In the Internet age, learning how to present oneself credibly online is just as important as a well-kept appearance in the offline world. How can you make sure that your application or home page comes across well as a virtual medium? The experts have a few handy tips.
Posting to Facebook, blogs, and message boards means creating a “virtual you” on the Internet. And for job applicants and freelancers, that digital identity can be very important. They need to project a certain gravitas online in the eyes of human resource officers or potential customers. The first impression is often decisive. Amateur-looking Internet pages or an abundance of private information don’t make a strong case for being taken seriously.
To give a convincing impression, users should always use their real name when appearing on the Internet, says Mike Schnoor from the video portal sevenload.com. Profiles, reviews and product evaluations only appear credible and serious to other users if the author doesn’t hide behind a pseudonym.
Those who do reveal their identity online, by contrast, benefit from an inherent pool of trust: An online evaluation of a cooking set by user “Samantha Sample, Chef” is more reliable than one from “Princess123,” explains Schnoor, who is also a member of the working group on social media at the German Association for the Digital Economy (BVDW) in Dusseldorf.
While human resource officers can be patient with email addresses from free online mail services like Gmail and Hotmail, there are no guarantees that those mails won’t end up in the spam folder. This happens not least because of the advertising lines appended at the bottom of the emails. Providers use those lines to point out new functions and services. Yet in many cases there’s no way to turn those unwanted signatures off. They only appear once you click send.
Anyone…