Wrong social networking can ruin your reputation as a home stager in one mouse click

Summary

Home staging expert, Debra Gould, uses the Tiger Woods PR disaster to demonstrate how nothing is private anymore and most of our communications are permanent and usually searchable.

Wrong social networking can ruin your reputation as a home stager in one mouse click

The media is having an absolute field day with Tiger Woods these days and if you take nothing else from his PR disaster, you must realize that there is very little that is private anymore.

You might not be a celebrity, but every time you send an email, Facebook message, Twitter status update or ‘Direct Message’ what you’re essentially doing is leaving a trail of digital communication. That also applies to all those tempting quizzes you’re invited to take when you login to Facebook.

Leaving a trail of communication can be extremely beneficial in some cases but this permanence of communication can also tarnish your image as a home stager.

Tiger Woods is a good example. Before the scandal about his car accident and “marital indiscretions” broke out, everyone had positive feelings about Tiger – he had a squeaky clean image. Then suddenly, allegations of an affair hit the Internet (as if the specter of a golf-club-swinging wife weren’t hint enough) and everyone hoped it wasn’t true.

But it’s hard not to be convinced when text messages that were exchanged between he and his mistress are published everywhere, not to mention an embarrassing voicemail so easily shared on the Internet and subsequently broadcast on TV. From now on, with the amount of press this incident has received, Tiger’s devoted family man image is ruined. This story, those text messages and that voicemail message will live forever on the Internet.

Assuming you won’t be doing too much potentially reputation-damaging texting in your home staging business (though it’s good to keep in mind that your texts can be used against you) you should be aware of the permanence of anything you put out there on the Internet.

Debra Gould, who is more commonly known as The Staging Diva® says, “Twitter can be one of the most dangerous applications to use if you’re not sure of what you’re doing. Each “tweet” or mini blog post you publish is out there in the world, with your name or your business name associated with it, when you press Update or Send.”

Gould, who has recently published her fourth Staging Diva Guide, The Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter, adds, “You can delete an individual post of course, but it’s automatically indexed by Twitter and search engines. For as long as the Internet exists, someone searching your name can find anything you’ve published on Twitter. This is why it’s a good rule of thumb to never post anything online or in an email that you wouldn’t feel comfortable with seeing in the local newspaper with your name beside it.”

Social networking is a must for any entrepreneur in this day and age, home stagers included, and Twitter is an extremely beneficial tool and a great way to build a business. But if you’re using it incorrectly you can be wasting time and damaging your image.

To learn more about Twitter and how to use it effectively in your home staging business check out Gould’s Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter.

About the author

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area.