The importance of social networking sites to personal reputation management cannot be emphasized enough. These sites drive traffic and command top spots in search engine results. More importantly, they often have to do with you, yes you. This means they are immediately important to virtually everyone, in both good and bad ways. On the negative side, when someone google’s your name, they are quite likely to find your facebook wall, twitter feed, and Blogspot profile–all of which might contain information you don’t want prospective employers seeing. Similarly, businesses have to be careful to control their branding online.

Facebook provides a platform for businesses to build pages showcasing their products and services. LinkedIn has become a massive talent pond that can’t be ignored if an organisation is serious about hunting for talent. Twitter with its flagship bird is enabling people globally to exchange tweets about what is happening around them. YouTube continues to show videos of events happening around our globe. Organisations have an opportunity to harness such platforms to communicate with their targeted audience. The strategy is to have a mix of talent sourcing and branding platforms suitable for each identified talent market.

This is a tall order, of course, and much easier to say than to do. Still, this statement is as true as they come in regards to the power of social media.

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