Strutting Your Digital Stuff

Think of your public digital life as an online sport requiring an outstanding offense as well as a good defense.

A colleague just sent me the recent Pew Internet study on Reputation Management and Social Media, and it prompted me to share some ideas about being 'public' in a digital world. We know about being public in the real world, but we're still acting like aliens online.

Two conclusions of this study are important. First, when people check you out online, they give more credit to your social web profiles than your professional history. Does this mean your social life outranks your reputation? No - just that Facebook has more credibility than your resume. Social sites focus on existing relationships where you won't be successful if you aren't being the 'real you'. In contrast, a resume (or a profile on a dating site) is about new relationships where we pretend we're better than we are, or as we'd like to be.

So social networks oblige us to be more authentic. Is it creepy for strangers to spy on you and your friends? No again - these sites are "social" - they are semi-public. Before the internet people couldn't so conveniently check you out in a club or restaurant, for example. Now that they can, it's no surprise that they do.  

The second conclusion is that people say it's not fair to judge other people by their digital activities - including their social networking profiles, searches, blogs, etc. Like it's not fair to judge a book by its cover? Yet we do it anyway. In fact, human beings are highly adapted to do precisely this - we can't help it. Society, biology and experience conspire so well in our instant impressions that we're not even aware of them. The back story on this conclusion is what's profound: we clearly don't believe our own digital activities show us off well. We're self-conscious about not being appropriately decked out - digitally speaking - for public scrutiny.

Together these conclusions reveal a current limitation of the web as a public place. People can readily observe you being informal and 'social', but not being responsible and 'professional'. Your everyday trust-earning and reputation-building activities are still part of a private digital domain (email, etc), or are scattered across special interest sites (blogs, etc). Professional directories like LinkedIn are similar to dating sites (the information is overtly promotional) and are relatively static (nobody 'hangs out' there). People therefore feel unfairly represented ('exposed') when represented only by their social persona, not their business persona. The web is a world with a limited wardrobe. Gleanr is one service that's trying to change that.

The Pew study dwells almost exclusively on the cautious side of being public, such as the privacy and security of your personal information. Hey, isn't public life also about being outgoing and gregarious? Pew refers to the 12% of employed internet users who say they need to market themselves online as part of being successful, but everyone who goes online (or who goes out in public) is inevitably engaged in continuous, strategic social marketing.

That's what this blog is about. You're not a wallflower. Get a (digital) life! Networking with caution is great, but networking with purpose is better. The corporate world is abuzz with search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO), but the web is increasingly about people seeking fulfilment. It is a public place. Think personal presence optimization (PPO).