Your personal reputation may be your most valuable asset online. When people are looking for information, they usually turn to the search engines for answers. Maybe someone in your meeting is looking for more information about you on Google. When was the last time you actually looked online to see what pops up when searching for you?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) and your personal reputation is becoming more critical every day. Since the advent of social networking and the ability for anyone to post anything online for the world to see, managing your personal reputation is vital in today’s digital lifestyle. Anything posted online is there for good and nothing can “really” be deleted, just hidden. While we all have done mistakes at various points in our lives, you never know when it will come back to bite you in the !@#$. Some employers/people may not care about your college party’s back in the day, others might.
Personal reputation
Maybe it is because I have a very uncommon name, or maybe because I have worked really hard at building my own personal brand, but if you type in “Anton Koekemoer” into Google, almost all the results are personal except a few from the famous Dr Anton M. Koekemoer of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. I have worked very hard in those rankings to make it happen.
Your name is your brand and it is very important to be aware of how it is displayed on the search engine results pages. Another thing to consider is that you could be negatively affected by someone else having the same name as you. If someone is looking for information about “Bryan Adams” on Google, they will get quite a few results. If your name is “Bryan Adams”, will they see information about you?
Your personal brand and Google
Type your name into Google and add a couple of different keywords to filter the results. Maybe you are not getting the best results when you are only using your name, but your name plus your job title does. Never make the assumption that just because you don’t see anything on the first few pages on Google that you don’t have anything to worry about.
A quick and easy way to manage your own personal reputation is to set up free Google Alerts for your name. While this isn’t the best way to check for mentions, Google can email you every time that it discovers your name mentioned online. The best defense with online reputation management is with a good defense. Your name is your brand and you always have to stay in control.