Who's Controlling your profile?
Have you ever been giving a presentation or talking to someone and all of a sudden you say something that makes you stop and think. I do it quite often actually and most of the time these turn into blog posts as is this one. My last session at EARCOS I was all fired up with a standing room only crowd and I was talking about Facebook and having a social presence when this came flying out of my mouth.
"If you don't take control of your social presence, someone else will!"
I had some shocked looks in the room, some wiggles in the chairs, and after the session ended had three people come up to me and ask "How do I register my own domain name?" (I use godaddy.com BTW)
As educators I think it is even more important. Like it or not, your students are out there and they're talking about you! You can either allow them to create your social presence for you or you can take control of it.
I've talked about the power of your social presence before and it is a scary thing if you do not have a gage on what's out there. You can't control what others say about you, but you can try to control what Google and Facebook searches find and rank.
I've also been hard on schools lately who are not controlling their social presence in Facebook. If you are a teacher in a high school go search for your school and see what you find. Then ask yourself:
1) Is this what we want incoming students to know?
2) How could our school harness the power here?
3) What do we want students; Past, Present, Future to find and know about.
(BTW schools...blocking it does not make it go away!)
One school that is getting this, I think anyway, is the International School of Kuala Lumpur. When you do a search for ISKL at Facebook the first group that comes up is their alumni group with over 1300 members. I used this as an example in my presentation and the Alumni overseer of the group was at the conference heard that I had use the site and approached me. The site was started by two past students. The alumni association approached them and asked if they could make this the official site. The school's alumni association now works with the two college students to run the site, keep it updated, and makes sure it correctly represents the school.
Sure, there are other ISKL student ran groups on facebook and I'm sure like most schools they're not all positive, but when a student comes to facebook and searches for ISKL...this is where they start. They start at the alumni page, they join it, know that they can get answers, makes connections, all before heading out to other "sub-groups."
As teachers and schools we need to realize that our customers are in this space, and that if we are not going to take control of our information there, someone else will do it for you. Do you want to leave a high school student in control of your profile? How about a group of say 100 students?
Scary? Yeah....then do something about it!
We can't continue to pretend these spaces don't matter. Especially if you are like most International teachers and you're out looking for a job every 3,5,7 years or so (what's the stat...14 jobs before they're 37?). Because some where, some time, somebody is going to Google you or do a Facebook search for you and what are they going to find? Who are you allowing to represent you?
I also like to show this poll started in 2006 and still active at USA Today.
The only thing this poll shows is that we do not want a law telling us we can or can not search for someone and use that information against them.
We are in a time of change, a time of figuring out how to use this information and when it is appropriate to do so. Until there becomes some "social norms" around this type of employee searching, you need to control what employers might find.
Do you feel like I'm yelling at you? Feel like I'm getting up in your face about this? If so this post is for you. Do something about it, get connected, get social and start talking control of your online presence! Because if you don't.....some day some one else will.
[tags]education, facebook, social presence[/tags]
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