CDG Interactive Blog

As you can see, we're making our  New Year's resolutions at CDG and sharing them. Mine is to focus my time and energy this year on the communities and social media sites that are meaningful to me instead of feeling like I have to be everywhere. So, I'll be saying goodbye to Friendster and probably MySpace since I spend so little time there anymore.

The second step is ensuring that the profiles in those communities are all up to date. The beginning of the year is a good time to review your profiles for completeness and correctness.

Here's a checklist I developed for my profiles:

• Is your employment status still correct? 
• Does your profile accurately reflect your goals about looking for employment, meeting people, getting back in touch, etc.?
• Did you do anything really great in the past year that people should know about?
• Are you associated with the correct groups or networks? Do they still reflect your priorities and goals for the upcoming year?
• Connect with any alumni groups both from schools and former employers - they are great networks.
• Do you have outstanding connection requests or LinkedIn recommendation requests that you should address?
• On Facebook, are there pictures you're tagged in that you need to remove your name from?
• Familiarize yourself with the privacy options of the site and consider limited profiles for certain people if that's appropriate.
• Review the site's Terms of Service (many change) to ensure they are still appropriate for your participation
• Do your interests still reflect what you want people to know about you?
• Do you need to update your relationship status? Or remove it completely?
• Are there new sites or groups that you should join instead of or in addition to where you're already participating? If lots of people are talking about a particular site (and there are some great niche sites for special interests such as Ravelry for knitting and crocheting) then you might find that much more appealing than a general interest site.
• Are your profiles consistent between sites (same level of education, etc.)?
• If you want people to recognize you from one site to another, do you use the same photo?

What else should be on the list?