As painful as it is for some to admit, living in the digital age practically requires that you share some things online. We keep our friends and family close through Facebook, we show off our resume on LinkedIn, and we’re never more than a minute away from our e-mail thanks to the invention of the Blackberry and the iPhone. If you share in moderation, and are careful about not sharing important information, you can effectively build your personal brand and protect yourself from online attacks.

However, if you don’t consider what you’re posting online, or you overshare, you could be setting yourself up for all kinds of digital drama. In a recent article for the Financial Times, David Gelles explores the problem of oversharing, quoting numerous experts in Internet privacy and reputation management, including Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik.

From the article:

What began with blogging and evolved into social networking has transformed the way people relate to one another, says Cameron Marlow, a data scientist at Facebook who earned his PhD at the ­Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The social norms have slowly been changing,” he says. “A few people found value early on in sharing a lot of information, and slowly society has shaped around this behaviour.”

Now, instead of communicating regularly with one’s closest associates and occasionally making contact with acquaintances, users of social networks maintain peripheral awareness of a much broader circle of contacts.

[...]

But social networks can prove ruinous to individual lives. “The internet is a daily part of our lives, an integral need. You can reconnect in a way you couldn’t before,” says Kimberly Young, director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pennsylvania. “At the same time it’s created a dependency. People are using this technology to the point where they’re forgetting social skills.”

Beyond problems of time management, oversharing can land users in serious trouble. The story of how an errant Facebook post cost a naive worker her job has become a contemporary parable. More serious concerns, such as phishing, stalking and identity theft, are also made easier by the amount of personal information that is publicly available on these sites.

“The tools for self-publication are rapidly proliferating, but understanding of the consequences is lagging,” says Michael Fertik, chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps users guard against these threats and restore online personas that have been tarnished. “Yes, it’s a new day in tolerance levels, but it’s a new year in unintended consequences.”

The very existence of companies such as Reputation.com point to an uncomfortable reality. While people may have more control over their online identities by curating their profiles to be just so, more sharing also means less control. Hastily uploaded images can come back to haunt. Posts meant only for friends can be widely redistributed.

In 2010 and beyond, the individuals who find the most success will be those who strike the right balance between promoting their personal brand online, while actively protecting it against threats. For more information on how Reputation.com can help you achieve this balance, feel free to contact one of our Online Reptuation Management consultants today.