Chiswick Marketing The measure of an entrepreneur used to be the number of real friends claimed, but times have changed. Now the measure is how many hits one has on a Google name search, factored by some formula, like the sum of all positive messages minus 100 for every negative message.
That’s the reason every good parent should be coaching their child from birth to avoid posting all the naughty things on social networks that can come back to haunt them later. To illustrate the point, here is a story posted by Seth Godin a while back:
“A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.
Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.
The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, ‘binge drinking.’
The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The
most recent entry said something like, ‘I am applying for some menial jobs that
are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few
paintings.’
And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.
Three for three.
Google never forgets.”