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5 Ways to Ruin Your Personal Brand

The concept of a personal brand is not a new one – people have been selling themselves for as long as trade and commerce has existed. But in the age of instant communication, web searches, Twitter, and any number of other platforms for conveying detailed information in a highly-personalized way, the potential for building a strong personal brand has never been greater. At the same time, the pitfalls has never been more staggering. These powerful tools that can be used for building up a brand can just as easily be used to destroy your personal brand. What follow are five of the most common mistakes that can ruin your personal brand.

#1 Posting Something You Shouldn’t

It is so easy to post status updates, images, videos, and blog posts that the danger for posting something extremely inappropriate is huge. It only takes one angry day, one wild night, or one lapse in judgment to permanently embed in the internet something you desperately will not want a future or current employer to find. While you might think you can easily remove this content, the truth is there are countless services that archive the internet frequently, so the odds are good that anything you post will remain forever accessible to those willing to look deep enough.

#2 Lying on Your Résumé

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to lie on your résumé to get a job. It may be as small as fudging dates of unemployment a bit, or as large as pulling a graduate degree or long-term job from thin air. Finding the truth about these things has become easier and easier with the search tools available on the internet, and companies’ and schools’ increasing online presence. No matter the degree of the falsehood, companies take this extremely seriously, and the consequences for your employment and your brand can be dire. 

#3 Changing Your Focus

If you’re known primarily for one thing, loved for it, and have built up a huge following, you may want to think carefully before drastically changing your direction. While you may be a complex, nuanced person in real life, on the internet your followers generally like you for one or two specific things. Stop fulfilling those expectations in order to pursue something very different, and you may find your brand evaporating overnight.

#4 Pretending to Be An Authority

Be good at what you do. The internet is full of a lot of people who know what they’re talking about, and who will be quick to expose you as a fraud if you’re just faking it. The most successful brands are built around a true core of expert knowledge, and although it may be possible to build a brand up temporarily by pretending to be an expert, eventually you will be found out. When you are, the results will be swift, and it may be impossible to ever truly recover your good name.

#5 Having Others Do Your Work

Similarly, if you’re building a personal brand, people really do expect that it’s you they’re listening to. If you hire assistants to help you tweet or write blog posts, be completely transparent about that. Always let people know when words are coming from you, and when they’re coming from someone else. Otherwise, you risk being exposed at some point in the future, and having an enormous backlash borne of a feeling of betrayal.

Low Cost Link Building Techniques

Keyword management, strong title selection, and good semantic tagging will only get your site so far in

terms of search engine results. Ultimately, the cornerstone of any good search engine strategy is link building – strong and topical inbound links to your site from other high-relevance sites will do wonders for your search engine placement across all of your keywords. There are many different ways to gain inbound links, and many of the most effective are actually free or cost very little. These are a few of the easiest, and most effective, way to build your links.

Commenting on Other Blogs and Forums

One of the easiest ways to garner links without spending a penny is to simply become active on other blogs and forums that are topical to your subject. Whenever you leave a comment on a blog you should have the option to include a URL, which will point to your site from every comment you leave. In forum posting you will be able to include a signature, which can feature a link to your site. In both of these cases, take care not to be seen as a spammer – make topical responses to the posts or threads, and don’t actively promote your site, just let the link sit there.

Registering for Pages

There are countless sites out there which allow you to create a profile that can include a link to your site. Many of these sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn, are free, and also have high search engine relevance. Others, such as LookupPage, are built specifically to improve your search engine ranking. These pages act not only as a source of inbound links to your page, but also as reputation management pages, allowing you to create another node in search engine results with content about your brand that you control. 

Including a Blogroll

Other blogs can be a great source of inbound links, as they can be highly topical, and often hold quite a bit of sway with search engines like Google. A blogroll, which generally sits in the sidebar of your blog, allows you to link to blogs you like or have a relationship with. These blogs, in turn, will link back to your site. There are services available which can help put you in touch with good blog matches, or you can simply contact the operators of blogs you think would be a good fit and offer to trade links on one another’s blogrolls.

Writing Guest Posts

One excellent way to get an inbound link from a higher-profile blog or informational site is to contribute a feature to that site. This will give you the opportunity to write in your area of expertise, demonstrating to their readers why they might want to visit your site, but will also give you a valuable inbound link. Even once your feature is off of the front page and buried deep in the archives, the inbound link will remain, and continue to help with your search engine relevance.

Custom Branding Tips for Twitter

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important way to reach out to existing customers and potential clients, and to build and manage your personal brand. With its ease of use, simple communication tools, and low barriers to entry, it is quickly becoming a cornerstone to a strong online brand presence. Although it’s simple to set up, there a few tips that can help you create a custom profile that best promotes your brand.

#1 It’s All in a Name

Make sure your custom profile name accurately and clearly represents your brand. One of the biggest mistakes people make when setting up a Twitter account for their brand is that they choose an esoteric phrase that is tangentially related to the business. Your business or brand name should be a part of your Twitter name. If that name by itself is taken, consider adding a keyword that is highly used in searches within your market. No matter how well you build your Twitter presence, if customers can’t find you when they search, you will have failed.

#2 A Short and Punchy Bio

With only 160 characters to work with, your Twitter profile’s description may seem quite limited. You’ll want to spend some time choosing each word carefully, to maximize the effectiveness of your profile page. It’s not necessary to use the description to make a sales pitch – instead, use the description to place a handful of keywords so your account shows up on searches, and try to hook new followers with an interesting fact or witticism.

#3 Profile Image and Logo

You can upload a profile picture, which will serve as your Twitter avatar for your followers. If you are a personal brand, you may want to use an image of yourself. If your brand is a business, this might be a good place for your company logo. Many people find it useful to change their images regularly, so that followers never become overly acclimated to seeing the same picture. Some Twitter-centric programs even offer options to periodically rotate your image, so that you can simply upload a handful of pictures and the process of changing them will be automated.

#4 A Custom Background

Perhaps the best opportunity to promote your brand actually comes in the form of the custom background. Rather than simply using a plain color or a stock background, take the time to make a custom background that fits your Twitter account. There are numerous templates around to help you ensure your image isn’t cut off by the content in the center of Twitter’s site. How exactly you want your background to appear is up to you; many people include their logo here, an image of their product, or a background that mimics the appearance of their personal blog. Whatever you do, use this to maintain a sense of continuity with your overall brand.

#5 Custom Color Scheme

Related to the above, Twitter also allows you to customize the color scheme on your Twitter profile. While this might seem like a small thing, if your brand exists primarily as a blog or personal website, taking the time to match the colors of the text and links can actually do a great deal in reinforcing your brand image in customers’ minds.

How to Manage Your Reputation from Your Phone

Managing your online reputation is critical to maintaining a strong internet brand, but it does require a certain level of vigilance and commitment. One way to make this a bit easier is to build into your workflow a number of regular updates and check-ins, which can be greatly assisted by using a number of phone-based applications. This allows you to manage your reputation on the go, helping you to always keep on top of things.

There are three types of phone software that will best help you manage your reputation: Twitter clients, blog software, and RSS feeders. For the most part these applications are free, although some may have a nominal fee to download them.

Manage Your Twitter

Your Twitter presence is one of the most important reputation management tools you have, and a number of programs exist to facilitate Twitter interactions via your phone. The most popular Twitter client, by far, is TweetDeck, which allows users to easily update their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and regularly refresh complex searches that can help you track what is being said about your brand. Although TweetDeck does not have support for many smartphones, it does have an iPhone app, available free.

BlackBerry users have a number of strong options, including UberTwitter and Seesmic, both of which offer thread searching to help you look after your reputation, and the forthcoming official Twitter client from RIM. Android users have more and more users each day, but the most robust client currently available is Twitroid.

Manage Your Blog
 
Updating your blog is another aspect of managing your brand that can be managed via your phone. Although any type of blog can be updated via a built-in browser, WordPress blogs are most conducive to integrated updating. In fact, WordPress makes an iPhone app, a BlackBerry app, and an Android app, all designed exclusively to streamline updating, maintaining, and editing your blog on the go. Many BlackBerry users also use Viigo, which features integrated blogging capabilities, as well as Twitter support.

Track Your Reputation on RSS

Finally, one often overlooked tool to help in tracking and managing your reputation is the RSS feeder. RSS feeds can be built on virtually any parameters, and it’s relatively easy to set up an RSS feed to update when a Google search for your brand name changes, using a service like FeedMySearch. By using an integrated RSS feeder like Manifesto for the iPhone, NewsGator or Viigo for the BlackBerry, or the built-in feeder on an Android, you can ensure you are immediately informed any time the first few pages of searches for your brand name change.

The current trend in app design is towards more robust, full-featured programs that bring together features of multiple programs. As a result, it is likely that over the next year new programs will be rolled out for all three major smartphone systems that will integrate Twitter tracking and updating, Facebook support, blog editing, and RSS feeds. For now, though, a combination of TweetDeck, the official WordPress software, and Manifesto will give iPhone users everything they need; BlackBerry users can rely exclusively on Viigo, or supplement its somewhat clunky Twitter support with UberTwitter; and Android users can meet their needs with Twitroid, WordPress, and the built in RSS feeder.

The Importance of Online Branding for Politicians

While the new marketing space of the internet has repercussions for all sorts of personal branding, it is perhaps most important for politicians. By their very nature, political figures are expected to be in touch with their constituents, are discussed frequently, and are held to a higher standard than virtually any other brand. At the same time, they are generally facing a very active force trying to tarnish their brand, in the form of their opposition. As a result, online brand management is a crucial part of achieving and maintaining success as a political figure.

It is a truth of politics that if an opponent is utilizing a form of media that a politician isn’t, then they control the discourse absolutely. Nowhere is that more true than on the internet. If a political brand is left unattended, it is certain that eventually the opposition will become aware of this and have a field day with it. Public perception is shaped more and more by what is read online, and without careful brand management the online space can become quickly inundated with negative spin.

One of the most important tools to managing an online political brand is simply being fully available through as many means as is possible. Politicians should have a Twitter presence, a blog, and pages on every major social networking platform, like LinkedIn, LookupPage and other niche networks. This allows them to stay in touch with their constituency whenever a problem or concern arises, to tap into massive numbers of supporters for projects, and to undertake spin control when necessary. It also limits the opposition from dominating those spaces and having free rein to say whatever they choose.

Controlling search results for the political brand is also crucial. The first page of search results in any major search engine should lead to sources friendly to the politician, or at the very worst neutral. Having a weak Google and search engine strategy can result in opposition candidates and parties creating pages that outline perceived faults in the politician, to undermine their credibility.

More and more people turn to the internet for primary information about a political candidate, and it is imperative that this information be controlled to prevent damage to the brand. The tools used to manage a political brand are much the same as those used to manage any personal brand, and rely primarily on creating high-relevance pages that show up as first page results for the brand. Free services such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr can all be used to provide landing pages that give information about the politician and outline their stances on key issues. Services with a nominal fee, such as LookupPage, can also be used to help ensure first page visibility.

If the worst does happen and the political opposition ends up on the first page of results, it is important to realize that this can be changed by building up inbound links, adding more high-value landing pages, and rallying supporters, negative sites can be buried on page three or four, far past where most people browse.

Review of the Best Twitter Monitoring Software

Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool not only for getting the word out about your personal brand, but also for tracking discussion about your brand, be it your business or yourself, online. Millions of users are constantly tweeting away about everything imaginable, and sometimes their tweets will be about you or  your business. Learning to track Twitter can not only help you understand what your clients are looking for, but also identify any problems they might be having. Recognizing and fixing these problems immediately, without even having to be contacted, is an incredible strength.

Twitter Monitoring Services

There are many different Twitter monitoring services out there, but one of the most effective, and completely free, services is Monitter. The interface for Monitter is robust, but can be used simply by entering your brand name into one of the three search bars. A long list of every tweet using that phrase will then appear, and it will auto-refresh roughly in real time. 

Using Monitter to the Max

To truly leverage Monitter, however, you’ll want to take advantage of the fact that it has a built in RSS feed for every search. This means that you can integrate Monitter with an RSS feeder to effectively be updated every 90 seconds on any new tweets that reference your brand. This is an incredibly effective way to manage your online reputation, as it allows you to catch problems as they arise and address them quickly and efficiently.

Monitter has many other features as well, including widgets that you can embed into your site. This means that any tweets that reference your brand will be immediately replicated on your own site, giving your customers a central place to view information about you as it comes in off the wire. And while Monitter is free, it still offers a wide range of robust features.

CoTweet Advanced Keyword Monitoring

A more extensive Twitter monitoring suite can be found in CoTweet, a platform built for businesses to interact with their customer bases. CoTweet allows you to build an account that constantly tracks a large number of keywords and phrases, so that you can catch every possible mention of your brand. CoTweet can then send you updates in many different ways, and at the frequency you request. CoTweet can be used with multiple accounts, and in addition to Twitter monitoring features it includes the ability to schedule tweets, thread conversations, and a number of other functions to help you more seamlessly manage your Twitter reputation. 

Successful Brand Monitoring

By using one of these, or any of the other free Twitter monitor services available, you will be able to keep a close eye on your presence on Twitter. This is important for everyone from the small personal brand to the manager of a large company, as it allows you to take care of small problems before they become large, and to shape your online reputation actively.

Interacting with your users, clients, and potential customers via Twitter means more than just waiting for them to tweet you directly, it means being proactive in solving their issues and reaching out to contact them after they express an interest in your brand. With a good Twitter monitor service and reputation management sites like LookUpPage, you will have the tools you need to always be well informed and to continue improving your reputation online.

Will Users Forgive Google for Exposing Their Identities?

Image by Getty Images 

One of the most influential companies in the world is the search-engine and information technology giant, Google. Although users around the world love Google for the many tools it offers to make their lives easier, recently Google has rolled out a number of services which people see as violations of privacy. These technologies include Google Buzz, Google Streetview, Google Mail, and even the core search engine.

When Google Buzz rolled out in February, Google Buzz users had their Gmail contact history revealed on their public Google profile. Every email sent and chat message exchange was available for the public to see. A boss could see an employee emailing competitors, a partner could see their significant other emailing an ex, and any number of other revealing situations.

Since many people did not know how, or did not realize that they need to opt out of this Google Buzz feature, it has led to cries that Google is showing sensitive information without explicit user consent. A related concern is with the mobile version of Google Buzz, which by default reveals the exact location a person was at when they made a post.

In response to a recent outcry over privacy concerns, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in The Register saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This cavalier attitude towards privacy has led some Google users to question whether they can simply forgive Google pushing Google isto an ever growing  reputation management crisis.

Analyzing The Crisis Response

However, Google, for its part, has been quick to respond to their reputation management crisis. The company has integrated features allowing users to turn off updates about their location, and to stop information about their contacts from being shared by default. While many people feel this is too little too late – and indeed, that the fact they made these changes is tantamount to admitting wrongdoing – others believe the company is making a genuine effort to correct an error in judgment.

Whether the public ultimately accepts Google’s attempts at reconciliation remains to be seen, but in similar cases in the past the company has shown themselves to be adept at addressing concerns, explaining their logic, and making amends for any damage that was done.

Improve Your Google CV with Videos and Images

Once you’ve started to get your Google CV under control, you’ll want to also look at the results that come up on Google Image and Google Video searches. These results may be radically different from your traditional Google CV search, and the last thing you want to show up on an image or video search is an unflattering or embarrassing picture or clip of you. 

The easiest way to get rid of an undesirable image or video is to push it off of the first page of results by getting other images or videos to replace it. While eventually Google and other search engines will use facial recognition software to automatically tag images and videos, for now they rely on things like the Alt and Title tags of an image, and surrounding text. In order to make images you choose come up first, simply rely on tags that hit the keywords you are targeting. 

The great thing about both images and video is that there are a number of free, high-relevance sites you can upload your media files to, and these services all have built in tools to tag the media with the key words and phrases you want. Sites such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and LookupPage are all great places to post images and videos that reflect well on your online reputation. 

Best of all, Google and other engines tend to weight newer content more highly than older content. That means that if you post a new image or video with the same keywords as an old image or video you want to get rid of, Google will tend to rank your new media more highly than the old. It therefore doesn’t take too much effort to clean up your Google video and image legacy online.

Three High Ranking Online Reputation Management Tools

While there are many different tools one can use to manage their online reputation, there are a handful that stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. These three, particularly, have a great deal of clout, and can be used in almost any situation to improve an online brand.

WordPress Website

WordPress is the premiere blogging platform used in the world, with more than 200 million blogs running on the software. It is built with user interaction in mind, and features an incredibly-intuitive backend that anyone can learn to use in a short period of time. Running a blog on Wordpress is one of the best ways to be featured near the top of search results, because the very nature of blogs lends itself quite well to having a great deal of search engine relevant content

Search engines are occupied with many things, but one of the most important factors in determining relevance is the freshness of content. Because blogs encourage their users to update frequently, search engines such as Google look at them regularly to see that the content has changed. And tools like WordPress actually include built in features that let a number of different websites and services know whenever new content is posted, so that each new post is echoed around the web, offering many hooks for search engines to pick up your content.

LookupPage

LookupPage is an incredibly high-ranking business directory that gives members an inside view of who exactly is viewing their profile on the web. Businesses and personalities can use LookupPage to quickly establish a presence on the web with no hassle at all. When members sign up with sign up with LookupPage they create a basic profile for themselves, putting down important information about their business, uploading a logo, and generally creating a business-card style presence on the web.

The reason LookupPage is powerful is that 95% of LookupPage Pro users are featured on Google’s first page. This gives a business or personality a place for information that they input and have total control over, presented in a professional manner. The LookupPage pro offering has no ads, and keeps close track of who is viewing the profile, so that businesses can analyze who is landing there, what they searched for to arrive there, and other key data.

Twitter

Because of Twitter’s very strong web presence, a Twitter username will very often show up in the first page of search results for that term. As a result, setting up a free Twitter account using a personal name or a business name can be an easy, quick, and effective way to establish a first page listing. Twitter allows information to be personalized, a custom icon to be uploaded, which may be a photograph or company logo, and the background to be customized.

Additionally, a Twitter account can be used to publish occasional updates promoting positive aspect of one’s business. These updates will then be displayed on the highly-ranked profile page. This is a great way to manage one’s brand and reach out to potential and existing customers for free, and with very little time investment.

The Google Buzz Backlash - How to Make Sure Your Backlash Isn't Larger Than Your Buzz

Last week when Google released its new social networking feature, Google Buzz, to compete with other popular social networking and micro-blogging services like Twitter and Facebook, the media giant set up their new social network to automatically enroll tens of millions of Gmail users. While having millions of new users instantly is a competitive advantage the only online giants like Google can enjoy, the company's unilateral actions have resulted in a large and vocal Google Buzz backlash.

As angry users have noted online, automatically opting-in people and intimately connecting them with their email contacts oversteps the social boundaries that many users have worked to create online. Today people have multiple identities online that they manage through distinct avenues--they know that they must carefully craft each of their online reputations depending on what social network or online community they are a part of. For example, many people use facebook to connect with their friends and LinkedIn for establish relationships with professional contacts. When Google Buzz stepped in and suddenly, without much of a pre-buzz, intimately connected users with their distant and disorganized email contacts, users responded by giving Google buzz a reputation management problem that they’ve been scrambling to correct ever since.

What’s to be Learned from Google’s Buzz Backlash?

As internet companies continue to provide powerful technology and communication solutions for businesses and individuals, they must keep a balance between meeting their users needs and their needs. It’s also very important, as Google’s users noted, to understand the social distinctions between different types of media--social bookmarks are clearly less intimate than social networks, and social networks far less intimate than email. Each type of media has different social norms that companies must recognize and attempt to blend slowly. Coercing millions upon millions of users to allow their private information to be used by a new technology that breaks the current online social norms is bound to result in a backlash bigger than your new products buzz.

How To Prevent Buzz Backlash

If you want to prevent buzz backlash or are looking to manage your own online crisis, LookupPage can be one of the best places to find highly effective online reputation management strategies, brand reputation tips and crisis management tools.

"Can I Quote You?" Managing Your Online Reputation in the Age of the Internet Reporter

In days of yore, when reporters were writing articles they had to make dozens of telephone calls to track down celebrities and their public relations representatives to get contextual quotes. However today, reporters have started taking quotes for their articles directly from the web--making it more important than ever that high profile individuals know how to craft their online reputation and use social media to their advantage. 

While it’s easy to imagine how this new type of reporting could get out of hand--tweets taken out of context and facebook posts altered for articles--these powerful new online publishing platforms also have the ability to help set the record straight and be effective crisis management tools.

Take the case of celebrity Lindsay Lohan and her x-girlfriend Sam for example. When RadarOnline, an online celebrity gossip magazine, published an article about Lindsay’s x-girlfriend beating and chocking her, Lindsey took the web. She tweeted, "This is become a bit much...Samantha R never raised a hand to me. I've never said she did. Enough is Enough. Focus on more important world issues." Shortly after publishing this tweet, a more popular news source, US Magazine, picked the story up and published her tweets online--allowing Lindsey to set the record straight.

By having an established presence online, Lindsay Lohan was able to communicate directly with her fans and the reporters always following her every move. She no longer has to wait for someone to contact her and write a favorable story because she can use twitter, facebook and other social media to connect directly with her fans and set the record straight. In addition, Lindsay’s tweets also created the space for Sam, her x-girlfriend, to respond publicly and now the two have a unified public presence denouncing RaderOnline’s accusations.

While it is possible to manage your own online reputation, as Lindsay did in this case, their are also many services that help celebrities and high profile business people set the record straight. For example, by registering for LookupPage, users have the ability to create a webpage with positive content and track who views their profile online. In addition, LookupPage has one of the highest rankings on Google, so every user that signs up can be sure that their positive profile will be at the top of their Google CV, an accessible place for internet reporters and followers.   

How To Manage Your Google CV

As nearly everyone knows by now, Google is one of the most powerful search engines and providers of online tools. When people are interested to know about you or your business, one of the first things they do is search Google. That’s right, your Google CV is the first impression people have of you, so it’s important to know how to manage your reputation in Google effectively. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Know What’s Crawled Before You Sign Up 

Every day dozens of websites ask visitors to register with their names, create a username, and establish identities in online communities. While it’s illegal to share your email with third parties, many websites and social networks have no problem sharing your name or username with Google and you can be sure that many of these websites will be some of the first results on your Google CV.

Before you sign up to a website, check to see if the website is crawled on Google. See what kind of content is showing up and then determine if you should register to the site and what information you can list there.

Keep Track of Where You’re Registered

As people register to more and more websites everyday, it can get challenging to keep track of all the separate accounts and identities that you or your business may have online. If you have a Google Account you can easily sign up for Google Docs and use a spreadsheet to keep track of all your usernames and passwords. This is a highly effective way to make sure that as you establish more online identities, that you’ll be able to update them with you or your businesses’ information easily and not leave any old information on your Google CV.

Register to Websites that Improve Your Google CV

Most people and businesses have an idea of the image they would like to portray online or an image that they’d like customers to associate with their brand. The best way to craft your Google CV is to register to high ranking websites that will improve your online image. Today there are thousands of niche social networks that rank high on Google and can improve your online identity. Some social networks, like LookupPage, rank especially high on Google and are built for helping users create a positive image online. 

Take a Pen Name

While in some social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, is it expected that you will use your real name, many websites give you the option to use a nick name or pen name. You should only register your real name to social networks and websites that improve your online image and brand. For other websites, take a pen name or nickname so that you don’t risk having the website connected to you or your company’s Goolge CV. 

Sign Up for Google Alerts

If you have an account with Google, you can register for Google Alerts and get an email every time Google indexes a new page with your name or your business. Setting up Google Alerts is easy, and helps you to know immediately as your reputation is being built online. One tip: Make sure that you place quotations around your name when you are searching or setting up your Google Alert, this way you’ll get very targeted results.