Don't Be a Jerk!

It is common wisdom that nobody wants to work with a jerk and social networking has made it easier to identify a jerk before you add one to your team.

While a lot of people have their Facebook pages set to private, things are a little different over at LinkedIn where all your activity is public and shared with your business network. I've been noticing that a lot of people on LinkedIn don’t take into account the persistence of their social contributions. I continue to be astonished at the number of people who forget that they are contributing/commenting under their real name, not an anonymous email account that doesn't tie back to their real identity.

I was watching the comments to an article posted by a LinkedIn “Thought Leader” the other day and my jaw dropped several times when people made flat out inappropriate comments under their business account. I suppose that these people are doing the rest of us a favor by clearly outing themselves as not ready for prime time, thus eliminating themselves as job competition. Yet it still seems like they should know better than to join a business network platform and proceed to be a jerk.

Nobody wants to work with a jerk. Nobody wants to hire a jerk. And, after watching what an election did to many people, a lot of people don’t want to be friends with a jerk, either.

One thing that’s really come around to me in the past couple of years is that the Web is a place of business for many of us. It takes very little for someone to tie email addresses together and match them to a real identity. Keeping this thought out in front has really changed the way I communicate, even when I think I’m doing so anonymously. Now, I approach everything as if it might come back to haunt me next week, next month, next year. I make I really want to own anything I put out there and I especially make sure that anything I do on LinkedIn dovetails with the personal brand that I've built there.

Social media is allowing us to see the real person behind the facades most of us erect in our day to day lives - we contribute spontaneously across our social networks and our internal editor goes silent more often. But it is critical that we keep that editor engaged when contributing socially, that old saying should guide appropriateness “the Internet is forever.” Once a comment, picture, or email hits the Internet, you can’t take it back. Control of it is lost to you forever.

That by itself should make anyone think twice before hitting the send/post button.