By Irina Soriano

Have you ever asked yourself how your digital fingerprint will impact your future? I am sure, if you reflected on your lifetime’s content library – all the ‘likes’ you gave away on your favorite social media platforms, the posts and comments, pictures and videos that feature you online as well as all those old Kodak photos your friend took 20 or 30 years ago that may still see the light of social media one day – you would certainly not be able to recall every single piece of content that can possibly be tied back to you. Yet, it’s out there, regardless of your recollection. If not on someone’s phone, your precarious image is buried under some old documents in a school friend’s drawer or packed in someone’s memory box in their closet.

RescueTime tells us that the average adult swipes, types, and makes calls over the course of 3 hours and 15 minutes each day (the top 20% even spend 4.5 hours on their phones). In short, 50 days per year are full of opportunities to make just one little mistake, one post or comment that you might regret later in life. Maybe it will cost you your education or your job. Maybe it will cost you your family. Or if you are lucky, it won’t cost you anything other than data charges, and you will be just fine.

We all tend to share our thoughts on social media without being intentional at times, unaware of possible repercussions, especially on our so called “private” accounts we only share with family and friends- those accounts that feel safe and protected. How many times would you say you posted something because you thought it was funny at that time? How many times did you post after a few drinks and what you shared did not seem like a great idea the next day? How many times did you post based on an emotional reaction to something you read, heard or saw? We have all been there. The danger is that everything we say and do on social media is on the record, stored away in the cloud, screenshotted on someone’s phone, waiting to come back at us later in life with the potential to impact our career, our family or our life.

Our lifetime content library, one that I call our life-brand, is our digital fingerprint shaped by the collection of publicly accessible content shared by or featuring us, including photos, videos, audio recordings, social media posts, and written statements or comments. This includes all possible content pieces that have not seen the light of day yet, but possibly will in the future. We all possess one life-brand, there is only ONE. It might be strong, or it might be weak, but our individual life-brand exists. Our life-brand takes control if we are not aware of it and gains power and strength over the course of our lifetime the more content we accumulate in the cloud. It …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer