At the beginning of this month, I posted an article about having your own brand on the Internet. Last night on MSNBC was an article posted about a guy that tweeted something about his pending new employer, that quite possibly, would have lost him the new job.

Why? Because he tweeted the following:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

Then, literally, moments later someone tweeted the following:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

He tried changing his profile to private so that it would not be included in the public timeline but the Internet is a funny place, with caching and all. Someone even created a website in honour of him, nicknamed CiscoFatty.

It seems people just don’t understand that if you say something on the Internet, and especially so on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that someone you may not want to find out, is bound to find out. But my boss isn’t on my friend’s list, I hear you say. Yes, that may be so but the theory behind six degrees of separation means that your boss is connected to you, whether you like it or not.

The MSNBC article includes some great “case-studies” of people that have gotten themselves into serious trouble by virtue of what they said online.

Thanks for the link, Baldricman.

Yup, thanks to the likes of Google and it’s almost endless terabyte indeces of information, you have a brand. And with the ever growing social-networking applications and websites, it’s even easier to build (or destroy) your brand.  The Wayback Machine’s Web Archive helps in this respect too.

You may have noticed, I mentioned “or destroy” your brand in the paragraph above. It’s because of the above that everything you do and say on the Internet (even sometimes not directly on the Internet, called Deep Web) is archived. More importantly is that it is searchable by just about anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. 

Take for example, the recent banter on my Money Wasted post, where you can quickly see in the comments how someone is ruining their reputation by what they do, say and how they say things on the Internet.

Another good example is the case mentioned by Seth on his blog, of someone looking for a housekeeper on Craigslist and googled the three prospective applicants and found them to be a binge-drinker, someone who admits quiting at the drop of a hat and someone convicted of shoplifting. 

So next time, before you say or do something online, think about what it’ll do to your brand.