Guarantee: The NSA Isn't The Only Outfit Spying On You

I picked up a thin volume that came in the mail the other day, lol...OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying by Matt Ivester. I'm long past being a student. In fact, I'm past being a professor as well. But, as someone who spends a lot of my time online, I figured there would be some good lessons in this book I could benefit from. I figured correctly. As Jennifer Aaker, author and Stanford professor said, "We are at a critical point in technological history-- where social media is beginning to have more impact on how we are perceived than our in-person interactions. lol…OMG! could not be more timely."

Ivester wants to make sure his readers don't ever ruin their lives with rookie mistakes like the Duke Sex List or the UCLA Asian racist rant, two legendary examples of college students who made and posted videos on YouTube that have come to define them in a way that they wish they could erase-- but can't. Ever. But there's a lot more to his book than embarrassment.

Today, 70% of recruiters admit to having rejected a candidate based on information that they have found online, and the actual number may be even higher. The three most common reasons for not hiring someone were "concerns about the candidate's lifestyle" [imagine, for example, that someone as narrow-minded and aggressively bigotted as Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was a recruitment officer], "inappropriate comments and text written by the candidate," and "unsuitable photos, videos and information." What inappropriate" means in this context is somewhat vague, but another survey found that "content about drinking or using drugs," "poor communications skills" and "discriminatory comments" were among recruiters' top concerns with regard to online content. Think about all the context that you have up online right now. Does any of that content fall into any of those categories? For many college students, it does.

The content that you put up online isn't likely to get you the job, but it very well may prevent it-- careless content creation can come back to bite you. Companies don't go online looking for the awards you forgot to tell them about. They are looking for red flags-- things that you are smart enough not to say in an interview, but might be willing to have said online. The New York Times reported about one student who listed "smokin' blunts" as an interest, and another who had posted public photos of herself passed out drunk. Needless to say, neither got the jobs he and she were seeking. One recruiter commented, "A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have? What are you allowing to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?"

...New services are also making it easier for companies to do this kind of online social research. Recently, a company named Social Intelligence has gotten quite a bit of press because the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) completed an investigation of it and confirmed that everything that it was doing was legal. In essence, employers hire Social Intelligence to perform background checks. If you want a job at a company that uses Social Intelligence, you have to agree to the social background check. Social Intelligence then goes into stalker mode, with skills that would put your super-smart, computer-science friends to shame. Social Intelligence employees scour the Internet-- blogs, public databases, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Craigslist, etc, to find out whatever they can about you.

I've never met my niece's son and don't know much about him. But I was working on updating my will and figured I should include him just because he's a relative. I friended him on Facebook and was appalled at what I found. He seemed like an asshole who likes to fight and waste his time. He doesn't seem to have any ambition or respect for education. I made the decision that the money I would have left him would be better used going to the charitable foundation I'm funding. Several years later he's a more mature teenager and wants to go to college and has no interest in the immature stuff the 12 and 13 year old I was following on Facebook was into. What an idiot I was! Fortunately, I didn't die before figuring it out!

This is really the other side of the coin, but last week one of the most widely-read reports on social media was Debra Donston-Miller's 10 Ways To Lose Twitter Followers in InformationWeek.

Twitter is a great way to maximize branding efforts, engage with existing customers and, with any luck, gain new customers. One basic metric for gauging your performance on Twitter is the number of followers your brand has. Numbers go up, good. Numbers go down, bad. What causes someone to cut bait? Here are 10 almost surefire ways to lose followers.

1. Post Too Often.

It's important to post regularly on social networks, but you don't want to post to the point of spamming your followers.

2. Post Too Little.

By the same token, if you hardly ever post at all, you are likely not to make the cut when users periodically edit the list of people/places/things they are following.

3. Be Explicitly Self-Serving.

Sure, the whole idea of marketing is to market. But people don't follow you to get fed a bunch of self-serving fluff about your company and its products. They want to be informed or entertained or rewarded in some way.

Make sure you are providing something of substance in your tweets-- early announcements of new products, links to coupons, ideas for using your products in new and innovative ways and so on.

4. Never Retweet, Favorite Or Follow.

Social media is in large part a game of tit for tat. If you never retweet posts or follow others, you are not keeping your part of the social contract.

5. Retweet Anything And Everything.

Although it is important to demonstrate appreciation for posts other than your own, you don't want your feed to become a long list of retweets (or retweets of retweets of …).

6. Automate Responses.

Posting for the sake of posting, especially using automated systems, gets old fast. Make sure your company is not relying solely on timed, automated responses.

7. Post Everything All At Once.

It's amazing how many organizations, especially publishers, dump all of their content onto social media sites at once. And it seems like it almost always happens at the end of the day. Although you don't want to overuse it, scheduled posting can be a very helpful tool in making sure that your content is spread out at times when people are most likely to appreciate it.

8. Shy Away From Topical Issues.

It's probably not a good idea for your company to publicly weigh in on every topic that's in the news. But people respect companies that publicly and genuinely recognize breaking news and issues that business should take a back seat to.

9. Shy Away From Mistakes.

Yes, when it comes to mistakes that your company makes, in whatever realm, it's important to respond carefully. However, it's also usually important to own mistakes publicly and to do so within a reasonable amount of time.

10. Don't Evolve.

Social platforms such as Twitter are changing all of the time, and so, too, must social business practices. You should be able to demonstrate a willingness-- or, better yet, an eagerness-- to relatively quickly incorporate new features that will add value to your customers. (And don't forget to Tweet about the changes.)