at the notion that what you post on MySpace is private. PRIVATE? The definition of "public" is "that which you choose to share with any blinkin' person who has internet access." How can it be private?

See, if I don't hire you because your MySpace profile says you get blitzed every night before work, it's not that I object to your alcohol intake. I could care less about that. It's the JUDGMENT. Where is your judgment? Looking at MySpace or googling someone prior to hiring them (or partnering with them, or contracting them, or funding their company or what have you) is simply an unobtrusive judgment test. Great pictures of you on Spring Break, but crappy judgment.

Why not Google yourself right now? Put your name in quotes so you won't have to slog through pages of stuff about certain people with your first name and different people with your last name. Then go to Technorati and do the same thing, and then do it on Feedster, and also Google Blog Search (second page of Google) just for the sake of thoroughness. Let us know what you find!

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