First, I went to that infamous search engine and typed in my first and last name. I was nowhere to be found! There were plenty of Michelle Mattox's. I just wasn't one of them. I was happy to know that I had done a good job keeping my privacy and my good name blemish free, but I was a little disheartened that I didn't stand out either. I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong. How could I get my name out there in a positive light? And honestly, do I care if my name is out there? I am happy with my job and have no desire to attract attention from new employers and I consider the internet a place for me to find information verses a place for me to share information.
I have a Twitter account, a Pinterest account, an Instagram account, a Google + account, and have recently started this blog (albeit this blog was created for a class I enrolled in). I've opted out of Facebook, and I am not really sure why. Anyway, I thought maybe I could search my handles from my social media accounts. Obviously, I was visible then, but who goes around searching "mmattox24" or "mattox_michelle" without knowing who I am in the first place? Isn't the idea to have strangers look you up by name and see how awesome you are? In case you are wondering, there is a hint of sarcasm in this post.
Then I got to thinking, "Do I want to advertise my personal life, my professional life, or both?" I started looking closely at my accounts and what people would learn about me if they didn't know me based on my posts in social media. With the exception of Instagram they would know that I am a teacher and that I am interested in taking on a leadership role in helping my school implement technology. So that was that! I have personal things on my social media like pictures of my kids and husband and the fun family stuff we do, but I wasn't concerned with sharing that with the world. I only cared to share that with my friends and family.
Now that I had decided to proactively advertise my professional life, I started wondering why would anyone who doesn't know me care what I have to say. Then I remembered that I cared what perfect strangers had to say. I was always looking for resources from people I didn't know. I didn't put much emphasis on the people, just the resources. So, I needed to make sure I was sharing excellent resources.
How could I let people know I exist? I started by increasing the amount of people I follow on Twitter and then tweeting my blog posts. I also decided to be more active in my social media. I set a goal to try to post at least one thing a day even if it is a retweet, a like, or repinning someone else's pin. I still wanted to keep a personal touch in my social medias, so I log into my accounts with two different personalities in mind. One is the professional front. I treat these log in sessions like interviews. I wouldn't say or do anything that I wouldn't want my boss to see. The second is mom mode. I still want to keep it clean. Only things that I would be ok with my kids seeing make there way into my social media. I hope this mentality paves the road for them in the future. Even modeling this attitude with my students could be an influence on their digital citizenship.
As for the inappropriate jokes and innuendoes, which lets face it, they exist in most people's lives, I will save those for appropriate times and places. Not online!
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