“People were just being vicious to each other.”

So says Matt Ivester, who founded JuicyCampus.com in 2007, a now defunct college gossip forum. The site reached over 500 campuses before its demise, less than two years after its launch.

In a highly accessible, insightful and important new book, Ivester draws upon his experiences to promote wise digital citizenship. In Lol… OMG!, he opens by talking about his own unexpected laugh out loud, oh, my god moment.

Four years ago, I created the biggest college gossip website in the country. It eventually became so out of control that student governments on various campuses were actually asking administrators to block access to the site, so that their students would stop using it. When I started it, though, I had never imagined the path that it would take.

Ivester certainly knows his audience, primarily high school and college students. I love that he never talks down to his readers, admonishing them at every turn for past mistakes and misbehavior. He treats students like adults, arming them with requisite knowledge to understand how their online actions have consequences.

Rarely have I spoken with someone as sincere as Ivester, who, from his very core, genuinely sympathizes with the difficulties of growing up in today’s digital world.

“I think it’s a really difficult position that students are in right now, in that their mistakes, the mistakes that they make are much more public and much more permanent than they ever have been before,” Ivester says.

I couldn’t agree more. Adults must hold kids accountable for their actions, yet in the vast majority of cases, young people deserve to learn from their mistakes and move on—without having to worry about one past transgression following them forever. But when inappropriate or questionable content is posted online, there is no delete button.

“Just as easily as you upload a video on YouTube, somebody can download it in the same amount of time,” Ivester says. “The immediacy of the internet and the permanence of the internet kind of combine to create this situation where the content that you post is really out of your control as soon as you post it.”

I recently experienced my own Lol… OMG! moment, but thankfully, with a positive twist.

Several weeks ago, I was helping my journalism students stream a varsity basketball game. During halftime I decided to try my luck at a half-court shot and win a nice yellow bottle of Gatorade. Mind you, I have almost zero upper body coordination, and I haven’t shot a basketball since middle school. Using the most awful form, I sunk it off the backboard and proceeded to celebrate as if I had won the lottery.

Not surprisingly, my students produced a clip to post on The Falconer, the online student news website. Soon enough, Yahoo! Sports picked up the video and published an accompanying story, “Florida teacher hits fairly routine half-court shot, goes absolutely nuts over bottle of Gatorade.” It currently has 17,000 hits.

A popular sports highlight website owned by Gawker Media, Deadspin, also covered the story, attracting 20,000 hits: “David Cutler is a history and journalism teacher at Palmer Trinity School in Florida—he’s not a basketball player. So his form on a 44-footer, taken at halftime of a game last week, left something to be desired. The result did not, nor did his reaction.”

Fortunately, the fallout was overwhelmingly positive—notwithstanding some nasty message board posts. But this event made me realize how fast word spreads on the Internet, and just how damaging one wrong post can be to somebody’s reputation.

Ivester writes about real and recent case studies to help students understand the importance of making wise online decisions, but he rarely mentions actual names.

“I guess I’m sympathetic to people who make mistakes even when they seem glaringly obvious in retrospect,” he tells me.

I was particularly struck to learn about a UCLA student, Alexandra Wallace, whom Ivester identifies by the pseudonym Nicole Banks. In a moment of sheer ignorance and absurd stupidity, the political science major uploaded a hugely racist three-minute-long YouTube video about how much she despises, as her clip is titled, “Asians in the library.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s hard to imagine how Wallace could ever imagine this video going over well. All the same, she never expected death threats, or that her actions would cause her family so much harm.

Ivester delves into a whole host of ways to manage and improve one’s online identity, and you should read his book to find out more. In the meantime, check out brandyourself.com, a free online platform that allows users to manage and improve their Google results.

“You’ve got to convince students that they should be doing the right thing, the responsible thing, and be good digital citizens,” he says.

So, do the responsible thing. Click here to purchase a copy of Lol… OMG! today.