By Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich, Special to CNN
March 9, 2011 7:19 a.m. EST | Filed under: Social Media
Winter is almost over, friends, and with spring comes cleaning. That should apply to your Facebook page, too.
Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book Stuff Hipsters Hate. When they're not trolling Brooklyn for new material, Ehrlich works as an associate editor at Mashable.com and Bartz is news editor at Psychology Today.
(CNN) -- Springtime, when young lovers' "ehh" turns to desperate fancy, when we clear the metaphorical (and literal) skeletons from our proverbial (and literal) closets, when the sun pulls the cobwebs from her blighted eyes and bestows upon us her tentative warmth.
Winter is almost over, friends, and with spring comes cleaning.
Sure, you're probably planning on taking some time out to execute mundane, soul-eviscerating tasks such as scooping deflated basketballs (and dreams) from the rain gutters, so why not add another to-do to the list?
We suggest giving your online world a good scrubbing. And we don't just mean deleting all those cookies you've collected from surfing RedTube.
Freshen up Facebook
Yes, it's obnoxious and wholly unfair, but -- as we've heard time and time again -- prospective employers, friends and lovers judge you based on your Facebook account.
If your status history is replete with F bombs, your albums bursting with snaps of your impressive beer-bonging skills and your wall crawling with comments detailing last night's exploits with that dude whose name you can't recall, well, you're likely not getting hired (or lucky).
Enter Socioclean, a service that combs through your entire Facebook history, grading you on just how dirty your social presence is. Warning: You will likely get an "F," as Socioclean is more sensitive to sin than the pastor in "Footloose." Seriously, the only way you might possibly score an "A" is if your profile were composed entirely of pictures of kittens -- and you refrained from labeling them with the other word for cat.
Still, the service provides a handy log of anything even remotely offensive your profile may contain, letting you go through, and, say, delete all mentions of your deep, abiding love for moonshine before applying for that job at the day care center.
Tweak Twitter
You know there's a reason you decided to follow PonyDancer87 on Twitter -- you just can't remember what it is, and now every time you log in you're privy to his extensive musings on the subject of Princess Celestia and her "gorgeous flowing mane." Yeah, it's time to pull that dude from the race -- as well as all other lame horses.
Tweeter Karma is a service that lets you see which of your followers are following you back, and unfollow those you can live without -- within the app. And, for those among us who follow scads of folks who never tweet, there's Untweeps, which lets you unfollow all those silent lurkers.
Prime your presence
Your web presence is your business card, so make like those dudes in "American Psycho" and invest in subtle, off-white coloring and a tasteful watermark.
"People need to constantly manage and monitor their reputation before someone else does it for them," says Dan Schawbel, personal branding expert and author of "Me 2.0."
"To control your social media presence, you should use various tools to keep track about what other people say about you: Google.com/Alerts (for news and blog mentions), TweetBeep.com (for tweets), BackType.com (for blog comments), and SocialMention.com, which searches your name across all social networks."
You can even up the ante by signing up for Brand Yourself, a site that lets you track and manage your online identity. The service was born because CEO Pete Kistler shares his name with a convicted felon, an issue that made Googling the entrepreneur a dicey affair.
So, you know, it's a useful tool -- unless you actually are a convicted felon.
Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment