We’ve all done it: egosurfing. Betting that the practice of Googling yourself is only so rewarding, a start-up called MyLife launched this week to carve out a niche in people-based search. The result of a merger between Reunion.com and Wink Technologies, myLife scours profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other public sources to pull up information on folks, filtering by name, email address, company, school, location or specialty. Various tools help users refine searches, suggest contacts and alert users when others are searching for them.
New to the social networking realm? Tturn to a new site, Jump Start Social Media, for tips on how to set up or utilize their profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn when looking for work. If it’s the latter, you’d be delighted to know that now, you can even automate linkedin profile visits. An on-site questionnaire helps the site’s experts contour a profile to fit your skills and background for a fee. Jump Start also provides plenty of tips to potential job seekers for free; some are no brainers, others bear repeating as newcomers often make some of these mistakes:
- Don’t include content on your profile that can be considered controversial. It’s best to leave political and religious preferences off the table;
- Don’t use social media as an advertising tool. Just as businesses have learned the hard way that their audiences don’t want to see marketing messages on their social networking sites, your personal network will not appreciate being spammed with information about your latest business products or services;
- Don’t use add-in apps unless you carefully review the terms of use for each one. There are few LinkedIn and even fewer Facebook applications that are appropriate or useful for business purposes, so it’s often best to avoid them entirely.