I enjoyed Jon Washburn's recent blog post about his online identity, detailing how he recently "clean up" his online presence by choosing to be consistent about using "Jon Washburn" instead of Jonathan Washburn, and sprucing up his mug shot which serves as his first impression to people viewing him on the web. I think curating your online identity is very important, and I should probably take more time to do this myself. This is especially important for people who work in the technology industry (like me), but it's important for everyone.
The critical inflection point in this is when you graduate high school (or at a minimum, post-college). That's when the prescient kids separate themselves from the less prescient ones by cleaning up their online identity -- establishing a linkedin profile, deleting their drunken pictures from Facebook, cleaning up their lists and privacy settings on Facebook, starting a blog, registering with about.me, and starting a twitter account. A good role model for all of is is Ajay Mehta (@ajaymehta), a freshman at NYU who focussed on social media marketing when he interned for two summers at Zillow while in high school. Check out Ajay's various online personas at linkedin, Facebook, about.me, and twitter - all unified via his personal blog. We could all learn a lot about how to position ourselves online and how to create a personal brand for ourselves by following Ajay's example.
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