Facebook meltdowns and celebrity Twitter feuds are entertaining from the outside, but they're much less amusing when your own career is at stake.
A new reputation-management tool called Persona wants to prevent your next social media gaffe. The service monitors your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts and sends you an email or SMS alert when it identifies potentially offensive material.
See also: How to Balance Your Personal and Professional Lives on Twitter
"You've got all these people who are now empowered with technology and networks that didn't exist several years ago," Persona founder Lee Sherman tells Mashable. "[For] many people, common sense flies out the window when they're having fun."
The service scans for questionable posts and interactions by keyword, keeping an eye out for profanity, adult content and references to violence or drug and alcohol use. Two icons, a green check mark and a trash can, allow you to approve flagged content or delete it from your networks. By hovering over a specific keyword, you can add it to a "White List" that prevents the term from appearing in future posts. And friends who have contributed unsavory content will appear in a separate tab, where you can choose to approve, unfriend or message them.
Persona's dashboard, displaying flagged posts.
I gave Persona a whirl and quickly discovered that my 18-year-old self was not a very conscientious social media user. It took me three hours to sift through the 636 posts Persona flagged, culled from seven years' worth of Facebook posts and 600 tweets, although some were duplicates due to a glitch.
I also learned that back in those halcyon days, I included profanity in nearly every Facebook post, and so did my friends. Why did I call them all "sexy" or "bitch" — or, if I was particularly fond of them, "sexy bitch"?
Here's a sample of what Persona flagged on my account:

However, at least half of the flagged posts were harmless, and usually taken out of context. For example, I received an alert for several tweets containing the word "theft," a term I only used to tout a Mashable post about Grand Theft Auto V. I added "theft" to my White List to avoid receiving any more alerts with that keyword.
"Our tool is dialed in to be very conservative," Sherman explains. "We want to capture things that may or may not be offensive, but we're going to let the user decide."
Persona is still in beta, and its user interface has a few flaws. When I accessed the site on my MacBook Pro, many posts were duplicated five or six times. Some would remain flagged even after I had deleted or approved them. When I switched over to a PC this was no longer an issue, but problems with Facebook's API prevented me from deleting nearly 60 posts. And some features that would be particularly helpful, like mass "accept" and "delete" options, are not currently available.
But the service is quite effective in pointing out that all of those harmless little comments on Facebook and Twitter can build up to a very unflattering public persona. It's a lesson that always seems to get lost amid the laughter and camaraderie — and yes, the smack-talking — on social media.
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