In a recent FastCompany piece by Gina Trapani titled “Work Smart: Claiming Your Name on the Web,” the author makes the following statement about creating one’s personal profile on the web, “To make yourself findable, claim your name in Web search results by setting up pages with information you’re comfortable sharing.”

The part about posting pages with “information you’re comfortable sharing” is key. The web today is a double edged razor sharp sword that advocates unlimited freedom of information and speech on one edge, while viciously cutting away basic freedoms when used as a highly monitored, mined, and scrutinized spying mechanism (as it is today) on the other.

Bottom line? Anything you post on the web is accessible to employers, colleagues, friends, family members, enemies, police, and other governmental and private agencies – without your approval or knowledge.

I recommend you consider all your online activity as essentially a strategic marketing initiative. Take care about sharing personal information on family and friends you wouldn’t want Hannibal Lecter to know (a bit dramatic maybe, but accurate). Take time to carefully consider precisely what you want to communicate. Write it down, review it a few times, then think about how you will communicate it. Will you blog daily, weekly, monthly? Will you setup and post to a Facebook page? Will you setup a LinkedIn profile? Will you Tweet some aspects of your life on Twitter? Whatever you choose, take the time to be strategic about it.

With more than 500 million users spending more than 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, the fact that the site is reported to readily comply with requests from national and private security organizations means you should take care with the information you share.

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