Curating Your Online Persona — Maarten Schafer

Point of View
3 min readAug 11, 2020

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We have all grown up listening to the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. Why? Because it’s all about the content! Being a storyteller and keynote speaker, I value content above all, which is why I like to say — it’s truly all about the content!

I recently came across an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review, How to Curate Your Digital Persona. The authors spoke about altering your online algorithm, which is what caught my eye.

While people and corporations are busy using our data to influence and judge us, we have the ability to curate our avatars in a way that will influence them. Understanding how our online profiles get created and used by others — as well as how we can access and modify them — is part of building a successful career.

No matter what your goals may be, you should become aware of the story your public data tells — and understand how to change it. Minor changes in your online presence lead to very different conclusions being drawn about you.”

The article goes in-depth about the “public” building blocks you can use to enhance your online presence. These blocks all focus on content.

Photographs and videos — two of the most important tools online to position yourself the way you want. Both these mediums decode and interpret your body language and help your audience know more about you. Your tone of voice and words used to communicate are crucial as well. Technologies exist which are able to create a full ‘character profile’ from just your personal style of language — it’s fascinating! All these blocks are easy to influence in order to create your desired online presence — which is why not doing so is a waste of a huge potential asset.

The content about you online says everything — who you are, your added value, your past achievements, and future aspirations. What you say, and more importantly how you say it makes all the difference. This article highlights the importance of the same, and was a great read!

Click here to read the full article by Ben Dattner and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

Ignorance is a choice. Here is a list with the most popular news websites:

Yahoo! News
Google News
HuffingtonPost
CNN
New York Times
De Telegraaf
NBC News
Mail Online
Washington Post
The Guardian
WSJ
ABCNews
BBC News
USA Today
LA Times
De Volkskrant
Le Monde
Le Figaro

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Point of View
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