Recently, while on Facebook, two separate situations made me fully aware of just how much information there is about us. One teenage cousin posted an extremely explicit status update about a recent (ahem) “encounter” with a boyfriend. WAY too much information for me. And later, when I announced that I was going on vacation, a friend commented on my status and asked when I was going. I was reluctant to answer because anyone who viewed my status would see the dates that my house was going to stand empty… and ready for a thief. Not all of my 300 friends are people I would trust. (Yes, many of them are, of course, but not ALL of them).

Like Hansel and Gretel, everywhere we go we leave breadcrumbs about ourselves in the form of profiles, bios, information and data.

There’s the website and the blog that we all have. And we’re familiar with our profile page on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and other similar sites. There are other sites that can gather info on you and your business crawling the web for links. ZoomInfo.com and Jigsaw are that I’m most familiar with but we’ve all heard of Hoovers and InfoUSA and there are others.

Every article we publish online has a bio which is a breadcrumb. Every link we message we leave in a forum is a breadcrumb. Every tweet we post is a breadcrumb.

When we add all of these together, will people find you? And what will they think?

Our online identities, when done well, speak as one voice that clearly summarize us to others, no matter where they find the breadcrumb. But when not done well, they display just a fuzzy picture that doesn’t help our business at all.

So, how can we manage our online identities?

Start by creating a short bio about yourself and using that as your one and only bio around the web. Wherever possible, change your bio to reflect this new one.

Use a site like DandyID to gather together all of your social identities into one place. And use PeoplePond to as a verifiable place to identify who you are and as a single website to give out to others.

Want to read more about managing your identity? There are great resources and articles out there already to help you. Here are some of our favorite:

Pew Internet did a study on online identity management with some interesting findings. People are becoming more aware of it… but not nearly enough yet (in my opinion): http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Digital-Footprints.aspx?r=1
Forbes takes a slightly different approach (less about coherence and veracity and more about its usefulness in your life): http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/01/manage-online-reputation-technology-identity.html
Mashable has a great list: 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity (http://mashable.com/2007/09/10/online-identity/). This list is more like a list of website tools you can use to manage your identity.
ClaimID (http://claimid.com/) has a list of best practices to manage your online identity. It’s a great article, actually, with plenty of useful tips that people should do from time to time.

photo credit: Thomas R. Stegelmann