Five Ways to Proactively Protect Your Online Reputation

protect your reputation online

Job hunters must keep in mind that countless employers and human resources personnel are utilizing the web and, in particular, social networks to get additional information on prospective employees. This growing method of gaining information on applicants has provoked many job seekers to “get off the grid.” But it’s important to note that information gleaned from the web can be what wins you a position as much as it can be what disqualifies you from one. Because of this, aspiring professionals should consider the following when attempting to perform their own online reputation management:

1. Clean Up Your Social Networking Act

This one is a given, but the ever-evolving nature of social networking has made it more of a meticulous task than merely removing raunchy images or references to dirty deeds. It’s important to always be aware of your privacy settings, as the activity of friends can affect your profile through image tagging and wall posting. Whenever you’re informed of “updates” by-way of an automatic email from your preferred social network, examine privacy settings for signs of change. You may not be aware of it, but updates could include a reformatting of such settings and introducing new options that are defaulted to whatever the social network decides.

2. Expand Your Social Networking Act

Becoming a listed member of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google+ does more than just make you look like a go-getter, it means that so long as you keep these accounts relatively active you help eliminate the possibility of undesirable uncontrolled information about you from making its way to the top of a Google search. These sites are such incredibly popular results that they’ll always sit at the top. That way any unauthorized content related to you, if in existence, is less likely to make an appearance to a possible employer.

3. Buy Your Own Website

If you have a popular name like Robert Smith this one might be impossible, but acquiring a yourname.com resume website is a great way to influence your online reputation massively in one single step. Buying the domain of your full name allows you to make that URL the destination of your online resume and additional personal information you wish to disclose to the public and potential employers. It also keeps someone else from buying it and making your name associated with who-knows-what.

4. Perform a Positive Google Bomb

It’s a primitive measure, but if you have some time to kill, simply do repeated Google searches of your own name with added words that highlight achievements. This is especially effective if these searches lead to information about achievements you otherwise wouldn’t put on a resume for the sake of space. Athletic achievements are a good example of such facts that are good to lead employers to.

5. Send Employers to These Sites Yourself

Employers might still go ahead and do their own search engine snooping but a good way to curb the intensity of their research is to go ahead and provide them with links to these sites through your resume or cover letter. You want to show you have an established online presence you’re happy to share. It’s also an easy way to look confident when making a first impression.

Employers and human resource personnel expect for potential employees to exist online. Your mission is as much to present your Internet image as ideally as possible as it is to protect it from negativity. Don’t fear Facebook and other social sites, but instead, utilize them to increase the odds of getting hired. It requires the proper balance of activity and alertness, but there’s nothing about managing an online reputation that’s outside the realm of possibility of those eager to get hired.

Related: How To Protect Your Online Personal Brand (Infographic).

photo by: cliff1066™

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Privacy, Reputation Tagged With: ,

Do You Make These 5 Online Branding Mistakes?

Your online brand is an essential part of your job search. Employers are searching for your name in search engines and on social networking sites. They’re looking to get a sense of who you are, what you’re passionate about and how you will fit in with their current team. What does your online brand convey about you?

The following mistakes can hurt a job seeker’s chance at landing an open position. Are you guilty of any of these?

1. Weak presence on social and professional networking sites.

One of the first places an employer will look for your online presence is Facebook. After that, they might look to LinkedIn to verify employment history and read your recommendations. Will they find a profile for you? If so, is it professional? Is it complete? Your online profiles need to show a potential employer how valuable you are—or they might move on to a more desirable candidate.

2. Failing to monitor your online personal brand.

There are a variety of reputation monitoring tools available online today, such as Google Alerts. Set up searches and alerts on your name to receive instant notification about recent information posted about you. It can also be a great way to identify any cyber twins – individuals who share your name — that might hurt your job search if an employer confuses you with them.

3. Trying to be everything to everyone.

A personal brand needs to focus on a specific niche – so don’t try to be an expert in several fields if you’re searching for a job. Instead, focus on building a strong online brand as an expert in one field. It will help avoid confusion and you’ll build better relationships with folks in that particular niche as well.

4. Lack of focus or consistency.

If you plan on building a brand on social networking sites, writing a blog or doing other activities to enhance your visibility in the space, you need to be consistent. For example, don’t spend two weeks tweeting, creating content and making connections and then drop off the face of the Earth. It takes time to build an online brand—and you’ll see your effort pay off through search engine optimization, a growing network and positive search results for your name.

5. Only talking about yourself.

No one wants to follow or friend someone who is constantly pushing their own content or talking about their job search activities. In order to brand yourself as a thought leader in your niche, share content related to your field, interact with other professionals and provide value. That’s how you’ll make the most meaningful relationships that can ultimately help your career.

What other online branding mistakes do you see people making?

Tony Morrison is the Vice President at Cachinko, a unique professional community where social networking and job opportunities come together. His roles include sales, marketing, and business development. He is passionate about building B2B and B2C client relationships and brings this passion to Cachinko where he focuses on helping job seekers to find their ideal job and employers to find, attract, and engage their next rock star candidates. Find him on Facebook.

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Is Google Plus the Personal Branding Tool of the Future?

Targeted messaging for personal branding in social media can be tricky. The types of messaging that are appropriate for Facebook may not be right for LinkedIn. A one size fits all approach to personal branding may not be the right tactic when you have multiple social media platforms which each have a different audience profile. You don’t want to use the same kind of messaging for casual acquaintance networking as you do for professional networking and job search networking.

And to further muddy the networking waters, what do you do when you have a significant social media overlap? You may have professional contacts and former professors who are also Facebook friends. When you add casual acquaintances and family members into the mix, personal brand messaging can become unnecessarily complicated.

It can become far too easy to lose track of the fact that you’ve got professional contacts included among Facebook friends. Breezy status updates which may be perfectly compatible with personal brand messaging for more intimate acquaintances may be entirely inappropriate for consumption by professional colleagues or academic peers. And LinkedIn status updates which should be focusing on a more serious manner of reflecting your personal brand should normally never be used in the casual relaxed way that can be entirely appropriate for much of your Facebook audience.

Google+ may prove to be a personal branding tool that could avoid these mixed audience pitfalls. Instead of using multiple social media sites, Google+ offers the potential of using just one platform for crafting tailored messaging to distinctly different audiences. Google+ has a series of ingenious circles in which you can place contacts according to the type of relationship you have with each individual.

All of your professional contacts can be placed in one circle making it easy to target specific messaging appropriate for professional networking. A more relaxed approach to personal branding through less formal messaging can be accomplished by addressing friends and acquaintances with the appropriate forms of communication based on the specific kinds of relationships you have with them. And the ability to build distinct circles based on relationship type is infinite.


One possible advantage of a single social media platform approach is that none of your contacts will know which circle they’re in. If a Google+ contact has you in their acquaintance circle, but you’ve placed them in the less intimate professional networking circle, they have no way of knowing. Google+ also allows room for a lot more nuance in social media interactions. If managing your messaging is most easily accomplished by keeping individuals in one circle only, that’s fine.

But if you want to incorporate a bit more nuance into the mix after noodling about on Google+ for a while, you can do that too. You may have situations where someone is a work colleague as well as a close personal friend. You can have them in your professional networking circle as well as in your friend circle. Many professional contacts may not be friends, but it may be entirely appropriate to include them in an acquaintance circle.

Google+ certainly has the potential to be an extremely effective personal branding tool going forward. But whether its potential can be realized is uncertain. Google has a track record of producing excellent services which are sometimes not big hits with the public. Among some of the more memorable Google offerings which never lived up to their potential are Google Buzz and Wave. No matter how great the potential of Google+, if people don’t recognize how great the platform is and flock to it in great numbers, it could result in another well-conceived and brilliant product that never reaches its true potential.

For more tips, check out 10 Personal Branding Ideas for Google Plus.

Jesse Langley lives near Chicago. He divides his time among work, writing and family life. He writes on behalf of Colorado Technical University and has a keen interest in blogging and social media. He also writes for professionalintern.com. 

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The Two-Dimensional You: Creating a Successful Personal Brand

dimensions of your personal brand

Sometimes in the world of marketing, we get a little “cart before the horse”. Everyone is always focused on marketing a brand, selling a brand, pushing a brand. This is all well and good, but how does one create a brand? What are the steps required to make sure that the brand created is functional and memorable? In short, how is a brand made? While it can be daunting to attempt to boil any idea, business, or physical entity, down into a recognizable two-dimensional visual representation, there are some steps one can take to make the process easier and more successful.

Since branding can take many forms, for the sake of this article, we will focus primarily on the process of personal branding, and the effective creation of a personal business identity. A brand is what was formerly referred to as a trademark. As defined by the American Marketing Association, it is a “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” In the case of a personal brand, it is also referred to as a “trade name”. To generate a personal brand successfully, use the three steps below as a jumping off point.

A. Define Yourself

This is actually the most difficult step, and the portion of the process you should plan to spend the most time developing. Ask yourself how people perceive you. What words do they use to describe you and your business? What aspect of yourself are you attempting to sell or market? What aspect of yourself or business is unique and sets you apart from other similar types or companies? What is your niche market? Look at the answers to these questions.

It may also be helpful to create a map, or plan of what you hope to accomplish by branding yourself. Make sure that you use the information you glean from those around you, to further your goals for yourself. Finally, create a name, based on these ideas.

B. The Two-Dimensional You

Remember that a personal brand is, in essence, your visual package. It’s the athlete on the box of Wheaties at the grocery store. The baby, sitting in the Michelin tire. The little boy fishing that opens every motion picture produced by Dreamworks.

Now that you have defined yourself, it’s time to create a visual representation of that definition. This visual representation of yourself needs to appear everywhere, on any and all media associated with you. Do not be overly esoteric with your design. It is helpful to sit down with friends or associates and brainstorm how the verbal definitions you discovered via Part A, can be visually represented.

Once you have some ideas, look at them across media. Print some out on your computer and see how they look as stationary, as homepage images, as logos on business cards. Ask strangers what the various logos mean to them. Once you are clear about which logo or design is most effective, you are ready to begin to brand yourself publicly.

C. The Media Juggernaut

If you are at the point of creating a personal brand, it is assumed that you have already examined and defined where you want your business to be in one year, three years, five years, etc., and that you have created a solid business plan. It is important to have these ideas in place before you begin to introduce your brand to a wider audience, because the last thing you want to have happen is for your brand to gain negative associations because you were unprepared for business.

Creating a positive reputation is much more effective than attempting to repair a poor one. If you have not yet created a solid business model, do that, then proceed with Part C. In order for people to find you, you must place your brand where it can be discovered. In today’s market, that means, literally, everywhere. Create an online presence with a clear and recognizable email address, a personal website, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles, blog posts, press releases, Internet business cards and email marketing, the use of an online portfolio, and targeted online advertising.

Create a physical presence with business cards, resumes, reference documents, and carry representative work on your handheld device, CD, DVD, or flash drive, so that it can be shown to somebody immediately, if necessary. With all of these marketing tools, the presence of your brand, the design that represents you, is vital. Your personal brand should appear on everything. Repetition breeds recognition, so the more you can get your name, and the images associated with it, out there into the public eye, the more successful your brand will be.

Bottom Line

Though it may seem like a lot to take on, personal branding is incredibly important in the development of a thriving personal business. Done correctly, it can propel you, and your product or company, into an incredible future. You owe it to yourself to take the time to create the best representation of yourself that you can. Remember, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and in this age of multimedia and online marketing, that first impression is your brand.

To learn more, check out our Personal Branding Workshops running in the UK and further afield.

Susan Black is a tech and web geek who spends most of her working week reading and writing on marketing techniques, both online and off. She writes here for discount sofa specialists sofasandsectionals (dot com).

photo by: colinlogan

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