Personal Reputation Management

What is personal reputation management?

Last week we ventured into the exciting world of Corporate Brand Management, but the same approach also applies to the personal brand or personal reputation management.

You might want to object that personal reputation management only matters to people who monetize or benefit greatly from their personal reputation, such as celebrities, social media personalities and influence marketing specialists. But this actually matters to everyone of us, because it is about having a good, comprehensive view of the traces you leave online, the conversations about you (with or without your personal knowledge), and frankly, any indication that your reputation and identity might be undermined. So we should think about this as part of your online identity defense and protection strategy.

What makes up a personal reputation management strategy?

– A good grasp of your social network profiles: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace but also lesser known ones like Flickr, Naymz, Spoke. You might need to claim your identity to have full control of those profiles.
– A good grasp of your wiki-class profiles: Wikipedia, Google Knol, niche wiki spaces
– A good understanding of your social media interactions outside of social networks. For example, you might participate in a customer forum; be part a Google newsgroups, a reviewer on Amazon.com; or you might discuss articles and leave comments on the New York Times social network.
– Last, but not least, you need to know the top ten Google results for your own name. If possible, you need to make sure that the first mention that leads to you should be as positive and as controllable by you as possible. You might also need to learn some search engine optimization techniques. As you might see, SEO is not just for inbound marketing specialists – it is a concept that we all need to know to have control over our online identity.

For more information about this, the following Slideshare document is a good place to start: