Monitoring Your Online Presence for Maximum Success

While the focus of job search is often a reviewed resume and cover letter. You should also be reviewing your online life regularly to ensure that you encounter no bumps along the job search road. Whether you review it or not, you can guarantee that the employers that you send your application materials to will be.

The first place to start is to GOOGLE YOURSELF. You should google the name on your resume as well as other common versions of your name (e.g., if you have a maiden name, you should also check it out). Search not only the websites on google, but also "images," "video," etc. You should see what is out there about you or someone who has the same name as you.

Here are the steps you can take if there is negative material about you on the web:

- Make sure that if you have a "twin" on the internet with the same first and last name, make sure that you are adding your middle initial, full name and that you put that name on everything including your Facebook, LinkedIn to separate you from your bad twin

- If you created the negative material, get rid of it immediately. It may take time for newly edited sites to come up on a search so change it or remove it as soon as possible.

-To push down negative material in a search, create new positive materials about yourself on the web including a LinkedIn.com site which typically ranks high on a google search, a new blog, website--newer material about yourself will outrank the older stuff.

Secondly, you should clean up your social networking sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. The best rule of thumb is that you should be able to show your site on an interview to an employer. If you can't, it needs to be cleaned up.

Areas for cleaning include:

-Unprofessional pictures including videos and pictures where you are tagged (i.e., you need to contact your friend to remove the tag or the picture)

-Groups that indicate personal or political affiliations (opens you up to potential discrimination before you even get an interview)

-Spelling, grammatical errors, type o's (as they can indicate sloppiness, writing skill, etc.)

-Be aware of posting too much (i.e., several times a day or every single day on LinkedIn) on groups or walls. It can look to an employer that you have nothing better to do and are not occupying yourself with more productive tasks such as volunteering, employment, school.

-Be conscious of your privacy settings--make an informed decision about who you let see what

-Inform your friends that you are in the midst of a job search so that think twice about what they include you in. If they are not conscious about it and do inappropriate things that involve you, feel free to ask them to not to continue and if they still continue, take stronger action (e.g., removing them as a friend).

It's very important to take charge of your online presence. Your online presence should represent as consistently as possible that image/person that you are saying you are in your cover letters, networking and interviews. If there is inconsistency in this image, a new employer, who does not know you, will most likely believe the negative image that they see on the internet before the positive one you purport to be.