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Advice for students - first steps

For students who have yet to actively market themselves online, these steps are recommended for getting started.

  1. Google yourself: first and last name, no quotes. Add your town or school if you have a more common name. Scroll through the first page and imagine having control of the top hits of this and any search query. This simple exercise – one that you have probably done numerous times with other people’s names – can illustrate the permanence of online content and also let you know how close you may already be to harnessing that top result. If your public Facebook profile is high on the list, make it private, if only to protect yourself from friends-of-friends-of-friends.
  2. Think about how you want to portray yourself and write it down. Take a few minutes to consider how much information you want to share. What are the pros and cons of revealing your age? Your hometown? Do you care if people judge you on appearance (as they will if you include photos of yourself)? Can you crystallize your skills, experiences, interests and strengths into blurbs that will stand out when someone briefly scans your standardized profile? Will you have a résumé to upload? Do you want to include more personal information such as your marital status, or your religious or political tendencies? This process, expanding on what you have done in developing your résumé, will help clarify your career goals so you can be sure you’re communicating directly who you are and what you are seeking.
    • Remember to use your school's career services or placement office. They are there to help you with your résumé and cover letters and counsel you on what you would like to do and be with your J.D.
  3. Set up a LinkedIn profile. Not that LinkedIn is the only game in town. But it is ubiquitous and it will accomplish something strangely powerful: you will have an online identity that looks just like the profile of those you hope to impress. Presenting yourself as a professional helps those who view your profile see you as a peer rather than a peon. Fill in your profile with the information you boiled down in Step 2. Using the site is easy, as is coming up with those first connections and with other users. The people who wrote letters to help you get into law school would no doubt be willing to connect with you on LinkedIn. Look also to undergraduate professors and advisors, as well as long-time family friends who can vouch for your character. Re-Google yourself after you profile is created and see what a difference it makes to your top search results.

    Once you have a LinkedIn profile, don't be shy in including the link:

These three steps will have you well on your way to taking control of your online identity and will cost much less in time, effort and cash than mailing out a hundred hard-copy résumés. Now, your ongoing responsibility is to keep the online information active, at a minimum have it up to date, as you would your printed résumé. Continue to add connections as you meet people. Add experiences when you volunteer at school or in your community. Most importantly, be willing to promote what is there. Many potential employers will only see your profile after some other preliminary contact, and in such case you want to make sure they find it. Search engines tend to favor social media content (remember this can mean Facebook and even MySpace as well as LinkedIn, unless those profiles are private). Employers that are internet savvy know that a few minutes browsing the web is worth many more that they might have spent on the phone checking into you, so point them to the right place.

One word of caution: when you do go back and Google your name again, realize that content that you might not want to be near the top may persist if it has been online for a long time or has many other pages pointing to it. For better or worse, digital text and images are so easy to copy, cache and transport, you can presume that anything posted online will last forever. For lower-level or temporary positions, few employers will look past the first page of search results, but you must always be prepared to address anything that might be lurking in the ether. Also keep in mind that more prestigious positions, and even the character fitness review for your state's bar, may entail very thorough online vetting. An honest “I made choices in the past that I wouldn’t make now” will get you further than denying or trying to hide something. And such a straightforward, candid response is possible when you are fully aware of what people will find in a Google search for your name.

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Next steps

For students that want to delve deeper, the above advice – thinking about what you want to reveal, finding people you want to connect with, staying involved – holds for all social networks, and there are lots out there. A simple search will turn up networking sites for lawyers, law marketing, law students and many more niche groups. See a list of examples of legal social networks here. Within each network, use the concise, consistent bits of informaiton you developed for your LinkedIn account to flesh out your profile. Some additional suggestions:

As a law student, you may be interested in the legal ramifications of what you post if you have a blog, and take those into consideration. If you aren’t comfortable blogging, get your toes wet by finding relevant blogs to follow and try commenting on their content. Commenting on blogs is a powerful way to connect with people who inspire you or whose ideas interest you. Below are a few sites that index legal blogs (or "blawgs") to help you find blogs you may be interested in reading and following with a RSS feed reader (such as Google Reader):

Finally, if you are hesitant to adopt social media as part of your professional identity, think for a moment about how you already use it, and know that others will use it to learn more about you. Any time you read a user review on a site like Amazon, browse Craigslist or eBay, check Facebook or read comments on a New York Times story, you are participating in social media. Consider the relatively minimal time it takes to put relevant, professional and accurate information about you online and know it will be more valuable than the vast majority of cocktail parties and cold calls.

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A few words on privacy

Despite the real and convincing potential benefits of law students using social media, it is important to keep in mind that every piece of information you leave about yourself online, whether it is easily identifiable as coming from you or not, becomes part of a permanent digital footprint. We can't see today what the implications of the accumulation of all these bits of personal data, scattered over the internet, will be tomorrow.1 Always think carefully about who the future, unintended audience of your information may be. And always read and try to understand the terms of use of any site that you join, as some can claim incredible rights over what you create on their platforms.2

Another consideration for all users of social media is to weigh the potential benefits against the risks. Some individuals should not post any personally identifiable information online because doing so could put them at risk of personal harm. We hear a lot in the news aboutt cyber bullying, stalking, and identity theft. For some individuals these are real concerns. Think about if this may be a risk for you and use caution accordingly.

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What they’re saying

More than 90 percent of respondents to a student survey at the University of Iowa College of Law use Facebook. They are looking to connect with friends and family and haven’t given much thought to using social media or social networking to promote themselves professionally. Several students thought that social media should stay “social” and the majority had altered information about themselves online by removing tags in photos, deleting content or enhancing privacy settings within Facebook. Approximately one third maintain a LinkedIn profile and a small minority have built an online identity outside of a social networking profile, such as by creating a professional blog.

For the students who have developed a professional online identity, social media has helped them:

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