GapingVoid_I Started A Blog, originally uploaded by Hajj Flemings.
What do you do when your personal brand reputation has been breached? Recently an article was written about me that had statements that could damage my personal brand, so this blog was born. In the world of new media nobody is exempt from user generated content and traditional media sources, your personal brand has to be managed online and offline. As your influence continues to grow and develop your ability to have absolute control of your reputation will diminish, however there are many basic monitoring tools to assist you in management your online reputation.
Basic Monitoring Tools (Free)
o Google Alerts: Set-up email alerts to monitor search engine results.
o Tweet Scan Alerts: Set-up email alerts to monitor twitter results.
o Twitter Search: Set-up RSS feed to subscribe to the twitter results.
o Technorati: Set-up RSS feed to subscribe to blog post results
Definitions
Reputation is an external assessment by others that might be accurate or inaccurate. Reputation can be distorted which means it has to be managed.
Reputation Management: Tracking your personal brand footprint digitally and offline.
Things to Remember
o Your personal brand is your investment. Nobody cares as much as you do about your personal brand it is your baby and you have to manage it. As your influence develops over time it will take on a life of it’s own.
o You can’t ignore the situation. Determine whether a passive or active response is required.
o Be proactive. Don’t wait for the damage to deteriorate the work you done to develop your personal brand.
o Don’t Panic. There are plenty of online reputation management tools: JobMob has an excellent blog post, 150+ Resources and Tips To Help Manage Your Reputation Online.
o Be prepared to defend your personal brand.
Online Media Sources
o Traditional/Mainstream Websites
o Social Networks (e.g. Facebook, MySpace)
o Social News/Bookmarking Sites
o Forums/Discussion Boards
o Blogs
o Microblogs (e.g. Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk)
o Tags
o Images
o Video
Review alerts and monitoring tool results when managing your personal brand. Managing a personal brand is a lifestyle, you never retire from being who you are. First, contact the person directly if this is an option to resolve, human interaction is always the best. Next, develop and execute your strategy, don’t leave anything to chance, you have spent a lot of time and money to position your brand do not sit by idol and be passive. Actively manage and defend your brand.
Hi Hajj, glad you find my article useful. It was a mini-project just to compile it, and I’m still adding new resources as I discover them.
Just one thing. In mentioning the article above, you actually linked to JobMob’s homepage. Can you change the link to point at the article itself? Here it is for you:
http://jobmob.co.il/blog/online-reputation-management-resources-tips/
Coming back to the question you asked at the beginning of the post, web-active people need to be extra vigilant about their personal brand. On a global scale, there are few people with a unique name and that’s just one small aspect of personal branding to watch out for.
The bittersweet personal note from my end is that it was only while I was compiling the article that I discovered a branding problem of my own. At least now I have a good list of tools to take care of it
Jacob from JobMobOctober 28th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I forgot to mention, I Stumbled this article for you:
Jacob from JobMobhttp://jobmob.stumbleupon.com/review/26924104/
October 28th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Thanks for the fix, Hajj. Now you also have a trackback on JobMob linking back here.
Jacob from JobMobOctober 29th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Hajj, for managing the twitter field Tweet Deck does a great job. maybe that could help your line of thinking here too.
Also, I am for active management of personal brands. So much so that I wanted to do this personal brand stuff in a simple way, to have a personal brand strategy. I noticed that most social places online give you some kind of public profile and I wanted to consolidate my links in one place to make them easier to find and easier to share.
So, I built myself a quick site and included all the links to my stuff. That really was the page… just links to my stuff. Friends started asking me if they could get one after they saw the address on my cards and in my email signatures and listed as my personal site on the social sites. Shoot, I was using it to remember where all my stuff was.
So, I built a tool for most anyone to use and am coaching those around me about their personal brand. It is already paying dividends. To my mind, the old saying that “its about who you know” hits a great insight. That insight is, that it really is about who knows you. So, part of personal branding can also be making it easy for ourselves to be known.
Cheers on the direction of personal brand. Google will find us all and when someone asks Google about us we have the opportunity to play a role in what makes the first impression.
Joseph RueterOctober 29th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Jacob,
I appreciate you Stumbling my blog post it greatly impacted the hits. Your comment about reputation management of your personal brand holds true for most people, they view it like insurance. They evaluate their coverage when something happens and in some cases realize that they need additional coverage. Keep writing great content.
Hajj FlemingsOctober 29th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Great post Hajj. Your right about the need to monitor and even defend your personal brand. I personally use the google alert system and TweetTrak for our company Nectar. They’ve both been amazing.
@Joseph Wonderful idea my friend!
Brett TilfordOctober 30th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Brett,
The purpose of this article was to re-confirm to people the requirements of a personal and business brand are not that different.
Hajj FlemingsOctober 31st, 2008 at 1:26 am
Hey Hajj. There’s so much stuff for people to track in managing their reputation online. This is a great checklist. Even if you don’t do it all in one sitting, you do need to go through all of these at regular intervals.
And, do you know, I have Google alerts set up for all my clients, but I’ve never set one up for myself! What’s that old saying about the cobbler’s children?
Keep up the great work!
Rob
Rob CuestaOctober 31st, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Rob,
Thanks for dropping by. I agree that as social networks and the blogosphere changes reputation management tools will advance as well. I appreciate your perspective on this blog post.
Hajj FlemingsOctober 31st, 2008 at 9:23 pm
just came across. Nice blog
MickeyJanuary 8th, 2009 at 10:45 am