109How to Have a Clean Online Image
posted by sherliez on November 3rd, 2010
As of now, you must have heard the news about Mai Mislang’s tactless tweets. Public officials like her should always be careful when posting opinions especially on the internet. Not long ago, Ms. Mislang, a speechwriter of President Aquino, made the mistake of tweeting that the wine “sucked” in Vietnam. It would be nothing if she was just a private citizen. The bad thing is she belonged to the President’s entourage on an official visit. She also made a couple more tweets after that, in effect, spoke less than flattering about ‘Nam.
As a protocol, her coworkers defended her, saying that she was a valuable member of the staff who works hard and is very trustworthy. Her good reputation all went down the drain just because of her few careless comments.
Complaining on Twitter or Facebook is part of life of a normal netizen these days. How far should you go? The web has always been the avenue of free speech, but where do we put on the brakes from being overly candid? Maybe the things below should help you check and maintain your image.
1. If you know that you are always opinionated online particularly in social networking sites, it is better to use an alias and make these profiles very private. If you only vent your complaint on limited number of people whom you trust, maybe you could feel at ease about it.
2. As you know, employers are also tuning to Facebook etc on your internet image, so it’s best that you check your image first before your future boss get to it. You can do it by searching your own name in Google. So if the search results produced a not-so-good image, you might as well try to edit it as much as you can.
3. If you don’t have anything good to say, keep it to yourself. This is a good mantra to follow in the internet world. Remember that nothing on the web is really private. So watch out for slanderous words against a coworker, workplace or even a client as this will always be archived somewhere on the web.
Remember, prevention is always better than cure.
Happy Tweeting!!!!
