There is another Melinda Tremmel, who is a clinical nurse coordinator in St. Louis. Her LinkedIn page is the first link that comes up. The second link that comes up is the one that intrigues me and surprised me a little bit! It says "Melinda Tremmel mug" from the Globe Gazette, the local newspaper. I saw the "mug" part of it and automatically thought "mug shot," but I've never been arrested or anything like that so I was a bit concerned! I clicked on it, and it took me to an article that the paper wrote about the new teachers who came into the West Hancock district a few years ago. I obviously don't like the name that they called the photo, but the link takes you to a good article. A lot of other things that I found related to my wedding last year. There are a few photos from our engagement session and wedding that pop up from Facebook or the article from the "Celebrations" page of the newspaper, and also our wedding website from theknot.com shows up as well. Since we are not in the wedding process anymore, I deleted my account from that website, which also deleted our wedding website. It will take a few days for the deletion to take effect, but after that, I wonder if some of those engagement pictures that were on there won't show up anymore on the Google search? Along with all of these, the other links that show up are related to the people I know (people from my cohort show up in the pictures, so does my brother-in-law, and so do people who are related to newspaper articles that my name is mentioned in such as the girls golf photo taken last year when I was the coach), or people with either Melinda as their first name or Tremmel/Trammel as their last name. Other than the "mug" link, nothing really surprised me or stood out to me as "bad".
In order to protect myself and keep my online presence positive, I created a Google alert to alert me if my name is mentioned anywhere online. I've heard about this, but have never done it myself. I think it is a good idea! I also created an About.me landing page. Using this page, I updated my profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (which I always had, but never really used until now). Screenshots of what my updated profiles look like on these sites are below.
I also looked at the "10 Ways to Build Your Online Identity" article and used some of those suggestions to keep myself safe and build my online presence as well. For example, I purchased my own domain name mtremmel.com through GoDaddy. I have it linked to this blog, so if anyone types in mtremmel.com they will come here! Also, if you are a member of the NEA, they have a great collaboration website for teachers at mynea360.org. They have many groups to join, and one that I've joined and contributed to was Secondary Math 6-12. They layout of these groups is similar to Facebook or Twitter, but teachers in similar areas are in the group and can collaborate together and share ideas! I also wrote a couple of reviews for books that I've read and/or purchased about the education field on Amazon. These positive posts and interactions online will eventually show up on my Google search later on and are proactive measures to keep my online presence positive.
Many of our students don't know the importance of creating and maintaining a professional web presence. It is very important to keep this image for getting jobs and references in the future. I plan on sharing this blog post and the ideas in it with my students to show them that even after you have a stable job, it is still important to keep that presence professional. I'm sure they have already, but they can Google themselves to see if anything negative comes up. Usually, this is the first thing that employers do when looking for people to interview. If there is anything negative that comes up (pictures or other things that they have posted), it would be a good idea to clean them up now! Creating your own domain name also guards and protects from online identity theft as well as being a good place to keep everything in one spot on your personal website. There are many other ways to protect yourself online, and I plan on sharing these with my students and future children. What other things have you done to build your web presence and protect yourself online?
Melinda, I like your thoughts! My name is so common that I really didn't worry about removing everything. I guess I could have flipped through many pages of Google, but got fatigued quickly. I tried to add an about.me page and signed up for a Linked In account, but still don't show up! It's a good idea you deleted your wedding website, as the memories are fun to have but probably don't need to pop up in a Google Search of you.
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