My Digital Footprint Faded Fast

I would rate my dig­i­tal foot­print as fair. Though my twit­ter page showed up at the top of the Gog­gle search, oth­er Eri­ca Bran­ca­to’s showed up else­where on the first page of results. My high school field hock­ey team bio was found at the bot­tom of the first page along with my Pin­ter­est page. Though my Twit­ter page has most of my arti­cles writ­ten for The Dai­ly Cam­pus and my jour­nal­is­tic work is acces­si­ble that way, I feel I need to improve my dig­i­tal foot­print a bit more.

I am not a big Face­book user, so it was no sur­prise I did not show up. I am mis­tak­en with Eri­ca Bran­ca­to Fish­er on both Face­book and LinkedIn. From what I found, Bran­ca­to Fish­er is a pre-kinder­garten teacher at the Strat­ford School in San Fran­cis­co. She went to col­lege in Cal­i­for­nia and has a beau­ti­ful fam­i­ly and an adorable baby girl.

It was a bit sur­pris­ing that my Pin­ter­est page came up on the first page of a Google search. Although there is noth­ing bad on it, it is irrel­e­vant. It was also strange how MaxPress.com had my bio from when I played var­si­ty field hock­ey in high school. Though some of the infor­ma­tion is wrong and the full bio is not filled out, it is inter­est­ing that they had what school I went to, the ros­ter and even my jer­sey num­ber. That freaked me out a bit.

As for pho­tos, my Twit­ter bio pic­ture came up and so did a few pic­tures I took from UConn foot­ball and hock­ey games that were pub­lished in The Dai­ly Cam­pus. The oth­er pho­tos were relat­ed to my arti­cles I wrote at The Dai­ly Cam­pus. There were no bad pic­tures or any­thing that made me ques­tion why it was up there, which was nice to know.

Over­all I would say that my dig­i­tal foot­print was what I expect­ed. I knew noth­ing bad would show up and I sus­pect­ed the major­i­ty of infor­ma­tion would come from The Dai­ly Cam­pus and my Twit­ter account, which I used to pro­mote my activ­i­ties at The Dai­ly Cam­pus. I will con­tin­ue to use Twit­ter to con­nect with my read­ers because in the past it has helped me get more view­ers to my arti­cles, but in the future I will be more aware on how to get my work more promi­nent on oth­er plat­forms. Although I was vis­i­ble, I feel my work needs to be eas­i­er to find; I would like more rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion about me on that first page in the Google search. Mov­ing for­ward I will have a pro­fes­sion­al online and offline atti­tude in order to keep my audi­ence’s trust.

Engag­ing with my audience

As Richard Gin­gras and Sal­ly Lehrman said, trust real­ly does mat­ter with­in the jour­nal­ism realm. The idea of “trust us because we are us”definitely does not work any­more today. I would say only a few big name pub­li­ca­tions could get away with that, but it is because they have estab­lished cred­i­bil­i­ty over time and they have proved to pub­lish accu­rate­ly and fair­ly over the years. How­ev­er nowa­days I believe it is eas­i­er to gain read­ers’ trust because of the fast paced social media. With quick, accu­rate, well writ­ten arti­cles and strong pro­mo­tion, read­ers would be more apt to trust you and read your work when scrolling through Twitter.

I feel pret­ty com­fort­able with this new role of going beyond sim­ply broad­cast­ing infor­ma­tion. If my arti­cles are well writ­ten and spark con­ver­sa­tion I want to put it out on Twit­ter and social media. I want my arti­cles to be so pow­er­ful that they move some­one to tears, trig­ger a con­ver­sa­tion or even just be remem­bered. I want my writ­ing to make an impact on some­one like so many writ­ers have impact­ed me. Through social media and all the tech­nol­o­gy we have around us, I believe that is possible.