Guide to E-Professionalism for Law Students

Reprinted from NALP Bulletin, August 2010. 2010 National Association for Law Placement, Inc.® All rights reserved.

A Guide to E-Professionalism for Law Students:
Five Steps to Create and Maintain a Professional Online Persona
by Kristen Uhl Hulse


What Is Social Networking?
Social networking is about making connections online,whether they are personal, professional, or a combination of both. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the leading social networking websites, each offering a unique platform to help you share information with your personal and professional contacts.

• LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which allows users to make “connections” with professional contacts, has over 65 million professional users in over 200 countries.(See http://press.linkedin.com.)

• Facebook (www.facebook.com), designed to facilitate online connections between “friends,” is the most visited Internet website. (See Facebook Surpasses Google in Weekly Traffic,available at www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_14698296.)

• Twitter (www.twitter.com),a relative newcomer to social networking,is a micro-blog that allows users to communicate with “followers” in short 140-character messages (“tweets”).

Making connections online can yield favorable offline results, such as making new professional contacts or networking to find a new position. Conversely, it may also expose you to unintended risks and consequences. It is therefore important to manage the information you share online(your “online persona”)to help you achieve your professional goals. This concept is known as e-professionalism.

Any information that you share online may influence an employer’s view of you, even if the employer cannot legally consider the information in employment decisions. With that in mind, this advice is designed to assist you in promoting yourself as a professional online, offering five simple steps to help you create and maintain a professional online persona.

STEP ONE: Identify your online social networking goals and choose the social networking platform accordingly. Law students typically use social media to keep in touch with family and friends, reconnect with fellow alumni and former colleagues, make professional networking contacts, and even search for jobs. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter may all be used for those purposes, but some are better than others for maintaining a professional image. Choose a social media platform aligned with your current goals, mindful that your goals may change. Err on the side of professionalism because it can be difficult to clean up “digital dirt” in the future.

Once you have chosen an appropriate platform, manage the content you post online. Any information you post on a social networking site creates an electronic record that may be accessible for years. Because employers may be able to locate your online posts and photos in the future, take steps now to establish a professional online persona.

STEP TWO: Conduct due diligence on your online presence. Is there disconnect between your online persona and your offline persona? Find out by conducting “due diligence” on your online presence. Whether you are an active user of social media or you have chosen not to participate, chances are information about you is publicly available online. Before you can begin managing your online identity,you must first determine what your online persona is now. To do this, run a search of your name (including your maiden name if relevant) on www.google.com, www.bing.com, www.pipl.com and search.intelius.com.

Assume any information you retrieve is discoverable by an employer. Many legal employers have admitted to running searches of a candidate’s name, the results of which can influence the employment process. Remember: your online persona is part of the complete application package you submit to employers. What you post publicly online may be just as important as what you have printed on a formal résumé.

STEP THREE: Clean up your online presence to reflect a professional online persona. Start by thoroughly examining the information you have posted on social networking sites, including status updates, photographs, and even responses to friends’ comments. You do not have to be posting about illicit behavior to raise an employer’s eyebrows. For example,consider the following Facebook or Twitter status updates:

• LAWYER “is stuck on a conference call with a bunch of idiots. Calgon, take me away!”

• LAW STUDENT “just got a job offer! Selling my soul to the devil for financial stability!”

While social media make it easy to share information with friends, be careful when doing so, particularly on Facebook. Even if your personal pages are private, your friends’ pages may be publicly accessible, allowing personal information you post on friends’ pages to be discoverable. Similarly,Facebook friends have the opportunity to “tag” photos of you without your permission.When interacting with a friend online, ask yourself: Does your friend have privacy controls? Do you know your friends’ friends? Assume that if you are telling a friend something sensitive online, the whole world will know your secret.

Beyond interacting on a friend’s page, friends might post material on your page that you may not wish the public to see — for example, “Care to take a ‘sick day’ and join me at the beach on Friday?” or “What time did you get home last night? Can’t believe we drank all those tequila shots.” Think carefully about the image you convey in any status update, photograph, or blog posting. Review information you have posted online as if you are an easily offended employer and purge any questionable material.

There are additional ways to mitigate the risk that a potential employer will find personal information. First, become an expert in Facebook’s privacy settings. From your profile page,select “Settings” for an extensive list of settings to provide different access to identified groups. Note that Facebook changes its privacy settings often. Thus, “fan” the Facebook Privacy page for automatic alerts each time Facebook alters its privacy settings.

• If you have personal AND professional friends on Facebook, create “Friend Lists” to control the types of information visible to various parties.
• You may restrict who can view your Profile, Search, News Feed and Wall, and Applications, allowing you to block a list of work colleagues from seeing certain activities.
• Once your Friend Lists are operational, you can assign new friends to a list when accepting friend requests.

Set Facebook e-mail alerts to notify you of Wall postings and “tagged” pictures of you. You can then act quickly to remove questionable material. Unfortunately,it is impossible to have complete control over what your friends post on your online profile. However,by choosing your Facebook
“friends” wisely and by requesting that they not post questionable items, you will hopefully prevent professionalism pitfalls.

STEP FOUR: Actively manage your online persona to meet your social networking goals. Once you have performed “due diligence” on your online persona and cleaned up your existing online identity, the next step is to actively manage your online persona. Conduct a self-assessment by asking yourself what kind of student you are now and what kind of lawyer you want to be. Specifically, what do you want your public online profile to be?

Based on your goals from Step One, implement an online strategy to manage your online persona. Online reputation management is a key component of e-professionalism. While you may not be able to erase negative online personal information, you can take steps to minimize negative content. In other words, you can create positive content through strategic use of social networking.

LinkedIn
Begin by setting up a professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s high Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means it often appears at the top of search engine results. The higher on the screen positive search results appear, the lower the likelihood that the public will find negative information. A professional public profile on LinkedIn helps you establish and maintain a professional online persona. However, be sure your online information matches your offline résumé because employers may check the consistency and accuracy of both.

For tutorials on how to use LinkedIn professionally,visit the LinkedIn Learning Center at learn.linkedin.com and the LinkedIn Learning Center for Attorneys, learn.linkedin.com/attorneys/.

Facebook
As a social networking site designed to facilitate information sharing between friends, Facebook should be used exclusively for personal use to minimize instances of unprofessionalism. Lock down your Facebook privacy settings to ensure that only your personal contacts can view your Facebook activity. Like LinkedIn, Facebook has a high SEO, so failure to impose strict privacy settings runs the risk that your personal information will be publicly visible. For further guidance, see “Nine Best Practices for Attorneys Using Facebook,” www.insidefacebook.com/2009/12/22/9-best-pra
ctices-for-attorneys-using-facebook/.

Twitter
Although Twitter is designed to accommodate both personal and professional networking, you can use the site to emphasize your professional presence. Namely, you can use Twitter as a means of branding yourself as a professional in a particular area. Like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter has a high SEO and is a powerful tool for self-marketing. Twitter enables you to post tweets that are visible to the public (if tweets are unprotected) or your preapproved followers (if tweets are protected). Decide whether you want to use Twitter personally or professionally and do not mix the two (or set up separate personal and professional accounts).

If your goal in using Twitter is personal, “protect” your tweets so they will not appear in search engine results. However, if your goal is professional,leave your tweets public.

To get started, see “How to Use Twitter as a Lawyer,” blogforprofit.com/2008/09/11/how-to-use-twitter-as-a-lawyer-part-1/.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) allow you to get e-mail updates of the latest Google results based on your search criteria (for example, your name and/or e-mail address). Results often include social networks, online forum postings, and captions for Flickr photos. Alerts enable you to regularly monitor your online persona. Similarly,you can search for your name and apply for automatic updates on Twitter at search.twitter.com/.
For further suggestions regarding online reputation management,see “Google Reputation Management: Tips on How to Fix Your Reputation and Remove Negative Results,” www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/10/google-reputation-management.html.

STEP FIVE: Be accountable for your online persona. Even if you implement these best practices today, an employer may still find something questionable about you online and seek an explanation. This allows you to clarify or put the material in context. It is crucial that you react professionally and accept responsibility. If it is a picture of you partying at Mardi Gras, explain that this behavior is in your past and that it was poor judgment to post the picture online. If it is a comment that you posted on an inflammatory blog as a law student,explain why you felt so passionate at the time. Mistakes are made — be prepared to be accountable when this might happen.

When answering an employer’s questions about your online materials, do not be defensive, and try to handle the questions with composure. Remember that in many cases, the employer may be trying to see how you react under pressure and whether you have learned from your mistakes. Use the opportunity to demonstrate you now have the judgment and maturity necessary for the position. Finally, if you wish to engage in social media
from your office, be sure to check whether your employer has an official social media policy governing employees’ use of social media. Legal employers are increasingly implementing such policies,and while some are lenient, others are strict and may monitor your access to social media networks from the office and your online posts. Review your employer’s policy carefully and follow it.

You now have the tools to actively manage your online persona to put your best “e-footprint” forward. This will help mitigate the risk that you will be held accountable for past online indiscretions. Become a strategic user of social media by being cognizant of your purpose for using social media. Participate in social networking in a way that enhances your online identity, so that your online activity advances — rather than impedes — your offline professional goals.

Kristen Uhl Hulse, Esq., is Associate Director, Graduate Career and Professional Development, at Georgetown University Law Center.

Marina Sarmiento Feehan, Assistant Director, Office of Career Planning at the University of San Francisco School of Law, provided editorial assistance.