Social Networking

Between Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and many others, just about all of us will find ourselves on one of the available social networking sites. 
Whilst they can be innocent fun as well as a useful way to keep in touch and share photos with friends and family, they can be detrimental on a social and, more importantly, a professional level.  Many employers do actually go onto these websites to get an insight into the character of their employees or prospective employees.  It is worth checking your privacy settings to ensure that only those closest to you can view this information or, even better, don’t put anything on them that you wouldn’t want someone to see!  We all need to remember to be professional and just one photo from your fun Friday night could very easily come between you and that graduate job opportunity or permanent job offer.
Also be aware of groups that you associate yourselves with on these websites.  Many people join these groups quite innocently, only to view them at a later stage to find that someone who they don’t even know has made inappropriate remarks on them.  To an outsider, you could be instantly associated with those remarks as you are part of this group. Do make sure, for your own benefit, that you only associate yourselves with reputable groups.  
It is also worth taking the same professional approach with your email address.  Whilst it might be fun and amusing at the time to set up a comical email address, we do suggest setting one up using your name which can then be used for work purposes and on your CV.
Put yourself in the employers’ shoes; would you prefer to receive a job application from jane.blog@yahoo.com or from i.am.a.clown@yahoo.com ? 
I think we all know the answer to that one!