Preparing Your Social Networking Profiles For Your Criminal Future

What's hot with young, affluent 20-somethings these days?

Murder.

Could you be the next hip grad student taking the life of a coworker or prostitute you solicited online?

That's the thing about committing a newsworthy felony — often times, you don't even see it coming.  That's why you need to prepare now.

If you do find yourself at the center of a circus-like trial, every news outlet in the world will be ransacking your social networking site profiles for juicy personal details, bizarre blog rants and incriminating photos.

Is your Facebook page prepared for such scrutiny?

Probably not.

The present is the best time to ready your accounts — Facebook, Myspace, even Bebo — to ensure that on the day you're formally announced as the lone suspect for your big crime, you won't let those vultures in the media down.

Here are some helpful tips:

• Keep at least one candid photo of you wielding a knife in a suggestive manner in your photo albums. News outlets will want to portray you as a monster.  Make sure you give them an image that fits the bill.  Even if you have to stage it, you'll be making webmasters all across the globe happy for your effort.
• Make sure you keep your profiles public. It's just good etiquette.  The media is going to dig up your online content somehow.  If your profile is private, that somehow is by barraging those socially-networked to you with messages asking to help them access your page.  Be polite.  Do you really want to put your "friends" through that kind of hassle?
• Avoid clear logic and proper grammar in your blog posts. Now that you're accused of a heinous crime, news agencies will want to convince us that you were not of sound mind, that you possessed a psychological dark side.  You'll want your blog posts to be able to be interpreted as subtle clues indicating that we should have seen this coming.  By representing your inner dialogue in this manner, you save society the trouble of having to resolve the fact that we are all equally a part of mankind.

By following these simple rules, you'll be doing not only the media, but all of the world a favor by making the coverage of your crime the most sensationalized to date!

It's really the least you could do, you filthy murder.

[Thanks to CBS News whose affront to privacy inspired this post!]