Protecting Your Personal Brand: 4 Simple Steps

If you don’t think you are “big enough” to be protecting your personal brand online then you are thinking along the wrong tracks. What happens if you suddenly write that killer blog post, release that awesome software or get mentioned by another big name and people start trying to utilise you.

For a serious and very accurate example, take a look at Seth Godin. Darren Rowse noticed that the Twitter account for Seth (which has over 3,000 followers) had absolutely nothing to do with him. I should note that this profile was recently updated to state it was unofficial - but what if the author of this account started insulting others or acting very unprofessional, it could easily start to tarnish the brand of the well known author.

4 Simple Steps to Protecting Your Personal Brand

1. Own Profiles on the Top Social Sites

As the Seth Godin example implies, even if you aren’t going to use sites like Twitter (our profile), it might be best to have an account there with your name just incase.

This can even apply for many more sites such as:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Any other community type sites in your niche

Generally, there are ways you can deal with people fraudulently acting as you, but it can be so much easier to just create a profile on these sites in the first place…protection and branding.

2. Buy Your Domain Name

I always complain when people don’t practice what they preach, and if im honest I only registered glenallsopp.com in the last 4 months, theres going to be something on there very soon. The point I’m trying to make is that although you may have not needed to use the domain for anything now, the $8 you can pay, or the multiples of that if you want the .net, .org or any more extensions is good reassurance that you have ways to protect your name if needed.

The best bet of course would be to put something on those now, Glen Allsopp.com may just become a landing page that links to my profiles around the web but at least its not being utilised by someone who has had a bad experience of me or just wants to try and damage my reputation online.

3. Monitor Your Name

The best way to monitor yourself would be by covering the services we mention in the feeds we monitor for clients post, and if you are completely new to this, check out the step by step guide on exactly how to do that.

Basically, the best places to track include:

• Search engine results for your name
• Industry sites related to what you are about
• Blog search engines such as Google Blogsearch
• Forum search engines such as Boardtracker

4. Think Before you Act

Just like you take the time to think about what you are going to say to someone, hopefully in a sense that won’t offend them - you should do the same online - don’t think of the internet being any different. It can be easy to come home drunk and submit an entry on twitter or be enraged by another blogger and retaliate on your own blog.

The people who understand how important their online reputation is will take the time to assess a situation before they take the next step; which is usually when they have calmed down and can think rationally.

In Summary

ViperChill was gratefully linked too from a well known american news source, katu recently. The only way I found out about it was through checking Google Analytics referrers, for all I know this news source could have been saying something bad about the company that could have been very damaging.

Thankfully, it was a link to one of our recent articles:

Monitoring your personal reputation is very important, as is knowing how to protect it. Hopefully, the information provided here is enough to get you started on the right path.

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