This week, Seth Godin ran an excellent post on personal branding in the age of Google. You can read it here.
It is ironic that when we were in elementary and middle school we were all threatened that any transgression, from running in the hallways to food fights to selling marked up dime bags of Kool Aid on the playground was going to go in your “permanent record”. It was a very effective threat because eleven-year-olds didn’t have a way to prove that the principal wasn’t keeping a manila folder of every mistake and misstep. Many parents even leveraged the same threat.
We were safe then. There was no manila folder following us around and most of us didn’t realize it until long after we figured out that Mom was the Easter Bunny and Dad was Santa Claus.
But today, there is a permanent record. Pending recent changes in their terms of service, Facebook is forever. MySpace is MyHistory. Google doesn’t forget. Everything is archived.
Don’t believe me? Check out this view of the Apple website.
How does your permanent record look? Are you ready for “just Google me” to be your business card?
