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5 Ways To Take Control Of Your Personal Brand

Posted: 01 May 2009 04:30 PM PDT

Dan Schawbel is the author of the bestselling book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog.

With a bad economy, more pressure at work and overwhelming competition, investing in yourself and your future is crucial. There are a lot of new trends and tricks that you can take advantage of now. Below are five easy and initial steps you can take to start building your brand today. These will help you control your online identity, protect your future, centralize your digital assets, safeguard your brand from threats and more.

Tell us how you've taken control of your personal brand in the comments below.
1. Claim your Google profile

Recently, Google (Google reviews) launched Google Profiles, a feature that enables users to claim their own profiles which are displayed at the bottom of search results when their names are Googled.

To get started, register for a Google account. If you are already using Google documents or Gmail (Gmail reviews), then you have an existing account. Use your full name when you register, so you can get a vanity Google Profile URL. Next, when editing your Google profile, you'll need to put a check mark where it says "Display my full name so I can be found in search." The more information you fill out, the higher up your rank will be, so include links to your blog, and other social networks, and fill out your profile information accordingly.
2. Reserve your name on social networks

Aside from having a Google profile alongside a blog or traditional website, you'll want to see if your brand name is available on various social networking sites. By using Namechk.com or Knowem.com, you'll be able to see where you can claim your brand name on almost all the social networks (at least the largest ones that count). Both of these track social networks such as Facebook (Facebook reviews), LinkedIn (LinkedIn reviews), Sphinn, Ning, Odeo, FriendFeed (FriendFeed reviews), etc.

By reserving your name on the largest social networks and the ones that are meaningful to your industry, you're protecting your brand against the competition. There are probably other people with your brand name around the world and, if there aren't, one might be born in an instant. By locking down your brand name, you're securing your future, whether you choose to leverage all of these profiles to promote your brand or not.
3. Establish a personal hub

You need to have a central place where people can go to learn more about you and everything you're working on. For instance, Nombray.com allows you to display all of your social networking profiles, blogs and websites under a single domain name (yourname.com). This way, people can make sense of your digital presence and you won't have to direct them to various websites, which can get tedious and obnoxious. Aside from Nombray as a personal hub option, you have the power to select the digital asset you're most proud of to be included in all of your marketing materials. It could be a blog that vividly displays your digital identity, including pictures of your social networking profiles, press mentions, a video resume, endorsements from clients or managers and much more.

Choose only one website for your personal hub because people, namely recruiters, don't want to have to search the entire web for your information. Having a central hub allows you to use one website and put that on your business card, resume, and other materials because you don't have enough space otherwise.
4. Have a reputation management strategy

Some companies are having a difficult time not just entering the social media realm, but protecting their brand from disasters that may occur. Domino's recently found this out the hard way when employees filmed themselves doing "questionable" things to some Domino's food products. That video circulated around millions of times and was in a lot of newspapers, on TV and on various blogs. The end result was that they lost customers, that people are probably questioning a lot of other places like Domino's, and the President of Domino's USA had to respond with a video apologizing to the world.

The moral of the story is that a single person can damage your brand, whether they work for your company or not. It doesn't matter if that brand is a company, product or person, the results are real and it forces us all to have a reputation management strategy. Are you viewing the comments said about your brand right now using Google alerts and search.twitter.com? Do you have a system in place where you're reacting to comments in a specific way? For instance, if someone tweets something negative associated with your brand, how are you responding? Depending on what is said, it might be wise or foolish to respond back. If someone says something positive, I think you should at least say "thank you" and if you're lucky, you might even get an endorsement out of it.
5. Promote your expertise

In the beginning of this year, I mentioned the "social media resume," which called for multimedia elements and sharing features that a traditional resume lacked. In your own personal branding campaign, there are other ways to get your experience out there, aside from a social media resume. The latest one is called twtjobs, a service for Twittering your resume, with many fields that you would find on a resume, such as experience, industry, 140 character resume, experience level and more. The term "resume" has become ubiquitous online because everything you publish becomes your identity or "who you are."

How Twitter Is Dethroning The Old Guard

Posted: 01 May 2009 04:22 PM PDT

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected. You can follow him on Twitter.

With Oprah showcasing Twitter recently to her millions of soccer moms, and other traditional media taking notice, I'm guessing that people who are not big users of technology, either your mom or relatives, have recently asked you like they have asked me, "What is the big deal about TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews? Is it just a fad or is it really impacting how we interact and use the web? And if the latter, in what ways?"

Below are the three areas where Twitter, in its rise as the next great social media site, is I think beginning to dethrone (or at least impact) several of the major players and technologies in the game.
The Social Dethrone: MySpace

I want to take my network with me

Of course, people will continue to use MySpaceMySpace reviewsMySpace reviews, but due to its heavy graphics MySpace is part of the past generation of social networks more suitable for computers. With its simplicity and ease of use, Twitter could be the first "everywhere social network," almost as simple to use via mobile as via a computer. This makes Twitter much more suitable for our "constantly connected age," where people want to share and read content from their handheld on a street corner as easily as they can while sitting at their desk at home.

The social networks of our times are not limited to any one device, and Twitter's rise is in part because it has met this need.
The Search Dethrone: Google

I want what is relevant today, not yesterday

Yes, I know, GoogleGoogle reviewsGoogle reviews continues to grow, but Twitter is impacting search in two distinct ways: The first is that with the growth of social media, there are many more options for acquiring information. Want to find the best hosting service for your website? Sure, you can conduct a Google search, but now you can also quite easily ask your followers on Twitter for their suggestions. You can also conduct a keyword search on Twitter of a particular company and read what people have said about them, as well as a more general search on "webhosting" to read what people recommend or not.

Second, Google is excellent at providing the most relevant results over time, less helpful on current events happening right now. Twitter not only provides this, but also through the use hashtags allows a central place with which to comment and discuss these current events, something that one cannot do on Google. As information becomes more social, Twitter provides both a community and a much more effective means of finding emerging news and content than Google does.
The Communication Dethrone: Email

I want it to be short and public

email imageThough few of us may have noticed it several years ago, it turns out there is a whole wealth of information people want to share for which email is not suitable. Had a great conversation with a friend? Come across a quote that you want to share? Found a really cool website? Going to visit San Francisco and wondering what events are happening . . . all these are not likely suitable as an email to friends or even a blog post, but perfect for a tweet. Indeed, some of us may even have asked ourselves, "What did people do with such information before Twitter?"

Email will not likely cease, but more people are realizing that much of the content they want to share fits in two categories: 1) it can be expressed in few words, and 2) it's information that they are happy to make public. In this age of "open conversations" and the "free sharing of information" Twitter allows for the sharing of content – both that we create and that we find — much more than email.
Conclusion

To the extent that Twitter will begin to truly rule these areas is unknown, but I think it's hard to argue that it is not already having an impact.

Twitter fits our time, but times change. Will people in the years to come want to live as constantly connected as they do today and prefer brief versus thorough content? Just how long will these interests last, and, thus Twitter continue to grow? No one knows, and no doubt there are "future Twitters" getting created in garages across the world that are trying to guess and address these future interests . . . but Twitter is clearly riding the waves of our time, and could have an even more significant impact on social networks, search, and communication than it does today. In this sense, the questions we get from non-techies about the role and importance of Twitter may just be beginning.

Busta Rhymes Ft Lil Wayne & Jadakiss "Respect My Conglamorate" Video

Posted: 01 May 2009 02:05 PM PDT