To Be Remembered & To Be Referred

Robyn Greenspan, the Sr. Editor one of our member newsletters, (CareerSmart Advisor) sent me some stats the other day on what was going on in the blogosphere. Pretty wild stuff:

Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

With numbers like the foregoing one wonders a lot of things, not the least of which is if all those people are blogging, who the heck is reading it all? Well, as we all know, the answer is a lot of people are, and there continues to be an on going debate about the impact of blogs on almost anything you can name, including one's career.

I came across a blog the other day called Scobleizer. It is authored by Robert Scoble who is a bit of a guru on the subject of blogging and has a book on it entitled: Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

Of particular interest to me, however, was the commentary going on relative to a posting he had on the site titled Blogging and Careers. By the time I got there, there were already some 17 comments covering a wide variety of flavors.

Even though they have been around for a while, I am not sure anyone is really totally sure if (a) blogs are here to stay, and if so, (b) what they will ultimately morph to.

What I do believe, however, is that when it comes to careers and the managing thereof, the use of telecommunications can be, as they say, a two-edged sword.

Indeed, my colleague Robyn actually has done a fair amount of research on the subject, and because "digital dirt" is becoming such an issue, even wrote a career guide for our members called Dealing With Your Digital Dirt.

On top of that, I got a call a couple of weeks ago from a producer at NBC Nightly News who wanted to talk me about the same subject as they were doing segment on the good, bad, and ugly of putting yourself out on the net be it MySpace, blogs, or whatever.

As the taping was winding down, the producer asked me if there was anything more I thought the audience should know about the impact of managing their careers when people are running around telling the world what they think about almost anything you want to name.

The response that came to my mind was not to try and argue the merits or demerits of "free speech" etc., but to remind people of two things:

1. The world operates on perception, and what you say and how you say it has an enormous impact on the perception they have or will have, and

2. If you are serious about managing your career, at any level, the name of the game is “To Be Remembered & To Be Referred,” and before you press the send button, keep in mind that you can be remembered for the wrong reasons as well as the right reasons.