The other shoe dropping: Business Insider posted This Company Will Expose All Your Most Embarrassing Online Moments a few days ago. It’s about a service company that helps employers by doing a social-media online background check on a potential employee.
It was more than two years ago that I first saw a business plan for a social media cleaning service, meaning a company that would clean up all those dumb and embarrassing things college kids posted on Facebook, when they wake up to the job market and the implications. (Aside: that one was done by Kai Davis, who is now doing marketing for Palo Alto Software).
My favorite comment in this context:
What part of the word publishing don’t you understand?
I’m traveling as I write this, waiting for my car to get new brakes while on a driving trip to California. While I was driving this morning I heard a major radio station commercial for a social media cleaning service. Sorry, I forget its name, I’d like to mention it.
So the contest is on: the social media scraping service, telling your next employer every dumb comment and picture you posted online; vs. the social media cleaning service, helping you get all of that off of the web.
Shall we take bets? Who wins?
(Image: heal the bay/Flickr CC)
As a headhunter, I’m aware that Social Intelligence Corp provides a service like this to employers (see http://www.socialintelligencehr.com/home and http://blogs.forbes.com/nathanvardi/2010/09/28/creepy-start-up-or-sign-of-the-times/). My guess is that many larger companies use it. I’d bet on this idea to win, unless employment law changes. Employers have a lot at stake when they make a hire.
Steve, agreed, and people have a lot at stake when they treat this new kind of publishing as if it were something besides publishing.