Most of us know that first impressions are a big deal.
It’s what makes important introductions so stressful — at the back of our minds, we have that terrifying awareness that a poppy seed stuck in the teeth could be costing us the opportunity of a lifetime.
But how many of you have stopped to think about your digital first impression?
Don’t kid yourselves: in this day and age, the first thing anyone’s going to do when you catch their interest is run a Google search on you.
Potential employers, fans who’ve seen your work, creepy crushes and stalker exes — they’ve all got the Internet.
And it’s worth your while to ask yourself just what they’re going to see if the search.
Why?
Because first impressions – no matter where they happen - disproportionally affect another persons long-term perception of you!
Interested – make sure to watch my complimentary video here: 4 Ways To Manage First Impressions Online
We won’t belabor the point – the science is so overwhelmingly in agreement that everyone should know it by now, but in brief: yes, first impressions matter!
When we say “first impression,” we’re talking about a deeply engrained mental bias that forms within the first ten seconds or less of meeting a person.
It’s very unusual for a person to change his or her overall impression of another person’s character over time. It can happen, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, we form an opinion and stick with it (in part because our brains hate to deal with being “wrong,” and so will consciously ignore evidence that might disprove our assumptions).
That’s true in person, and it’s true online too. If someone skimming over your public online presence for the first time finds you tedious, or offensive, or even just sloppy in your punctuation, that impression is going to stay with them.
And whether it feels like it or not, people are looking: in most surveys, a majority of managers, recruiters, and HR personnel (sometimes up to 90-95% of them, depending on your industry) say they use web searches and social media to evaluate potential hires and clients.
The reality in this day and age is that your CV or your personal webpage are maybe half of the data at best that people are going to use when deciding whether to work with you or not. The rest will come from your web presence.
What a Good Online Presence Looks Like
So what do you do to make a good first online impression?
Try to think of yourself as a brand, and market that brand accordingly. Separate your personality from your persona — they’re not the same thing!
You should be asking yourself the same questions a skilled marketer does:
- what do you have to offer? (your “product” — in this case, yourself!)
- who are you offering it to? (your “target market”)
- how are you going to reach them (your “channels”)
- how will you sustain interest/stay in touch?
It can be a little disconcerting to think of yourself this way at first. But remember, the things that you like and value about yourself as a person aren’t necessarily the things you’re selling as a product — or maybe they are! It all depends on who you are, what line of work you’re in, and what you’re looking for from other people and businesses.
There’s no wrong way to think about it except not at all.
Self as Product: How to Offer Yourself Online
Forget “the person is political.” Online, the person is profitable. Get into the mindset of thinking of yourself as a branded product.
What that means: avoiding things that “tarnish” the brand (make you look bad), while highlighting things that “promote” the brand (make you look good).
Here are a few basic first steps everyone should take to help improve his or her online first impressions:
1. Get your social life out of the public eye! The Facebook, Twitter, etc. channels that you use to communicate with longtime friends and family should be separate from the ones that you use to communicate with strangers on the internet. Create an account name like “Firstname Lastname Social” for your private life, and make sure the sharing settings are limited. Use your real name or business name for a larger, more publicly-shared profile where you’re watching what you say closely.
2. Tidy anything unprofessional off webpages associated with your real name or your business name. That means obvious offenders like pictures of you guzzling beer or mooning people, but it should also include things as basic as confrontational attitudes or rudely-stated preferences, even about mundane issues (“McDonald’s sucks, go to BK!” etc.).
3. Create a list of the “core values” you want people to associate with you. Then go through all your social media and web platforms and start removing content that doesn’t do a good job of representing those. Even if they’re not bad, things that aren’t presenting the “you” that you want to highlight are noise drowning out your signal.
You should end up with a simple, clear-cut image of yourself that doesn’t offend people. Highlight two to five things about yourself that are awesome, and cut as much other deadwood as you can. Make the impression as consistent as you can across all platforms.
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Self-Promotion: What to Include in an Online Profile
Self-Promotion: What to Include in an Online ProfileThere are a couple different ways to make yourself look like a valuable person once you’ve cleaned your online persona of clutter.
Start with the basics: any websites under your control should look clean and neat. They should also include a good, up-to-date photo of yourself, and a short (two minute or less) video if relevant.
After that, there are a couple of different things that show your value to anyone browsing your online content:
1. A clear definition of the services/products you offer. This should ideally be front and center. Keep it short, to the point, and up-to-date.
2. Authority endorsements. If a big name in your field likes your work, have that quote somewhere visible. If someone famous uses your product, make that fact known. People trust outside “experts,” even if it’s just a famous name with no real expertise, so don’t be shy with any associated with you.
3. Followers/traffic. This one can be harder to display (“visit” counters just look silly), but fortunately most social networks automatically show your number of followers. If you have a lot, that’s good — there’s a “social proof” effect. The more people already listen to you, the more new strangers will assume you have something worth listening to.
4. Community connections. If you’re seen talking to other people in online communities associated with your field, it’s assumed that you’re an accepted part of those communities. Since that makes you look both established and expert, that’s always a good thing — and as a practical side benefit, it keeps you in touch with potentially useful contacts, too.
Long story short: make your professional activities and successes as public as you’re making your personal ones private. Remember that the “you” you’re trying to promote is the one that provides a useful product or service, not the one that wins bowling trophies or makes a mean stir fry. (Unless, of course, you’re a professional bowler or chef, in which case you can disregard that last.)
Understanding Platforms
So now you know what to put online (and what not to put online, or at least what to hide behind a privacy wall). But where do you put it?
Start with the obvious approach: Google yourself. It’s what everyone else is going to do!
Most people aren’t likely to dig beyond the second or third page of results at the very most, so that’s your starting place.
Look at what pops up when you Google your name. Are there things you want to highlight? You’ll want to work on getting those as high in the rankings as possible. Are there old, obsolete, or unflattering profiles out there? You want those taken down, if you can.
You may not have full control over all of this (in fact, it’s very unlikely that you will). Without getting too technical, Google and other search engines are going to weight websites’ ranks as well as relevance, meaning that big-ticket sites like Facebook and LinkedIn will always show up above whatever personal projects you might have going on.
That’s okay, since most of those big-ticket sites allow you to customize your public information. Just make sure they’re up-to-date and presentable. The big concern with Google is to get current personal pages or projects as high as you can in the rankings, and to scrub or request take-downs for any old and obsolete sites (company websites that don’t regularly update their personnel pages are big offenders here).
One other thing to keep in mind with Google: whether you use the oft-maligned Google+ social network or not, just having a Google account (from Gmail, YouTube, or any of their many other properties) does mean you’ve got a publicly searchable profile out there. Take the time to find the settings on your Google profile and make sure they’re as detailed and presentable as your other social media accounts.
Can you find the picture of me with a shotgun and 9mm? The mugshot (not me)!
For most people, the Facebook page associated with their name is the first site returned by searches for that name.
That means you want to make your Facebook page neat, engaging, and totally free of objectionable material. If you’ve been using it for years and your history is full of inconsequential and potentially embarrassing personal stuff, bite the bullet and close the account down. Then restart from scratch, thinking hard about everything you upload to the new profile.
Technically Facebook only allows one account per user, but there are plenty of people out there running both a “personal” Facebook account and a professional one. You can also set your Facebook profile to full privacy, and create a Facebook page with more public access.
You can love LinkedIn or hate it (a lot of people do both), but it’s achieved enough market penetration that it’s pretty safely here to stay.
Take the hour or so and set up a detailed profile with up-to-date employment information, if you haven’t already. (If you have, go through and make sure it’s completely up-to-date, again. Never hurts.)
Not having a LinkedIn account at all isn’t great, but it’s not a deal-breaker. Having an old, outdated one with few contacts and an unimpressive skill set, however, will hurt much worse than not having one at all. So have one, and make it shine.
Twitter is where famous people go to embarrass themselves. Don’t do that.
Watch what you say on Twitter. Assume that there is no way to delete your tweets (there are ways to, of course, but there are also lots and lots of ways for them to get preserved without your knowing about it).
If you use Twitter for promotion or product linking, strive for a balance between promotional tweets, “social” ones that reply to other users, and “networking” tweets that mention other users. If all you’re ever Tweeting is links selling your stuff, no one but robots and competitors are going to follow you.
Other Social Media
There’s a new social media service every day, just about, and all of them would love to be the next big thing.
Whatever your preferred venue might be, follow the same basic rules we’ve outlined above:
1. Remove all the obvious negatives.
2. Highlight between two and five “core value” points to focus on.
3. Minimize content that doesn’t display those points.
If you can do that — and pick a good photo or two for your profiles — your online first impressions should always be positive ones!
So what do you think?
What more would you add?
Let me know in the comments!