A common trend now a days has to do with your own personal brand and having an online presence. According to the article on which I base this post, this can be useful for many things, from monetizing content produced by yourself, to landing the job of your dreams. To illustrate a bit the contents of the article, I have researched a friend's online presence, will comment on my findings, and proceed to make some recommendations.
I have chosen to do this research on my friend Antonio, who is a new exchange student from Portugal. This I know because I know him personally, but I don't know him enough, and so I hope that his online presence will allow me to find out more about him. This could be the sort of situation at which you might find yourself post any job interview: the recruiter has met you and has found out some things about you, but wishes to find out more and decides to Google you out. So I went ahead and Googled both "Antonio Leitão" and "AntonioLeitão". I had no luck finding anything, so I decided to Facebook him. I found here that he uses Hotmail, so I Googled him using this e-mail address, and again had no luck. So I decided to get a little help, and asked him about his online presence. It turns our Antonio has no LinkedIn profile, no Twitter account, no Google+ and until recently, no blog; basically, very limited online presence.
My suggestion is to start at the basic: get a LinkedIn profile, since he will soon be diving into the professional world, and this will allow him to build and maintain a professional network. It would be best if he used his same username accross all social and professional platforms, be that AntonioLeitão or hist Hotmail username. This way he can start creating a consistent image despite having few content. Blogs and Twitter is not for everyone, but as BioJobBlog states in the article, start reserving your usernames across platforms, even reserve your domain name. You never know when you might need it.
