Social media honeypot

This infographic from the social media monitoring firm Reppler illustrates statistically how recruiters screen job seekers based on their social media presence. LinkedIn figures in the mix, but personal sites (Facebook, Twitter) loom larger in recruiters' scrutiny.

The statistics in and comments on the graphic reveal some obvious points and some larger points:

• It's a Put Yourself Out There World! BTW, your drunk, naked, racist, cretinous, provocative, impolitic, uncool, weakness-revealing posts will haunt your future. 
• Many social media users don't know how or haven't made the effort to protect their privacy using settings or pseudonyms. Read the directions. Think before you act. 
• In the latest employer's market in the history of the world, employers are using the latest means to sort the wheat from the chaff. The march of history and all that. 
• The architects of social media, for good or ill, have succeeded in collapsing our far-flung relationships into a small town. No secrets, nowhere to hide. Scarlet Lettersville.

As a communications professional I'm very much in the minority among peers because I've declined to get on Facebook and Twitter. This has disqualified me from consideration in several marketing jobs, particularly in B2C. Still, it's a small price to pay for a little privacy and the editorial gratification of denying eternal life to those myriad random expressions, half-thoughts, pure piffle and TMI blunders that (who knew?) are actually being scrutinized.

A final point on an earlier post on editorial best practices in infographics: Note that our subject graphic has both a title and a credit line embedded in the artwork, ensuring its editorial integrity as it gets republished here and numerous elsewheres in the behavioral archive of our world that we call the internet.


   

The elements of (infographic) style

Today, under the title of "TIL:The Small blue ball is all the earth's Salt water & the even smaller blue ball is all the earth's fresh water", a Redditor linked to a graphic showing the total volume of water on Earth, relative to volume of everything else on the planet.

This is a great infographic in its sheer illustrative simplicity. But, were they to receive the image file with no accompanying context, most viewers could only guess what they're looking at.

Metatags, linkbacks and similar web devices exist to describe and provide provenance for digital images. When images get republished, however, there's no guarantee that such appended information will follow. By downloading and pasting the image into this post, I've in effect broken the chain.

So, what to do to make sure the graphic's meaning, and therefore its value, will survive its voyage through the information universe? I haven't the expertise in computer and library science to suggest curatorial best practices. But from a composition/design standpoint, I'd advise the graphic's creator, or its original publisher, to compress a title and label into graphic. A simple failsafe if a blow to artistic minimalism.