You pride yourself on your professional appearance and demeanor. You strive to create and maintain a strong identity and reputation within your organization, with your clients and peers, and in your industry. But are you as diligent a custodian of your professional brand in cyberspace as you are in the physical world? If not, you probably need a digital makeover. This post provides guidance for critiquing, updating, and maintaining your digital presence to convey a positive professional identity in cyberspace throughout your career.

Step 1: Review and Critique

Conduct internet searches on yourself.

• What to do:
  • Conduct searches via major search engines like Google and Bing.
  • Use different combinations of your name and aspects of your professional identity (e.g., organizations you’ve worked for, positions you’ve held, industries you’ve worked in), as well as nicknames you may have used when engaging in digital activity (e.g., sharing or liking an article, commenting on a blog post). It’s also a good idea to include a spouse/partner’s name and to search on particular aspects of your personal life (e.g., political donations, church affiliations).
• What to look for:
  • Publicly available information and activity that you thought was private
  • References to and/or information about you shared by others
  • Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content
  • Personal activities, affiliations, and perspectives that may impact your professional life (rightly or wrongly)
  • Potential cases of mistaken identity

Evaluate your public profile on social media platforms.

• What to do:
  • Find and review your public profile on networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus to see how your profile appears to people to whom you’re not connected.
  • If you have a Twitter account, a blog, and/or an account/channel on public platforms like YouTube, SlideShare, Box.net, VisualCV , Quora, Klout (it’s a potentially long list!), access your public profile on that account. Don’t forget to look at accounts you don’t use anymore too!
• What to look for:
  • Content that is incomplete, out of date, and/or inaccurate
  • Typos and grammatical errors
  • Broken links
  • Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content,as well as those that could undermine your professional brand
  • Publicly-displayed information that you’d like to keep private

Get someone else to critique specific accounts/activity.

• Whom to ask: Identify someone you trust to give you an honest opinion, even if that opinion might make you a bit uncomfortable or hurt your feelings. Finding someone with whom you could do a quid pro quo exchange is not only mutually beneficial, but you’re likely to get a better sense of what you should/shouldn’t do based on your review of their accounts/activity in addition to their feedback on yours.
• What to do: Identify the platforms/activity you want them to concentrate on. For most people that would be LinkedIn and Facebook. People who are more digitally engaged may also want to include platforms like Google Plus, Twitter and blogs.
• What to look for: Basically they’re going to look for the same things you did in the previous step, only they can be more objective and are likely to spot things you miss. They can also better identify things that might be viewed as questionable by people who don’t know you.

Step 2: MakeOver

Delete risky content when/where you can.

• If it’s something you can control (e.g., a blog comment made via Disqus or using your Twitter account, or a photo you uploaded to Facebook), access the content and delete it.
• If it’s not something you can control (e.g., a Flickr photo in which you’re tagged, or a reference to you in a blog post), contact the person who created the content and ask them to either remove the content or unlink it from your identity.
• In some cases (e.g., reports on contributions to political candidates, newsletter articles) you won’t be able to delete the content or unlink it from your identity, but at least you’ll be aware of what is publicly available and can be prepared to discuss it if necessary.

Board up digital properties you no longer use.

• If you don’t plan to ever use a specific platform again, shut down your account. Check with the provider to see if your public data will still be available, or if it effectively disappears from cyberspace. If you can’t completely erase it, try to add information that redirects people to a new platform/account.
• If you think you may use the platform again, clean up your account and add some kind of a “we’ll be back” sign. You may also want to redirect folks to a new platform/account.

Lock the doors that need to be locked.

• If you don’t want everyone to see certain Facebook albums or wall posts, change the settings on those items. Do the same with activity you consider private on other platforms like blogs, Flickr, and YouTube.
• Similarly, you may want to cull through your friends, connections, and followers on various platforms and disconnect from people with whom you don’t want to be connected/engaged on that platform (e.g., unfriending work colleagues and/or people you don’t know very well).

Make sure your front porches are presentable. Update your public profiles to address all the problems you identified during your review.

Direct people to the “right” you, and make yourself easy to find. Designate a hub or home base for your digital identity (e.g., your LI profile or a website). Make sure that hub includes current contact information (i.e., email address and/or phone number) and links to all your relevant digital presences.

Step 3: Maintenance

Think before you tweet, comment, update, blog, etc. The best way to manage a strong positive digital reputation is to not put anything out there that you will later regret. And the best way to do that is to be mindful of what you share and where you share it, to choose words and images carefully, and to remember that even though most digital activity is fleeting, it’s also permanent.

Set up internet search alerts at regular intervals. Using an engine like Google, set up regular alerts using the same criteria you used in your initial review.  This way, you’ll be notified whenever some cyber activity is connected to your identity. Keep in mind, though, that these automatic searches aren’t perfect, so you should plan to supplement them with periodic manual searches.

Keep a current inventory of your digital properties. Create a list of all the places you have accounts and update it whenever you join a new platform. This list may not be necessary for the accounts you use all the time, but it is vital in helping you remember the accounts you set up but never return to or stop using. It’s amazing how many digital stakes you can put in the ground and then forget about…

Review and clean up your digital inventory periodically. At least once a year, determine whether you want to continue to maintain specific accounts, especially those you rarely/never use. Doing so will minimize the digital detritus you leave behind.

Review and update your public profiles. Even if your professional circumstances haven’t changed, it’s worthwhile to take a look at your public profiles at least once a year to make sure you continue to be satisfied with how you’re presenting yourself in cyberspace – and to take appropriate action when you’re not.

Choose your friends wisely. We all have different rules about whom we connect with, but it behooves us all to be discriminating about the company we keep in cyberspace. Develop a set of connection rules and adhere to them consistently.

Click here to view the original post on the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) website and access related resources.

Recently, the team at eCornell asked the Ethics Resource Center President, Pat Harned, for her insights on social media in the workplace. Dr. Harned has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our newest certificate Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice.

1. How does your organization, The Ethics Resource Center, use social media to interact with people online?

I think we’re like most organizations. Social networking is sort of the Wild Wild West and we, like everyone else, are trying to figure out how can we make use of social networks to reach the audiences that we want to try to reach with our message. So we have a Facebook page, and we make use of Twitter, LinkedIn, and other pages as they seem to be emerging and growing in popularity.

So far, what we’ve been doing is trying to post announcements about reports or new initiatives by our center. But I think for us the big challenge has been to try to figure out how we reach business leaders and other target audiences using social networks. It’s not always easy to figure out how to reach them.

2. You have recently completed a study of social media use in the workplace. Can you share any insights that you have learned from that study?

Our center recently did a survey of U.S. workers on their use of social networks from the workplace. We were interested in that topic because we wondered how much social networks are actually changing the way employees think about ethical conduct and how it changes their relationships to their supervisors. And we learned a couple of important things.

First, business leaders who think that having a policy that prohibits social networking are only confusing are lying to themselves about how much employees are actually online during the workday. The vast majority of employees are using social networks from the office whether or not their company actually prohibits it.

The second thing we learned is that the workplace is becoming a public square. Employees are willing to talk about both their supervisors and events in the news that involved their companies. More and more employees’ attitudes about what’s considered to be confidential is changing and social networks have a big role in that.

3. Younger employees are often social media-aware. Are older workers becoming active in this area?

I think it’s true that we all have the perception that social networking is something that has been a part of the millennial generation. What we just realized when we conducted a survey of employees across the country is that 73% of people who were using social networks from the workplace are over the age of thirty, and in fact, 71% of people who were using social networks from the workplace are in management positions. It’s not just a younger worker phenomenon anymore.

Patricia Harned is the 6th president of the Ethics Resource Center. As president, Dr. Harned oversees ERC’s research agenda and leads its survey and benchmarking work for clients. She also directs ERC’s outreach efforts to policymakers and federal enforcement agencies in Washington, DC and advises CEOs and directors on effective ways to build an ethical culture and promote integrity in business activities.

In my last post, I discussed how organizations use remote work to drive business and human capital objectives — and the pitfalls of not defining these objectives before implementing remote work policies. The takeaway was clear: If you don’t know why you’re using remote work, it’ll be difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether these practices are adding value or falling short.

But organizations can’t stop there. The next step, once you’ve clearly defined your objectives for remote work, is to determine which types of remote work arrangements are best suited for the type of work that needs to get done, and the different employees who do it. To make these decisions, you first have to understand the wide array of working arrangements we call “remote work.”

Remote work: What’s in a name?

In general, we use terms like ‘virtual work’, ‘telecommuting’, and ‘remote work’ interchangeably to refer to employees working outside the office in some form. But remote work, similar to online or e-learning, is hardly one thing; rather, it comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. That said, we tend to see organizations using four basic types of remote work arrangements:

The home office

The first type of arrangement is home-based work, in which employees either work full- or part-time from a home office. This is the most common form of remote work in today’s organizations; in these cases, employees are generally working from home less than full-time, or a few days per week.

Flexible work schedules and job-sharing

The second type of arrangement involves flexible work schedules. These include a compressed work week, sharing a single job and hours with another employee, as well as temporary teleworking, where an employee works from home or some other location one day per week or per month. Flexible work scheduling is also quite common in many organizations.

Mobile work

A somewhat less common form of remote work is mobile work, in which employees work from the road, or as we often say, “out of their cars.” Mobile employees tend to make up a small percentage of remote workers in most organizations, but are more common in certain functional areas, like sales.

Onsite client-based remote work

Finally, there is onsite, client-based remote work. Here, employees are working at client or customer locations as integral members of a project team, to provide more intimate customer service, or perhaps to foster partnerships.

Forget one-size-fits-all

As you embark on your journey to implement successful remote work policies, it’s important to assess the different types of remote work and which of these best fit your organization. The answers are usually not one-size-fits-all; this flexibility is precisely one reason remote work can drive employee engagement. Start by reviewing the different types of remote work and how each supports (or undermines) your business and human capital objectives. Then, use the following questions to assess remote work arrangements from an individual employee and job function/design perspective:

• Which types of remote work are best suited for different employee groups and levels in your organization?
• Which types of remote work are best suited for different job functions and tasks in your organization?
• Which types of remote work are best suited for different employee personality types?

For the uninitiated, these may seem like picky details. But successful HR leaders know that realizing the benefits of remote work requires due diligence. And in policy making, more specificity allows you to better tailor policies and practices, which in turn reduces the risk that some employees are burdened more than others. This perceived unfairness can quickly lead to disregard. Finally, having a clearer picture of which employees are using which remote work arrangements can help you make better resource decisions — about office space allocation, technology investments, or even parking lot size.