Personal Branding Nightmares: Former US Senator Rick Santorum

We often look at how the internet can aid your personal branding efforts or turn the average Joe into a worldwide sensation.

There is however, a dark side – one to be monitored and avoided if at all possible. To highlight this dark side, we’ll be looking at various personal branding nightmares over the next few months and we’ve chosen to start with a really extreme and well known example: Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum is a former US Senator and a Republican known for his conservative ideals and outspoken disposition, especially on homosexuality, same sex marriages and religion.

Not shy of the spotlight, Santorum has published many periodicals, has a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled "The Elephant in the Room" and is a contributor to Fox News.

Rick Santorum’s Online Identity

Santorum’s personal branding has changed over the years, and has also embraced social networking as a platform to publish his writings and solidify his personal branding. His Facebook fan page has over 5 000 followers and includes articles ‘From the Desk of Rick Santorum’ as well as details on his public speaking appearances. But of the 119 Facebook search results, it’s evident that there are many anti-Santorum supporters online – not to mention the amount of negative commentary on Twitter.

His Google CV also produces a mix of good and bad publicity. The Wikipedia entry is the topped ranked result. But contrasting this is another Wikipedia entry for the term “Santorum”.

Created by American writer, Dan Savage, in an effort to ‘Google bomb’ Santorum’s SERP, the term is a neologism for the by-product of sexual acts which Santorum himself condemned. The openly-homosexual journalist urged the public to adopt the term, and use it online to ‘hijack’ the search results for the name Rick Santorum.His Google CV also features results for books written by Rick Santorum, flanked by denigrating content – or even angry commentary on legitimate Santorum related stories.

Although the politician could definitely benefit from online reputation management, the sheer volume of bad publicity would make the management extremely difficult.

But, as most of the derogatory instances on his Google CV are at least a year or two old, Rick Santorum could improve his personal branding with a LookupPage profile (which would push some of the negative results down) and some serious positive publicity.