Your Online Legacy: The World is Watching

The days of content disappearing into cyberspace are over. Everything we do online is tracked, recorded, and often displayed somewhere. Each of us is tweeting, face-booking, and you-tubing a legacy that our great grandchildren will read. The question is, will we be proud of our online legacy?

I was recently at an internet marketing event listening to a great speaker. He was funny, had good content, and everybody listening loved him. He's an expert with twitter. He told a story of trying to get a celebrity to chat with him in twitter. He tried and tried, but couldn't get the guy to respond, so he "tweeted" to his followers about it. Right away, about 900 of his followers went to the celebrity and asked him why he wasn't responding to their twitter friend. He said that shortly after that the guy's manager called, asking him to stop his followers from bombarding the celebrity with tweets, and promised he would hear back from celebrity that day.

It was an entertaining story. As a matter of fact, the guy beside me sent out a tweet about it right then. Somebody "re-tweeted" it, and it fell in the hands of a researcher, who knows the twitter-verse and how to search every single post, as all of them are permanent blog entries online.

Here's the sad part: not a trace of communication between un-named speaker and celebrity, and not a single day when one person, let along 900, all contacted said celebrity asking him to contact un-named speaker. The whole story was a fabrication, easily researched and proved false within a few minutes.

The moral of the story is obvious. Our true personality, and more importantly our character, is coming through loud and clear for all the world to see. Let's make sure everything we publish, openly and privately, is something we don't mind our children and grandchildren seeing.