Last time I was in with Sir Sonnie in the 18th run of Watcha Webtrap! in UPHR Las Pinas, we dealt upon employers’ use of social media as means to background check your credibility as applicants. According to the Harris Study(2009), 4.5 out of 10 employers admit that they indeed use social since it is more time-saving and discreet and not conducting a house call to any of your references. Also 3.5 of them would actually base their decision of hiring you depending on what you post online.
What is SocioClean?
I discovered this very nice tool called SocioClean. It is a 3rd party app designed to scan through your Facebook accounts old posts, comments, and photos with any content that are categorized as sexual, drug or alcohol -related, racial, aggressive and profane. This tool gives you a better understanding of your online reputation. All you need to do is to create a free SocioClean account, hook it up with your Facebook account and start a scan. It will take a couple of seconds depending on the size (number of post your have). Don’t be alarmed if the initial scan turns out to be a grade D (as in Dangerous). Since SocioClean is literally filtering out posts and comments using banned words, you have to scan through each tab on the top of your dashboard to check the context of the filtered posts.
You shall be provided with a detailed report on Wall Posts, Comments, Photos and Groups. Check each of the reports and see if the the filter words are really used in context of a harmful post.
Example: I have a filtered wall post with the word “dead” on it: “meeting 12am till 4am.. doubleshift.. braindead” -a status I made 18 months ago. To SocioClean it is a post about aggression -as it only filters literal dictionary meanings, so you have to go through each report, entry one by one. If the entry is not in any illegal or offensive context, then tick the check box found on the right to ignore the instance. Also go back to your Facebook account to delete all other filtered contents you admit being offensive. After you have made the clean-up, check the dashboard again. We are hoping for a result like this one:
It will take you days to throughly clean-up your profile to squeaky clean, depending on how often you post. Using this tool gives us a whole new perspective about our online reputation. We sometimes forget that what we post online is information we broadcast to the world -something should be kept private for your own professional credibility’s sake.