Category: Personal Reputation Management
I could be accused of shooting myself in the foot here, but I meet lots of people who are very interested at what we do on behalf of our clients but, for whatever reason, do not want/cannot afford to employ a professional services company, like De Leon, to transform their online presence.
If we assume that the case is made for actively managing our online reputation/presence then what can people do for themselves if they are not savvy in the ways of online PR, copy writing, search engine optimisation? Let’s also assume that an individual wants to see themselves represented positively and accurately online.
So here, free of charge and without obligation, are a few pointers:
• Firstly, if you are into Facebook, MySpace or other similar social networks, consider carefully what you allow strangers to see. The press has been littered with stories of people that have been “caught” as a result of comments written by them on Facebook. Famously, employees have had a go at their bosses online, only to discover that their bosses were able to read their missives with the inevitable results. There’s a reason you have a network of friends and why some people are in it and the rest of the world is not.!
• Create business profiles on social networks like LinkedIn as well as niche social communities according to your interest such as YouTube and Flickr, or any of the other many social media sharing and news web sites.
• Start a blog. Register your own domain name and use one of the big blogging sites to host it for you. The domain name costs £10/year and the blog host service is often free.
• Registering a domain that includes your own name is important and competition for domains is only going to increase over time. Very few people have unique names and there will always be competition for the best domain name and for recognition by the search engines such as Google.
• Consider registering domain names for your family members. Your children may not want/need a domain name just now but at some point they will be applying to universities or entering the job market. Either way, a unique, relevant domain name is likely to become ever more important and, even, a necessity.
• Find the good stuff that’s already out there about you that might not yet be ranking on the first page and get links to that content. Cross linking between profiles is one way to do this, but promoting your interests and even content that you’ve created online with links to the pages that represent your accomplishments can also work well.
There are many more things an individual can do to improve their online reputation but the important thing to remember is that whatever gets put online, is pretty much forever. Sometimes it seems like a good idea at the time and now it’s not, sometimes it’s simply not accurate and sometimes the information reflects a person’s previous situation but is not an accurate representation now.
That all sounds like a lot of effort but, spread over time, it’s possible to make progress and produce some decent results.
Alternatively, you could, for a very small fee, employ De Leon to do all of the above for you and also bring our PR, copywriting and SEO skills to bear and really make an impression.
Philip Westerman, De Leon