Have you ever wished you could see yourself through the eyes of others? Well, now you can - on Facebook, anyway. Once you think you have your privacy settings the way you want them, you can check to see how your profile looks to one or each of your friends. Here's how:
Once you're logged into Facebook, click on "Account," in the top righthand corner, then "Privacy Settings," on the drop-down menu. Near the center-bottom of the page, click on "Customize Settings," and make any adjustments you want to make. When you're finished, click on "Preview My Profile."
At the top of the page, type in any of your friend's names, and you'll see your profile the way it looks from that person's account. You can do this with one friend, or try it with as many friends as you want to, if you have different settings for different friends. If you're unhappy with how much or how little you are sharing, simply go back to "customize settings," and make your adjustments, then try again.
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking.
We've been talking a lot about online security and privacy lately, and I figured this was a good time to reiterate what we all really should know, but sometimes forget: There is no such thing as "privacy" on the web. Just like your mother used to tell you, if you want to keep a secret, you'd better keep it yourself. The web is no different, and in fact, it gives gossips and newsmongers a larger bullhorn.
It seems like daily we hear stories of some now-famous person being humiliated by photos or videos of themselves during their younger, wilder days, being posted online - like this crazy stunt by our current Vice President (Aww, Joe, you're so crazy! Ha ha!). The ones we don't hear about in the national news, of course are the TRULY humiliating ones, like some job-seeker's or college applicant's sexting adventures showing up on MySpace or YouTube.
Then, of course, not all online embarrassment comes from drunken parties or ill-advised dating games. Some of us, who like to blog or be active in the social networks just have stuff online was relevant at the time, but several years later makes us appear hot-tempered, silly, or like really, really, bad spellers. Sometimes this stuff can be deleted, and sometimes it cannot. The problem is that even if we have access to the site this stuff is posted on, and can deleted it (or can convince the site owner to delete it), the search engines often store it in a "cache" for an indefinite period of time (unless, of course, you delete your stuff in error, and need the stuff in the cache, in which case the cache will be deleted within hours - Murphy's Law, don't ya know).
If this has happened to you, you can try getting it deleted using instructions like these, but you'll have to do it on every search engine individually, and good luck with that. You're better off to just start posting good, current material like crazy, and getting your online friends to link to it, to push your "good" stuff to the top of the search engine results pages, and hope no one does an in-depth search (to page two, three, or four) of those search results).
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking.
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Egosurfing (usually referred to as Googling yourself and sometimes called vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling, self-googling) is the practice of searching for one's own given name, surname, full name, pseudonym, or screen name on a popular search engine, to see what results appear. It has become increasingly popular with the rise of popular search engines, as well as free blogging and web-hosting services. It is sometimes combined with third-party tools when several people egosurf together, or with Pimp My Search when people create their own search engine, or accessed by SMS through services which people SMS their name to a number and an "egosearch" is performed on that name and returned (egotexting).
Similarly, an egosurfer is one who surfs the Internet for his or her own name, to see what, if any, articles appear about himself or herself.
The term was coined by Sean Carton in 1995 and first appeared in print as an entry in Gareth Branwyn's March 1995 Jagon Watch column in Wired.
The Daily Flip has additional information, including how to use Technorati for monitoring your brand online"
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. There is no place that this is more true than with online profile management. Years of developing an impressive personal resume or business reputation can be undone with one unfortunate photo, posted either by a competitor, or just by a friend who "thought it would be funny." So, how can you monitor what photos of you and your business are being used online?
Google Images is the best way I have found to quickly see photos tagged of me and by me. Be sure to turn the "safe search," off, as this will keep the most damaging photos (if there are any) from displaying. Also, be sure to use all variations of your name and business name, enclosed in quotes (to filter out unrelated searches containing online one word in your search).
Another site that is good for monitoring photos posted online is 123people.com. A lot of the information offered on this site is partial info that you have to pay to "see the rest of," but the photo section is still free, and will pull up photos from the social networks and other websites tagged with the searched name.
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.
BoardReader.com is a search engine for online discussion boards and forums. The results will often display good links that are not in the first several pages of a Google or Bing search. There is also an advanced search option.
Omgili.com is a, "...forum search engine lets you find communities, message boards, discussion threads about any topic. Omgili's advanced search features make it the best search engine for forums out there." There is also an automatic feed service, with free and paid options.
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.
This week, we're discussing digital profile management. As we discussed yesterday, hiring professionals to monitor your online reputation, can be costly. For some individuals and small businesses, using the free resources available online can be a reasonable alternative. Yesterday, we talked about using Google Alerts, which are primarily for news and niche websites and blogs. Because Google's is crawling more and more sites, now, you will get some hits from some of the social networks, like FriendFeed, and occasionally Twitter and Facebook fan pages, but these hits are not as reliable.
One way to start tracking what is being discussed about your and your blog or company on the social networks, is to use SocialOomph, which focuses primarily on Twitter, currently one of the most popular, and most real-time social networks. Actually SocialOomph does a lot of stuff, but my favorite feature is the @MentionsMonitor. To use, it login to SocialOomph, then look for the "Monitors," section:
Then, click on Manage My Tweet Keyword and Tracking Alerts. Check the "Email me a keyword alert digest," and choose your frequency. Then, in the "Keywords" box make a list of the terms you want to track. Each keyword should be on a new line. You can use regular text, @TwitterUserID's, or #hashtags. Here's an example of what a list might look like. Here's an example of what my list might look like:
You can log back in any time to change or update this list. Once your alerts are set up, you will automatically receive e-mail digests whenever any of your keywords are mentioned on Twitter.
Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is a trainer and tech writer in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. Her weakness is the mocha frappuccino.
