I actually just realized recently the importance myself of keeping track of all of the social media sites I have joined over the past few years. The Melanie Andersen Agency just purchased a new database called Maxhire which keeps track of all of the clients and candidates we work with. It has a great social media function, where as soon as we have any email address for a candidate, work or personal, it searches the internet across numerous social media sites for any accounts that this individual has created with these email addresses. As an initial test, I entered in my name and two of my most used email addresses, and I was amazed at some of the informaton that was dumped into my file. There were sites that I had forgotten ever joning (Friendster for example back in the day), outdated photos but more importantly, outdated employment information and contact details. I spent some time updating the accounts and deleting a lot of them. It was a good lesson for me and moving forward, I will be much more pcarefulabout making sure that any information that is out on the internet, and under my control, is correct.
A funny side note, a good friend of mine used to hate the fact that whenever anyone googled her name, the first photo that would appear of her was always a not so great photo of her taken at an event several years ago. Recently, she was so tired of seeing this bad photo each time, that she emailed the company that had held the event and asked them to remove it from their website. They happily did, and now there are only good photos of her available online. It’s all about controlling your image! When someone googles your name, what will they see?