I received an email this week that began as follows:
Morning, Stewart, hope you are well. I hope you don’t mind me contacting you, but what you do with the media and especially the TNS Radio broadcasts are excellent and we at X FC are looking to push forward with our own media and potentially a radio broadcast of our own and I am hoping you wouldn’t mind advising us?
It was from an official at a football club. I don’t need to name the club, because that’s not where I’m going with this, but suffice to say that they play in the top flight in their country.
The point I am making is this though, you never know who is watching on. That’s why it’s so important to be careful about what you post in the public domain.
For most of us, that means our social media presence. I don’t think many actually grasp just how important that is.
What you tweet can open doors or it can shut them forever. Your Facebook posts can enhance your career or it can push potential employers away.
More than we will ever realise, people are observing. They don’t necessarily comment online but they notice.
Four years ago I had an email out of the blue (like the one above), from the Football Association of Ireland, asking if I would go to the HQ in Dublin to speak to the clubs about media. That’s the lead image.
Do you think they would have invited me if my personal social media presence was full of ranting, anger and hatred? Or even if it was just moaning and groaning all the time?
I had a great time, I loved it. They flew me from the UK, put me in a great hotel and I had a wonderful couple of days in Dublin.
There’s more here which is a very similar blog entry that I published a few months ago. You can never emphasise too much the value of what you post online.
You sometimes see people put the words ‘These thoughts are mine and not that of my employer’, or something similar in their bio.
Actually they are meaningless. Everything we write has association and comeback.