Enhancing your online presence
The first step in managing your online presence is one of discovery: to do an assessment of your online presence by searching your name on two search engines and comparing the first 10 entries.
If you haven’t done this before, and are active on social media, a lot of information may come up in the search, some positive for your identity, and perhaps some that is not. This can be a very distressing experience, please know that there are ways to manage the information, and this guide includes some of these resources.
To search your name:
Go to one of the main search engines
In the search box,
Put your name in quotes: “Firstname Lastname” click search and see what comes up.
If the search returns many hits that are not you, you’ll want to start again, this time adding an identifying keyword that will set you apart, like: “Firstname Lastname” AND academic affiliation [an example, for me “Laura Clos” AND Harvard].
Look through the first 10 hits. Are they a positive reflection of you as a professional/scholar?
If you are active on social media and have a lot of profiles, you may want to look further down the list, to the end of the second page, to see if anything comes up that concerns you.
Make a screenshot of this search.
Print Screen’/‘Prt Scr’ button in Windows http://www.digitalcitizen.life/4-ways-take-screenshots-windows-8-81-using-built-tools, or for Macs http://www.imore.com/screenshot-mac#screen
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For comparison, repeat the search using another engine:
DuckDuckGo is especially useful for this task because it doesn’t track you or retain personal information so it is as close to a blank slate search engine as you can easily access.
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In the images to the right side of the page, you'll see the first few hits for my name. On the top is the Google search and on the bottom is the DuckDuckGo search. In my case they are essentially the same, and the search did not reveal any entries that were a problem
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For a useful perspective on online self-assessment and how to manage the various findings, go to ProfHacker, a long-standing tech blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education:
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For some general suggestions about how to manage your digital identity as an academic, an advice article, also from Chronicle of Higher Education,
How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic; If you don’t manage your online presence, you are allowing search engines to create it for you.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Curate-Your-Digital/151001
Learn how to manage your privacy settings (Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/manage-your-privacy
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Learn how to manage your settings (Google)
https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061
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