So you’ve got your Facebook page sorted, and you’re also on LinkedIn, as well as putting photos on Flickr, tweeting away on Twitter, and posting on your favourite tile forum, or whichever site you visit in your spare time. But did you know that according to MSNBC.com in August 2007 23% of American human resources’ recruiters were already checking social networks to see potential employees’ pages on social media? That figure is sure to have increased by now, and to have started to catch on, on this side of the Atlantic. But before you rush to delete your posts about throwing a sickie, bear in mind that there are now companies that offer to trawl through the deep web (the bit with all the murky stuff that you thought you’d deleted, swimming around in it), and find out anything and everything that you did or wrote on the web from the last few years. The search encompasses companies such as Amazon where they can view your wish lists, Spotify, your play lists and so on, so they can tell a lot about your habits as well. They search mainly by email address, so if you have a common name and create a hotmail address that you use only for job applications you may be at least partially immune.
There is a useful side to this as well as far as marketers are concerned because you can use the services of some of the firms to understand your customers more fully. By searching on your customer email list you can identify trends in areas of interest that will allow you to buy lists of similar customers, or carry out partner marketing with firms which provide a service that should be of interest to your own customers.
The companies argue that the information is all in the public domain and is therefore okay to use, but not everybody is so happy about the ethicality of its use. Anonymous marketing research into customer tastes is one thing, an over inquisitive boss prying into one’s private life or a jealous ex researching information on a specific individual is quite another and both are equally possible. So be very sure that you won’t regret it in years to come before you post those images of you on a stag night in Amsterdam or moan about your boss to a friend on Facebook. He may not be able to access your page but Spokeo can.
